Google has become so integral to online navigation that its name became a verb, meaning “to find things on the Internet.” Soon, Google might just tell you what’s on the Internet instead of showing you. The company has announced an expansion of its AI search features, powered by Gemini 2.0. Everyone will soon see more AI Overviews at the top of the results page, but Google is also testing a more substantial change in the form of AI Mode. This version of Google won’t show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode.
This marks the debut of Gemini 2.0 in Google search. Google announced the first Gemini 2.0 models in December 2024, beginning with the streamlined Gemini 2.0 Flash. The heavier versions of Gemini 2.0 are still in testing, but Google says it has tuned AI Overviews with this model to offer help with harder questions in the areas of math, coding, and multimodal queries.
With this update, you will begin seeing AI Overviews on more results pages, and minors with Google accounts will see AI results for the first time. In fact, even logged out users will see AI Overviews soon. This is a big change, but it’s only the start of Google’s plans for AI search.
Gemini 2.0 also powers the new AI Mode for search. It’s launching as an opt-in feature via Google’s Search Labs, offering a totally new alternative to search as we know it. This custom version of the Gemini large language model (LLM) skips the standard web links that have been part of every Google search thus far.
AI is over hyped and doesn’t need to be shoved in our faces. Ugh.
Sounds cool, can’t wait!
Stick to SEARCH, not making shit up (euphemistically called “hallucinating”).
Yup, this was all the motivation I needed to jump ship from Google, fuck those clowns.
The future is coming and it sure looks like garbage. I have long since left Google behind.
It’s been a long time I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for basic stuff (which let’s be honest, more than 80% is just a simple query to find a certain area of some website, like “Firefox download Windows”, “Discord site status”, “Microsoft office pricing” etc.). If I want to search something more related to my own language or recent events in my county, Google is a must, but that’s like 10% of all my search engine usage. I don’t really need Google to know about the other 90%.
I noticed today that UDM mode for Google is displaying sponsored results now, too…
https://www.google.com/search?q=drp&udm=14 still works for me…
It’s never not worked, but they’re running sponsored links now. I’ve hit them 3 times today out of maybe 50 searches. But they’re there.
yeah udm14 getting pretty bad lately. That is why I moved to startpage which is same Google services without AI and sponsored contents
I am no longer feeling lucky
Is this for human beings, or is it for Google to show their investors to prove that AI is totally going to revolutionize something eventually?
Screw Google either way, I’m not going to use their search engine either way, but this doesn’t feel like a product they are genuinely committed to releasing. Maybe I’m wrong, and in that case, screw them even more.
Does EVERY axis in life have to be fucked up at the same time?
Can we have one thing that is just doing ok?
Government - fucked.
Education - fucked.
Healthcare - fucked.
Environment - fucked.
Societal and Social Cohesion - fucked.
Wealth Inequality - fucked.
Personal Technological Autonomy - fucked, and under continuous attack.
Technological Enshittification - Running like gangbusters. So really - fucked.
Damn, someone give me some kind of ladder to climb out of this pit of despair.
I’m from India so two more things to add to the list
Air - fucked.
Cleanliness - megafucked.
Does EVERY axis in life have to be fucked up at the same time?
Yes. There are many texts written on this since start of writing, some are written down from what was carried in word before that since start of speaking.
Every civilization rises and falls. We’re on the down slope ATM. Sorry. The 80s and 90s were pretty nice in America!
That feel when the Matrix actually called it
Every single one of these flows from wealth inequality.
(and reinforces it)
They also flow from corruption (regulatory capture/failure to enforce anti-trust and other consumer-protection law). It’s hard to say whether that is itself a cause or result of wealth inequality, though.
Nintendo, when chasing developers of emulators and modders, uses regulatory mechanisms. IP is such a mechanism initially. Intended to protect the little guy from big bad corporations.
It’s hard to say whether that is itself a cause or result of wealth inequality, though.
It’s both of course. Only time flows in one direction and never the other.
Excellent point!
No.
The ladder has been privatized.
You get the greased pole.
I know it isn’t much, but services like mastodon, lemmy, kbin, friendica, Peertube, etc have shown me there is connected pushback.
Tilde communities have given me something smaller scale to focus on.
Problems exist, but there’s never been a safer time to be a homosapien on Earth. A book called Abundance helped me gain a little perspective in these gloomy days.
Also Homo Deus.
Thanks, I’ll check it out, though it’s going to take more than motivational books to pull the US out of the current nosedive…
safety because more people are alive? but also most dangerous because more people die daily than at any other time
Oh wow sounds great, can I get in line now to not use it?
I don’t really get Google’s angle since it’s pretty obvious that their AI search sucks. Maybe it’s just to impress shareholders?
This makes sense to me. All other reasons presented sound like wishful thinking that google is still the same company from 2005
I mean, they’re ruining their search anyways. It’s almost unusable at this point, it’s like asking for relevant ads and two year old Reddit posts
Is it censorship? Did they decide to just straight up sell SEO? Are websites locking down and blocking their crawlers to stop AI training crawlers?
I legitimately find Bing to be better at this point, but whatever they’re doing it’s maddening. Even better AI assisted web searches kinda suck because the data fed into them is more of the same
But solid chance they’re trying to boost Gemini, which has been a shockingly bad llm for a company that basically wrote the book on AI not too long ago
There’s also the problem that there’s much more noise in the web nowadays—it has been growing exponentially and people try to manipulate the search engines. It becomes more difficult to filter out that’s good and what’s bad. Be too strict and you risk missing valuable but less polished information. Be too lenient, and you drown in low-quality, SEO-optimized content that prioritizes visibility over usefulness.
Would this be the same AI that spits out incorrect summarys or just flat out gets data incorrect constantly? What could possibly go wrong by making that the ONLY way to look for things going forward. Fucking morons.
I recently had a dream that involved a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have never been to Green Bay Wisconsin. I know it as a rather small city that is the home to the Green Bay Packers, an administratively anachronistic NFL team that draws a large plurality of its fan base from the greater Milwaukee area. Off the top of my head, I don’t know if Green Bay has “suburbs” in the usual American sense at all.
I googled the name of this completely nonexistent community, along with the words “Green Bay,” and the AI very confidently hallucinated it into existence, describing it as a lovely shopping and residential area just over the bridge of the same name.
Yup. No problem though. In the future AI can just add the now very real town to you AR eyeballs brought to you by Chipotle Exxon and T mobile.
Thanks Google, I hate it. At least the udm=14 trick and website still works, at least until google decides to stop supporting that feature. Definitely going to be using that more and more if this becomes the default google experience.
You can also use startpage. They use Google services without AI
Is there any escape from shitty AI slop in my search results?
What search engines are there that I can use that arent a proxy for one of the big ones? And yes I know about Kagi, I’d prefer open source if possible.
There’s a new beta one which only uses its own index: https://stract.com/
And best of all it’s written in Rust.
There’s not really a strong player in the open source search space.
Mwmnl exists, but per their own readme:
The quality is a long way’s off from matching the commercial engines at the moment
Kagi provides the source code for many of their services, but is not truly open source, especially because at its core, it relies on applying its own rankings to other’s indexes.
That said, search is a space where the old adage rings true:
If you’re not paying for it; you are the product!
For what it’s worth, I find value in my Kagi subscription.
Maybe something to use only for fun, but check out Marginalia. It’s open source and as far as I know, runs in the guy’s computer at his house. It deprioritizes commercial websites and boosts small blogs instead.
Every time I go there I find something genuinely interesting or cozy to read.
Moving from enshitified closed source to a different closed source that’s trying to position itself as user first isn’t necessarily bad.
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