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What scares me about this new AI mode thingy is that every answer sounds like a systematic literature review, but only for the results. For example, if I look for users feedback about a specific product, it says "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website just because it thought it was a good contribution to the results. Sounds like it's giving a ground truth from "multiple" data, when instead it's just aggregating almost random stuff. In the context of a systematic review, the feature that I would love the most is augmenting my initial query, so that I can just get more results that I could find interesting. I am 100% sure they thought about this, but ignored it for the most profitable option.

barf but it at least opens up the playing field for new startups that want to provide good old index search and try to beat them where they left off when search still worked 8 years ago before they hired the yahoo POS execs that enshitified the service.

It’s diverged quite a bit from the original:

    <form method="GET" action="/search">
      ...
      
      <center>
        Search the web using Google!
        <br>
        
        <input type="text" name="query" value="" size="40">
        <br>
        
        <select name="num">
          <option value="10" selected>10 results
          <option value="30">30 results
          <option value="100">100 results
        </select>
        <input type="submit" value="Google Search">
        <input type="submit" name="sa" value="I'm feeling lucky">
        <br>
        
        <i>Index contains ~25 million pages (soon to be much bigger)</i>
      </center>
      
      ...
    </form>

I'm old enough to remember when "Google" was something that ended conversations. People — myself included — would literally say "Google it," the facts would be located, and that was that. Now that Google wants to be the conversation, I'm worried there will no longer be a bias-free source of information for the masses.

This is all new, so I may be a bit hyperbolic, but the reason OpenAI introducing ads bothers me is the implicit (or even explicit) bias that can be smuggled into a chat in ways that simply aren't possible when you're just clicking through to an external source. There are all kinds of implications to Google no longer being that source of truth, even by default. Maybe this has quietly been the case for a long time, but this feels like the final move — pushing their ad bias (i.e., whoever paid the most) into a conversational system, where dark patterns are far easier to implement and much harder to detect.

One answer to this might be domain-specific agents — narrower, accountable, ideally something you (or your community) actually run. But even then it all falls back on trust: you being a good-faith actor, and others trusting that you are one. Which is to say, we're back to the same problem, just at a smaller scale.

I think this is the second time in a week (the first being the "Googlebook") that Google's promotional announcement video showcasing UI is so full of special effects, dramatic pan/zooms, and woosh sounds, that I have no idea how the final-end product actually looks or works.

I had an interesting one yesterday. Someone responded to me on Reddit with very official sounding words to make their argument. I was still dubious and googled a few of the concepts they threw out there.

The AI confidently told me they were right. Then I checked the sources, and found the only source that agreed with them was their own Reddit comment!!!

Alternative to archive.ph and "unlocked article" tracking code

Works where archive.ph is blocked

Text-only

   view-source:https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/google-seach-bar-ai-gemini.html
   Save as 1.htm

   egrep -o "(\"text\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\")|(\"url\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"__typename\":\"TextInline\")" 1.htm \
   |sed '/\"url\":\"/{s/??.*//;s/$/\">/;s/.\{7\}/<a href=\"/;};
         /\"__typename\":\"TextInline\"/{s/\"$/<\/a>/;s/.\{24\}//;};
         s/\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\"/<p>/g;/\"text\":\"/s/.\{8\}//' \
   |sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content=width=device-width>/' > 2.htm
   rm 1.htm
   firefox ./2.htm

   ct.captcha-delivery.com
   geo.captcha-delivery.com
   www.nytimes.com
   g1.nyt.com 

AI in the 1950s

   Robots will do your chores so you can focus on your work

   Robots will take your work so you can focus on your chores

This might just do irreversible damage to my parents' generation. They already trust the AI overview with all of the thinking and synthesizing after making a search, and this will only make it worse.

I don't care. Aside from a single dormant GMail account I keep solely for "parental tech support", I de-Googled 5 years ago and strongly encourage everyone to do likewise.

Google stopped being a customer-focused company after their 2nd major revision to GOffice and the PM shake-up in search from Raghavan https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ .

It's not clear to me from this announcement. The articles make it sound like all searches now go to ai mode and no more blue links.

But Google's description seems more minimal, like easier to get to ai mode, search box can expand intelligently based on input. Is there any clearer description of the magnitude of the change?

I get that they have to make changes to the google search box because so many people are just using ChatGPT/Cluade to answer questions instead of google.

However, I specifically use Google (or DDG) when the LLMs are failing me. When I want "research something on my own" because the LLM is giving me garbage, or untrustworthy information. If Google completely replaces their search box my Google usage will go down even further.

I don't plan to use Google's LLM when Cluade is just better. Now that Google's search features are gone (or going away) I no longer have any reason to turn to them at all

It was only a matter of time. Watching how less technical people behave in the LLM era, I've noticed that most people no longer say "Google something", instead, they say "ask ChatGPT" or "ask chat". Many technical people have also stopped using Google for a lot of search queries and now just let an LLM find the answer.

So how does google now make money when it is just providing us with direct answers from ai, instead of showing us both paid for search results and directing us to sites which host targetted ads?

How does adsense work when there are no search results?

So many questions:

Is “the goal of Search” really: “to help you ask _anything_ on your mind”?

If “reimagined Search” is “designed to anticipate your intent”,

Would it correctly infer my intent to not utilize an agentic approach? Is there an “off switch”?

As for “Search agents”

“operating in the background 24/7”,

What is the carbon footprint of that? How do I turn it off? How do I ask it to stop phoning home my every keystroke?

These questions are asked partly rhetorically because it’s likely I don’t need a team of “24/7 Search agents” to help me guess the answers…

Historically, I scoffed when someone said “here’s the difference between a google search and asking ChatGPT”, or when people said that ChatGPT would “kill search”, but Google sure seems to be in a hurry to burry the original feature all by themselves.

I've noticed this since yesterday when i tried to do a site:url search, it gave me an AI chatbox and answer

tried it out:

Search: "Hello world"

> AI Overview

> Hello! Wordle is the viral word-guessing game where you get 6 tries to uncover a mystery target word, using color-coded hints to guide your guesses.

Also their universal shopping cart seems to be quite a change too https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/shopping...

Google search results have been the worst part of every LLM I’ve used. I imagine the LLM specifically designed to use Google search is going to be the worst LLM.

AI search.. they should at least put that behind a "I'm feeling unlucky" button

Google search box has basically become an AI aggregator that doesn't give anything back to those websites it scraps data from, and it'll result in the death of the internet as we came to know it At this point, google might as well stop showing website links in search results. with AI Overviews, barely anyone’s clicking through it anymore

I think I'll be getting a Kagi subscription.

Sometimes I hear lies and slander about big tech pulling up ladders and misusing their advantage to cement monopolies, but just look at this!

I believe I speak for everyone working on alternative search engines when I offer a heartfelt thank you to Google for their untiring effort to derail their search product.

Up to now, the Gemini results they display are often worse and less accurate than the same question asked in Gemini. I'm guessing SEO has so thoroughly cooked Google's search results that they are actually holding back Gemini as a brand.

It looks like the new experience works backwards - it's more or less a Gemini prompt that they then stuff a "search experience" into.

Obviously the search feed and ads are so integral to Google's business model that they probably can't confidently just step away from it.

Google search itself is becoming useless. It tends to promote social media results even when scarcely relevant, and just can't find things like part numbers that even baidu can find on English language pages. The AI then summarises social media posts.

Google???

Remind me what Google is again. Haven't used them for years...

In the last 10 (maybe longer) years I've noticed I've changed how I am approaching these changes.

In the past, I excited. It was the first to sign up for all kinds of betas.

I don't know what triggered the my reasoning, but now whenever I see these upcoming announcements I don't think about how it's gonna be better, but how it is objectively gonna be worse. How much harder is it going to be for me to compare things.

How much more do I now need to go and explain people that the output is merely a mathematical average of what's out there, and if it's out there on the internet doesn't make it correct.

A lot of people in these comments have strong opinions about the performance of a service they use frequently, for which they pay zero dollars, and is run by a public company with a fiduciary duty to provide ROI to its investors.

I wonder how many of them would switch to a paid model that offered pre-ai-era google search?

Why replace something deterministic with something non-deterministic? I can no longer tell someone "just google it" because I don't actually know what will come up...

Hmm, perhaps should switch fields and become a factologist

https://medium.com/luminasticity/artificial-stupidity-and-th...

>And I think we can throw out all the complaints of the past few years about how Google quality is lowering and it is hard to find anything on the site anymore, for those were the salad years.

>At least back in the day when sites copied answers from Stackoverflow or Lyrics from RapGenius and put them in their own site with scammy pitches to pay for the content you were going to get the correct answer in the end, but now you need a factology degree to figure out if something is bullshit or not.

NYT found 10% of answers are wrong

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-over...

Ask Joogle or Ask Geeves?

https://www.techradar.com/computing/search-engines/ask-jeeve... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com

Ask Jeeves was dissolved 15 days ago

The last product i thought google would kill, that isn't ads, the true end of an era with an underwhelming bang.

I wonder if they will stop using pagerank completely? Has pagerank already transcended the software plane?

I know a lot of regular people who hate this, but Kagi can be a hard sell for regular people. What are y’all’s recommendations for free search engines at the moment? I used to rec DDG, but I feel like their results are much worse than Kagi’s at present

To change anything on the home page of google, amazon, etc, must be a hair-raising experience for the people making those changes.

Thank god for Kagi. It literally saved search for me, although I mostly use kagi.com/assistant these days.

I think I've had this on duckduckgo for several months

So you can code in search now and create apps. No clue how that in depth works out. For them, the dream could be that everybody has their custom apps hosted by google.

It doesn't seem to be secure. If every google link is one step away from a prompt injection and leaking all your data, then they are worse then npm.

I wonder how many days it takes until they roll it back or put that stuff behind some extra clicks.

This is to Open Claw what Google home is to Home Assistant.

I prefer the Claw like I prefer Linux and FOSS in general.

Since day one Googs’ vision was to make the Star Trek computer. They’re really there now. But I don’t like their how. This computer serves them, not me. My mind-bicycle must serve me, my thoughts are my own. I hope my resistance is not futile.

The spend difference for this must be enormous. I wonder how they justify it financially. I guess they don’t have to.

I've been using google search, and all other products, less and less. i find a mixture of perplexity and chatgpt perform much better and find higher quality results faster.

the degoogling process will be a long haul but im determined to do it.

First signs of the death of google.

I started switching to DDG on some devices, this will motivate me to finish the transition ! Thanks

The “magic” of the SERP is that it makes the organics product and the ads product reinforce each other: People come for the organics and don't have to pay. That brings eyeballs, which advertisers pay for.

If Google no longer sends users to websites for free on organics, the world will have to figure out some mechanism whereby Google pays site owners for putting the information on the web in the first place. Where will that money come from?

If it's ads, the AI experience is a “lies engine” where advertisers get to pick which lies the AI tells. Not sure what kinds of people would show up for that experience. Probably the same kind who watch home shopping TV. I would venture to guess that there will be a ceiling in the advertising value of that property. Or the AI interacts with people in good faith. But then, if I'm an advertiser, how do I get my lies into the world? “We will tell your lie, only if it's a truth” doesn't work because, as an advertiser, I understand that the truth about me already gets spoken, and I don't need to pay a dime for that.

You can run an argument that people can tell ads from organics on the current SERP, and you can calibrate how much of each there should be. But you can't really “calibrate” the amount and level of the lying in the AI to where it's just enough so that people will show up, but not so much that there's no value for advertisers. You can't have little boxes either, where the AI is like “having told you the truth, I want you to also pay attention to this lie that someone paid me to tell you: …”

Is Google really saying: “Hey, we're the lion's share of the advertising market right now. But, because we kind of like these newfangled AI things, we're going to just vacate that spot to whoever. Instead, we will turn ourselves into a pre-product-market-fit company. Maybe at some point over the next 10 years, we're going to be able to tell you how we might actually monetize ourselves. Stay toooooned.”

The reason why AI is a better experience than the web right now, is because we have pre-enshittification AI and post-enshittification web. What will the whole thing look like, after enshittification is through with AI?

> Designed to anticipate your intent, it also helps you formulate your question with AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete.

The first red flag for me. The +/- of this type of feature are well worth exploring.

The inability to do a proper search with “-x” x being a word you want excluded from the results but I can being able to have a convo about summary results is just mindblowing. I miss proper search. What’s everyone using for alternatives?

I've found Google AI Search to be good for really topical searches. And its conversational ability has noticeably improved over the last year. I can now have a (short) conversation where I reference past messages.

Google is making the pivot. And they’ve got such a strong strategic position. Full-stack integration. They will survive and thrive in this new era. Search seems safe. Yet, other products are still vulnerable to encroachment.

I use Google daily, and yet I can't remember the last time I used their search box - all of my searching has been done through the browser URL bar for a long, long time. I wonder if similar changes are being applied to the Chrome URL bar?

The unnecessary mention of Antigravity in there gives me Microsoft Copilot vibes.

Search doesn’t work well anymore anyway. Half of what used to be searchable has either been consolidated or is gated.

Gmail search doesn’t work well either. It simply doesn’t find things. Almost as if they have stopped indexing and repurposed resources towards LLMs.

And whatever there is left to index and search has been completely overrun with slop.

Search is over. Internet as we knew it is over. Something new has emerged in its place, and we are still calling the new thing the old thing.

Scrolling down this article presented me with pop-up dialogues twice. Annoying.

I kind of like it for dumb one off questions I dont want to burn my real tokens on...

Lots of people talking about Google being strictly worse than a number of search engines (bing, duck, etc) not been my experience. Brave default search is awful. Duck was terrible last I used it. Google still great for me, but I have a decent amount of "privacy controls" implemented (DNS, vpn, browser extensions) and i basically dork most searches--average search looks more like a find invocation than English. In this last regard especially, Google is peerless, imo Been a while since I looked around though. Is there an engine that supports all the operators that Google does and that provides results of better or equivalent quality?

Surely, the motivation here is a mega influx of training data.

> . And for select categories like home repair, beauty or pet care, you can ask Google to call businesses on your behalf

NO - thanks!

How is Google going to make money off this?

There are a number of "hide AI overviews from google" browser extensions. Use them.

Today is the day the old internet died. RIP.

You can search, understand and hallucinate - do anything. All you have to do is ASK.com

How much longer can the internet survive if we just stop sending traffic to websites?

the thing that bothers me is I don't usually want this mode. When I search, I am not looking for what google thinks, I am looking for what other sources think.

This ruined my experience using chrome on my phone. Done with it.

Hopefully they don’t kill tbs=li:1, or I’ll get pretty angry.

I wonder if the song they used for the video is also AI-generated. It's pretty catchy.

Feels a bit like New Coke

I miss having a good search engine. Even before AI.

As long as udm=14 still works I'm fine on a personal level. It's still bullshit that they're going to push it as the default

Where are the PageRanks of yesteryear?

How does a media company stay in business when there is no one visiting the site, and people are only getting the quality information from Google?

Advertising on the media site (assuming digital media, no physical media) is going to disappear because people probably won't be clicking through to read the source material that the Google AI answer relied on. No traffic, no advertisers, no money to produce the original journalism. That's going to impact the Google results eventually as these media outlets shut down to be replaced with...AI slop, maybe?

Is the subscriber model the answer? It could work for a niche subject or a single journalist with a following, and it wouldn't be sucked into Google results, either, if it was effectively gated/paywalled.

God, this is just as awful as Microsoft trying to push copilot into everything, trash.

How does this work for Google? I read it costs them $0.001 to perform a search. No matter how efficient their inference chips are, the new cost basis has to be 10X or more. And the zero click Internet not only kills ad supported content sites, it also kills Google SERP ad revenues.

but i dont know who visits google.com anymore

The shark has fully cleared it’s jump.

I just want a relevant website ... no I don't want to use your agent. Just give me search results that are interesting to read, no AI slop, which teach me something new ... no I don't want to buy if I don't show this intent. Just serve the public interest and not your own financial interests. Thank you.

I wish they could remove the AI overview crap that's dysfunctional and kills the very spirit of a search engine's premise. You're not supposed to steal links from sites Google. That's a fucking dark pattern.

I suppose it would not be in line with their business plans to make google search actually search again.

what a weird surface to put LLMs

For years already google has had integrations and more 'intelligent' responses for things like weather, shopping, answers to queries etc. This hardly changes any of that (most of the 'features' are inside AI Mode). For 'regular' uses this changes nothing. Avoid AI Mode most of the time. Double-check most automated overview options. And still not using any kind of chat interface when searching for sites, things, images, whatever. Hardly changes anything. And Google is still the destination for all lookups. With little to no reason to go looking for a different service especially not from any other AI-related firm.

Kagi is a great alternate.

Privacy first, opt-in AI, total control over site blocking, zero ads.

You're the customer, not the product.

Bring me Google before the instant search nonsense where I could go into rabbit holes 100+ pages deep.

Now it can't find anything interesting. As a search is basically useless and it's more like Home pages used to be (that you would very much build yourself in a html editor and place your most often visited sites).

Anyways, I find that my $10/mo subscription to Kagi has been well worth not having to deal with Google's BS. (And they do offer AI if you want but they don't push it on you.)

I'm pretty sure I had something very similar A/Bed at me by Bing the other day.

You know what I really miss? Being able to type a literal string in quotes and get pages that had that actual string on them. That's what I really miss.

I haven't used google search as my default search engine in YEARS. DDG is good enough for 99% of my searches. Same with Google Chrome. Stop giving evil companies your traffic and attention.

This is great news. I remember Altavista, Yahoo and similar ones, they pioneered this type of home-page-is-all-you-need UI which is the perfect compromise of what product people at Google have come up with and what users want, at least according to their tests.

This means that, in a couple years, we might see a competitor that offers you quick, almost instant web search, with a minimal UI, possibly an algorithm that somehow surfaces the most relevant results based on how all websites point to each other naturally (like, a site that is referred to by 20 others should be above one with zero references).

I look forward to it!

Glad I switched to Kagi

huh, one downside of being an all-in Firefox and Kagi user, meaning I have everywhere firfox as default browser with kagi account configured, all laptops, tablets, phones, means I am now out of touch and never noticed.

duckduckgo.com

F Google!

Makes me sad. I recall the beginnings of Google, so hopeful so new.

Now they are a money printing corporate. I am sure there are still people there doing new and exciting things, but the Grey Suits have taken the reigns

They could have used AI to make that awesome simple sparse home page better. Fought off the SEO optimiser that made search so dire in the recent past

But no. They are doubling down on bling and crap. SEO is good for business.

"Do the right thing". Not even close

Makes me so sad.

damn this is some real slop. not expected from google.

i played the video, didnt understand anything and got dizzy. then i tried to scroll but the browser tab froze? wow

of course; ever since ChatGPT first launched it was clear this is what Google would do to its search

good luck getting visits to your site unless you're paying for AI placement

I genuinely feel like I could have a breakdown over this.

I’m so fucking tired. I don’t want it. I didn’t want it. I didn’t need it. And now here we are, once again, shoving it fast and hard in my face.

Thanks, Google.

If you'd like to switch from Google, I'll take the opportunity to let you know about Uruky [1], an ad-free and privacy-focused search engine, that's focused on a simpler experience than Kagi (no AI). Kind of like "old school" search. My wife and I launched it earlier this year, and it's been going really well so far.

Id you'd like to try it for free for a couple of days, reach out with your randomly-assigned account number and we'll top it up for you.

[1]: https://uruky.com