Headline fix: Google kills the one good thing it has going for it with AI
this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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Search sucks for some time now. I'd say the best thing google offers today is Gmail - but there are plenty of arguments against that too.
Google Maps, their traffic data has no rivals, unlike gmail which has plenty of good competition. It's the one thing I couldn't easily replace yet.
True. I wanted to replace it with OSM or similar, but my main use of Maps after navigation is exploring places, reading reviews, and browsing pictures. They have a database that is tough to replace.
I prefer OSM since I can use the maps offline. Google maps is useless out in the middle of nowhere without any cell service.
Not to discourage usage of OSM at all, but you can absolutely download offline maps on mobile with Google Maps, they've just hidden it a bit. If you tap your account icon in the upper right, a menu pops up that includes offline maps, and it'll let you select boundaries to download.
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Far from any desire to give kudos to Google: Maps does allow offline maps.I had greater London available on my iphone recently, and that worked.
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Which makes it good for hiking, and I've found it's better for bike routes too. However, I can't easily search for places to go, there's no recommendations, and generally you need to know the address of the place you're going to (not just a restaurant/bar etc.).
I tried OSM and it completely failed. Downloaded the offline region, loaded it up at home fine. Went to the location and the offline map wouldn't load. Had a connection and tried to load an online map, nothing. Ended up right back using Google maps. I support the concept of OSM, it just doesn't work.
Strange, it's been very very reliable for many years, for me. Did you use OsmAnd?
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I switched away from google maps to Apple Maps a few years ago and I honestly can’t tell any difference. If google maps traffic data is better, it’s not in any noticeable kind of way for regular day to day usage.
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No, gmail's Inbox is the best mail client out there!
........................wait
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They don't really have a choice. Classic website search will be useless in the near future because of the rapid rise of LLM-generated pages. Already for some searches 1 out of 3 results is generated crap.
Their only hope it's that somehow they'll be able to weed out LLM pages with LLM. Which is something that scientists say it's impossible because LLMs cannot learn from LLM results so they won't be able to reliably tell which content is good.
The fact they're even trying this shows they're desperate, so they will try.
If they can't direct me to the right web site because they can't tell what's LLM junk, then how will they summarize an answer for me based on those same web sites they know about? It doesn't seem like LLM summaries are a way to avoid that issue at all.
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Google search is still a very shitty product right now. In a blind test I would never conclude they are the market leader. It used to work a few years ago though.
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This is really funny to me because Google ruined their own search engine for advertising purposes; so much so that they now need to add "AI" to it to look good and hip again. Only if the "AI" results are actually good, it will hurt their advertising revenue, and it's not quite so simple to tweak it the same way they cooked their search algorithms to serve you more ads, plus it will burn an ungodly amount of money to process each request. And if it's bad, they'll have wasted billions on it and will ruin their reputation even worse.
And if it's bad, they'll have wasted billions on it and will ruin their reputation even worse.
Ah, the Meta approach! I love to see it!
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Nah. It's not going to be "AI." It's going to be YouTube results, followed by Reddit results, followed by "Sponsored" results, followed by AI-written Bot results, then a couple pages of Amazon results and finally, on page 10 or so, a ten-year-old result that's probably no longer relevant.
Just fix google back to how it was and create an entirely new search engine with AI and call it Sairch.
Sadly, old Google doesn't work either thanks to the efforts of SEO and the AI generated garbage.
The problem with search is that the motives of those being searched aren't to provide you with the most helpful answer. The motives are to get you to visit their website then stay/click/buy as much as possible. They'll tailor their content to match whatever algorithm the engine is using.
That's why Google's new plan is to collect all of the information ahead of time and skip the "visit other websites" step. Then you can stay/click/buy on their website as much as possible.
Seriously though. Just skip all this nonsense, you selfish piece of shit, and open your wallet so the hungry corpos can feast on its contents - they have poor, innocent, starving shareholders to feed... you monster.
Is it Scottish?
I wonder how many Malaysian employees will be the brains behind this "AI" tech
AI = Absent Indians
I'm aware of a lot of the fake AI scandals, but it doesn't apply here. Google has good models and human workers cannot go through your results in real time
I noticed DDG now has AI. Damn it
It has a chatbot you can interact with separately. It doesn't uses AI in its search engine as far as I know.
It may summarise Wikipedia articles in your search results, though you can turn that off.
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Great. now the search engine will tell me "I am not designed to provide that information" when I don't use the specific, constantly changing magic words it wants.
This also reminds me that I'm still annoyed my phone options are more or less limited Android and iPhone.
I dislike this AI-first approach because it provides only a small selection of results that are influenced by the phrasing of the query. You can't just replace paginated results.
googles search results got so bad in the last few months that i switched to a searXNG instance and couldn't be happier at the moment. no profit incentive, so i get no-bullshit results. they can keep their SEO-infested AI garbage results.
There has never been a better time for someone to swoop in and remake web search. Hell, there are probably dozens of software engineers from Google that have direct experience with search AND were laid off.
I'm surprised that no one is trying to compete with Google at the weakest point it's been since going public.
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Google already lost me around 2016. All other search engines lost me to AI. Google is too late
It's going to be even shittier now. Lol
Aaaaaaand I'm entirely out. No thanks.
And it can go fuck it self all the way down. I can only think of one good thing to do with Google and that is to de-googlelize yourself.
Cool. Still not gonna use it though.
Well it’s a step forward for efficiency at least. Now I can see the LLM generated crap straight it in the search page, rather than having to click through to an automated blogspam page.
If they are really going all-in on this, it almost feels like Google admitting defeat on search, having now been drown by the (partially self inflicted) deluges of SEO and now “AI”.
It's going to find 1 billion more results that all are equally as irrelevant as the 8 billion results that was initially pulled up per search.
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Fooook google
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