Hacker News

points by wnevets 13 hours ago | 0 comments

Google purposely killing the golden goose by forcing all of its users to use the AI overview is a bold strategy.

Blaming AI is correct but perhaps not the way you think. I think a lot of people actually use other people's AI tools to do their searches now. Google's attempt to grab that back via their own AI tools is so far not really working. Google is no longer the go to tool for answering questions or doing research.

I used perplexity for some time. These days, I have claude and chatgpt. They search on my behalf. Sometimes I still do a Google search but I mostly just use it if I want to open a website that I don't remember the url of.

[–] brokencode 13 hours ago

They’re not killing anything. Search revenue is up this year.

And it’s not like they can stop the long-term move towards AI from traditional search engines.

All they can do is try to compete with their own AI. Otherwise OpenAI and Anthropic will run away with it.

[–] WarmWash 13 hours ago

Don't worry, the AI overview is actually just a salesman for advertisers going through an introductory period.

[–] fallingbananna 12 hours ago

>killing

But the search revenue is growing at a high speed.

The article wording is just unfortunate.

The non-misleading title would be: "Google Cloud growing way faster than other sources of Alphabet revenue".

[–] VladStanimir 13 hours ago

What do you mean force to use ai overview? AI overview is just the 1st result, you just scroll down and the legacy search results are still there.

[–] einsteinx2 12 hours ago

Forced as in not giving an option to disable it

[–] dboreham 13 hours ago

About 80% of the time the AI overview is what I want anyway.

[–] ashdksnndck 1 hour ago

If I have a really straightforward question and I want a fast answer I’ll sometimes Google search for the AI overview. But it’s so unreliable. I use opus 5.5 for any question that Google could plausibly screw up. This is a huge product failure on Google’s part, IMO. I’m a $20/paid user for both Gemini and Claude. It’s nuts that with Google’s massive head-start in AI (and apparently they still are capable of making a frontier model), they somehow deliver such a crappy version of AI by default in their flagship product. Google is probably in some part responsible for the public’s distaste for AI.

[–] SonOfKyuss 12 hours ago

Yeah, I was annoyed when they first introduced it, but now I find it extremely useful

[–] epolanski 11 hours ago

Bing introduced it first!