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points by abixb 13 hours ago | 0 comments

Google is just scared. Google has been scared since November 30, 2022.

Text search is fundamentally a deterministic problem, and squeezing it through a heavy non-deterministic, stochastic engine -- especially through a CoT LLM -- is inefficient from a first-principles algorithm design pov. Also, Google did great search before AI overviews using probabilistic linking and knowledge graphs.

I've been using DuckDuckGo's NoAI version as a fallback, and I've had great results so far; brings me back to the web I remembered growing up -- personal blogs, random forum discussions, and whatnot -- with just a fraction of the page bloat.

I say all this as a HUGE fan of Gemini, Gemma, and Antigravity.

[–] sznio 12 hours ago

> Google did great search before AI overviews

not really... search was great in 2008 or 2014, but not in 2022. seo spammers won by then, and their writing was even worse than opus 5.

I remember that the sites google shown before were sites you could get lost in. often they were communities. often they were sites actually written by an enthusiast of a subject.

these sites died. I wonder whether google was the victim or the culprit. the death of these sites did end up making their product worse. however, any site that actually hooked you meant less ad revenue for google. google wants you to come back from the result, since that's a second chance for you to click the ad. a result you come back from however is inherently a bad result.

[–] immibis2 13 hours ago

You don't want Google to be a direct keyword search. Well maybe sometimes you do, but not usually. Text search is not fundamental to the Google user experience - DWIM (do what I mean) is fundamental. The ideal user experience is that you type in what you want and the machine finds it or does it. LLMs designed and deployed properly are infinitely better at this than keyword search engines are, despite being less predictable.

Example search: video card game with the robot guy

AI overview [correct]: The video card game you are thinking of is likely Inscryption, which features a mysterious, robotic-looking or masked scrybe (like P03, the robot scrybe of technology)

[–] abixb 12 hours ago

That's not what I meant at all. I understand no one would want 1:1 text search, and part of the reason why Google won in the 90s was because of PageRank. All I was saying was that basing a 'search engine' on a CoT LLM is very inefficient.

>LLMs designed and deployed properly are infinitely better at this than keyword search engines are, despite being less predictable.

In what way? How are LLMs more efficient and 'infinitely' better at this than what Google had before AI overviews? If anything, I find that search results have gotten worse.

[–] immibis2 11 hours ago

Something like: An LLM can encode a query into a vector to match against a vector database of indexed pages.

You have to actually engineer that though, you can't just throw random stuff into ChatGPT and expect good results.

[–] solarkraft 12 hours ago

That’s not what they’re doing either though. If I’m correctly informed, they are still running bog-standard Google searches under the hood and letting the LLM find the relevant stuff in them. It’s a bit of a godsend not having to do it yourself since the original results’ quality tanked so much. And kinda elegant from an algorithmic perspective actually.

It’s still not as good as actually searching the web semantically as I used to often find myself wanting to get rid of results that sounded vaguely like my search term but actually completely missed the point, but it makes it somewhat bearable again.

[–] Sopel 13 hours ago

pure text search (the deterministic kind you're talking about) is medieval technology that's useless in a web search engine

[–] abixb 13 hours ago

Yes, I'm aware. I meant that deteministic systems should be at the core (PageRank was deterministic), alongside other contextual clues and knowledge graphs -- things Google did before this AI overview crap.

What pisses me off is that you can't turn it off. Like, fine, you may bury and dark pattern the crap out of the disable toggle, but at least give users the choice to opt-out. And no, UDM=14 is not a toggle.

[–] chneu 13 hours ago

I jump between search engines and DDG had a big improvement a few months ago. It's pretty useful.

[–] rasz 11 hours ago

Text search is, but normal people dont want text search. Normies want to concierge fetch them perfect answer on first try. LLMs are really good at convincing you they just did that.

[–] genxy 8 hours ago

Lol, Antigravity got turned off.