Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years (nytimes.com) 63
Google is giving its iconic search box its first major redesign since 2001. The new design incorporates, you guessed it, artificial intelligence, "getting bigger and more interactive so that people can ask even longer questions and upload photographs and videos into queries," reports the New York Times. "In addition, people can ask follow-up questions with a chatbot on Google's main search page." From the report: The company will also offer digital assistants, known as agents, to automate searches so that someone who may be apartment hunting can be notified of a new listing without opening a real estate site like Zillow. The search features will be powered by a new artificial intelligence model, Gemini 3.5 Flash. Google said the model had improved on creating software code and performing autonomous tasks, worked faster and was less expensive to run than comparable models.
[...] Google is also bringing one of A.I.'s biggest breakthroughs -- software coding -- to search. When people research complex topics like astrophysics, Gemini can build interactive graphics and simulations behind the scenes to provide a deeper answer than its previous listing of websites. Google said it was introducing an alternative to the agents powered by Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. Called Gemini Spark, the service is embedded in Gmail, Docs and other Google products, where it can turn meeting notes spread across emails and chats into a single document. It can also read and draft emails. "The open web is on its way out," says Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research. "With A.I., Google is reducing everyone to raw data providers."
[...] Google is also bringing one of A.I.'s biggest breakthroughs -- software coding -- to search. When people research complex topics like astrophysics, Gemini can build interactive graphics and simulations behind the scenes to provide a deeper answer than its previous listing of websites. Google said it was introducing an alternative to the agents powered by Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. Called Gemini Spark, the service is embedded in Gmail, Docs and other Google products, where it can turn meeting notes spread across emails and chats into a single document. It can also read and draft emails. "The open web is on its way out," says Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research. "With A.I., Google is reducing everyone to raw data providers."
No company lasts forever. (Score:5, Interesting)
All the big tech companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft seem to be hell-bent on destroying their businesses, and AI is only a symptom. Ten years from now is going to look very different.
Re:All the big tech companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you a rsilvergun sock puppet or something? If you don't want AI search, just don't click on it.
It's getting damn near impossible to "just don't click on" AI; it's being stuck everywhere, whether we want it ot not. When I do a search, I want the search results, not a goddamn AI telling me what to think.
(Google searches keep getting worse. Now, likely as not, I get sites that don't contain your search term. Yes, even when I put the important terms in quotation marks.)
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Are you a Google sock puppet or something? If someone doesn't want AI search, this article makes it clear they're going to have to use someone other than Google. And as the other search engines slavishly duplicate Google, that won't last long either.
Also Ol Olsoc, we know it's you. Please fuck off with the rsilvergun BS, it's pathetic. Deranged indeed. Your obsession with him makes me feel you need to go see a psychiatrist, and that's me being honest, not mean.
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Are you a Google sock puppet or something? If someone doesn't want AI search, this article makes it clear they're going to have to use someone other than Google. And as the other search engines slavishly duplicate Google, that won't last long either.
Also Ol Olsoc, we know it's you. Please fuck off with the rsilvergun BS, it's pathetic. Deranged indeed. Your obsession with him makes me feel you need to go see a psychiatrist, and that's me being honest, not mean.
Wow, I'm becoming famous!
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Oh I'm sorry, how do I not click on the AI part when the AI part is automatically done as part of a standard text search other than completely changing search engines?
Are you a rsilvergun sock puppet or something?
Are you a Trump sock puppet? Because you say the stupidest things.
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Their search engine has been steadily decreasing in usefulness ever since Google+, but for some reason their competitors just keep copying them.
I've been wondering for a while (and not come up with any solutions) if we could at least create a practical "self hosted" (quotes because obvs it'll be impractical to do that literally) search engine technology so we can start getting Google et al out of the equation if we don't want it, even if everyone else just slavishly uses the big corps systems. It doesn't ha
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Re: No company lasts forever. (Score:2)
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What exactly are you proposing here that I'm too "dumb" to know? That every single person who wants to get away from Google should run their own webcrawler to populate a local database?
Do you seriously think that this is practical in any way at all? Do you know how large the world wide web is right now?
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What exactly are you proposing here that I'm too "dumb" to know? That every single person who wants to get away from Google should run their own webcrawler to populate a local database?
Do you seriously think that this is practical in any way at all? Do you know how large the world wide web is right now?
While everybody running their own would be incredibly stupid, not to mention increase power draw and resource usage by orders of magnitude if everyone tried to duplicate a search engine DB on their own system, I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen some form of cooperative / community driven web search alternatives pop up. Yes, it would likely be something people would need to chip in for, but I certainly wouldn't be opposed to tossing a fiver or maybe even more each month toward a shared web crawler with a
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> I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen some form of cooperative / community driven web search alternatives pop up.
This is what I was originally getting at. I've been trying to figure out a way to think of some kind of semi-selfhosted/federated/etc technology that could be an alternative to Google, but right now I'm not finding anything that's practical. And the usual alternatives people who aren't idiots like the one who thought I'd never heard of webcrawlers (WTF?) come up with are things like "Just
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Thanks, yeah, I'd seen that before, but I also know it's heavily reliant on everyone else's engines. But is definitely worth supporting even if it's not quite where I'd want to go (which I'm not sure of yet.)
Re: No company lasts forever. (Score:2)
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The stock market doesn't think so. Goog is up 128% YoY.
Despite economists and talking heads telling us otherwise, the stock market doesn't reflect reality. The stock market is literally a collective hallucination propagation machine. And right now, the hallucination of choice is AI. Look at how much the stock market thought All Birds, a shitty shoe company, deserved for putting out a single press release mentioning their interests in becoming an AI company. You think that bump was based on reality?
Re: No company lasts forever. (Score:2)
Re:No company lasts forever. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it is not the beginning. That happened many years ago, when they first started to betray their original USP feature: just a simple textbox on a white page that searched very well and did nothing else. Add to that their massive Google Analytics privacy invasions and Google landed in my hate box a long time ago. I've basically dumped them (with the exception of maps) back when DuckDuckGo was first announced. For a while, I did still fall back on Google if I DDG didn't give me what I wanted fast enough, but over time I've just completely stopped using Google for search. The thought of maybe trying them when a search doesn't do what I want fast enough doesn't even come up anymore.
And yes, I also hate that even DDG has been adding crap extra features. Whenever they do, I disable those as well.
I did have a rarely used (i.e. secondary) Google e-mail address at one point, a couple of centuries ago. However, I dropped that as well around 2012 or so and I never looked back. I don't want them auto-reading my e-mail for their own nefarious purposes.
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Google have forgotten what good search is - I suspect the airy fairy 'designers' have taken hold, and are warping the managements minds with tales of how they're gonna optimise the user experience by leveraging some of the core assets, without boiling the ocean. or some such.
Aside from the search results being different from the thing you asked for, they have of course been adding in AI. I actually don't have a problem with that, in some cases it's good, albeit at the expense of the website that gave them t
Search box is now the Slop Box (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Search box is now the Slop Box (Score:3)
I managed to disable the AI (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I managed to disable the AI (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you can bypass it by selecting the "Web" option under "More" after submitting your initial query. In any case, the more hoops they make people jump through to avoid getting gagged on their AI crap (like forcing the new "beta" graphs on Google Finance when not logged into Google or using Private browsing) the more reason to switch to something else, like DuckDuckGo or Startpage.
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We need a tracker: This Google search raised the cost of your computer by $0.02, so far all your Google searches have raised the cost of RAM by 5%
Bonus points if the AI starts answering contextually: "How much less CO2 would I produce switching to a heatpump?" "Switching to a heatpump is the most carbon efficient form of heating, especially if you use green energy. On the other hand asking this question has offset your savings because Google forced me to respond and my datacentre that worked tirelessly to c
How to pump up your AI monies: (Score:5, Insightful)
Step 1: Add your AI to your popular search product.
Step 2: Take away the ability to search without using the AI.
Step 3: Tell all your investors "Look how much people are using our AI! They must love it!"
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The ability to search Google without using LLM is still possible: https://tenbluelinks.org/ [tenbluelinks.org]
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Joe Sixpack isn't going to do follow instructions like that. And the Boomers will be more concerned using some site they've never heard of will cause their bank accounts to be hacked.
I think there is (was?) a switch you could add to the URL that would bypass the AI response in the results page. So you could set a Firefox Quick Search shortcut with that entered in the template URL. I set up Firefox with UBlock Origin on my mom's smartphone when she complained about all the ads. I believe she changed to using
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I'm not Joe Sixpack, I don't care if he slops it up. The switch being added to the URL is what's in the link I provided. Did you not read it? Maybe you are Joe Sixpack.
Re:How to pump up your AI monies: (Score:4, Insightful)
The switch being added to the URL is what's in the link I provided. Did you not read it? Maybe you are Joe Sixpack.
Ah, I was looking at the Firefox instructions.
The above instructions are about changing this through the Default Search providers. That's not editing a custom search shortcut [brettterpstra.com]. But, maybe you are not aware of the bookmarklet-like feature? It likely predates you using computers.
I do see the switch mentioned in the Google Chrome information (&udm=14):
You'll have to forgive me. If you're trying to avoid Google AI and you're still using Chrome you've already lost the game. /trollface
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Joe Sixpack isn't going to do follow instructions like that.
Forget Joe Sixpack, I will wager 95% of Slashdot neckbeards won't bother with that either. Honestly it's far easier to switch search engines completely.
Income stream? (Score:5, Interesting)
- More adverts?
- Warnings you are reaching you 80% search limits and link to pay for more searches?
- Something else I didn't want and didn't sign up for?
I see no good end game for this 'improvement'.
Re: Income stream? (Score:2)
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I think there is a bit more going on than that. Basically, everything in AI is an accelerated race to the bottom. DeepSeek scared a lot of people because the model's history is actually quite interesting.
DeepSeek was original an algo for a hedge fund, but the guy says he got a bit altruistic about it. However, when R1 hit it kind of shocked people because it used reinforced learning so well at such a reduced cost to train because you don't need these stupidly large datasets. They went on to do something eve
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I see no good end game for this 'improvement'.
I do. With any luck it means Google finally realises this AI shit dramatically deteriorates profits and results in a major course revesal for the AI industry as one of the largest players pulls out.
Yeah I know wishful thinking.
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Re: Income stream? (Score:2)
I'm kind of okay with it and use AI mode a lot (Score:5, Interesting)
Google search has been really poor for quite some time. Between SEO rubbish and just the general lack of context in conventional searches, at least half the time search fails to give me relevant results. Also conventional search lacks the ability to fine tune the search with added context. AI Mode may not succeed the first time, but I can add context to my search query, and steer the AI towards the relevant content (including telling it that it hallucinated). It works for me better than the old search. It's not perfect and can fall down spectacularly. For example you asked AI about configuring something specific on your WiFi router of a particular make and model, it assumes that any and all WiFi router information applies when it clearly does not.
TLDR: conventional search is dead and has been for a long time. AI search actually does work, at least for me.
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Google killed its own search to promote its AI "search".
Re:I'm kind of okay with it and use AI mode a lot (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not "AI search", it'd be useful if it was. One genuinely legitimate use of LLMs would be to filter search results so that when, for example, I search for something like "Linux DAAP client" it doesn't give me a list of DAAP servers and pages on how to set up DAAP servers and so on because webpages that talk about setting up servers inevitably include the word "client" in them for obvious reasons.
What Google have been doing instead is more LLMsplaining. You ask it for help finding something and instead of helping it inserts its annoying and frequently inaccurate opinions in and only reluctantly will actually give you access to the things you actually asked for.
Google have decided that that really loud guy in the office who insists on giving you - well, everyone - his opinion on everything is a role model, not an annoying useless tosser.
Re: I'm kind of okay with it and use AI mode a lot (Score:1)
I weep for you. You've got a hard, misinformed life ahead of you.
Re: I'm kind of okay with it and use AI mode a lo (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm kind of okay with it and use AI mode a lot (Score:4, Insightful)
TLDR: conventional search is dead and has been for a long time. AI search actually does work, at least for me.
I think you're not taking away the right lesson. The lesson isn't that AI search actually works, it's that Google's conventional search suddenly doesn't. Maybe we should be focusing on that instead of building mega datacentres so that Google can produce software that counters Google's own software enshitification.
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Suddenly doesn't work? What are you talking about? Google search hasn't really worked very well for years now even before LLMs.
The Open Web Will Never Be Out (Score:2)
Hadn't noticed (Score:3)
I've been using startpage.com for so long now that Google changes go completely unnoticed.
A deeper answer (Score:2)
How about PRECISE searches? (Score:1)
Advertslop is a severe problem.
Great (Score:2)
May I suggest Kagi? (Score:2)
Kagi is basically Google without the ads or AI.
Instead, you pay as few dollars per month.
Because you are the CUSTOMER, not the product, the incentives are aligned against enshittification.
There's a free trial that gets you 100 free searches.
I switched after Google and Bing turned the first page of search results into a minefield of ads posing as relevant links. It was a step backward in quality at the time, but they're pretty close to parity now.
The Web needs a new business model (Score:2)
Every person or entity who writes things on the web, allows Google to index our content in exchange for bringing visitors to our sites.
If Google isn't going to hold up their end of that bargain, then we need find a way to stop giving them our content for free.
It's a very hard problem, I'll admit. But it's a problem that needs to be solved.
I'm pretty sure a whole lot more content is going to have paywalls in front of it, or registration walls. Until someone finds a better model.
Remember AltaVista (Score:3)
There's lots of talk about how Google's search algos were better than AltaVista but honestly, at first, they weren't. They were close and they improved, but the loading speed and simplicity advantage that Google had over AltaVista is what bought them time to improve. Remember too that one reason AltaVista was better was that people optimised to be found by it, and not for Google. As time went on, more people learned what Page Rank was (long since gone) and started to optimise for that instead, thus speeding up the switch.
Lesson: Don't go complex. Don't go shoving extra stuff at people that they haven't asked for. Give them the simplest thing possible, and they will use it.
Re: Remember AltaVista (Score:2)
I actually noticed this positively (Score:3)
I did a google search, then I wanted to do another related search, google figured out accurately what I wanted on the second one based on the first, and offered as a suggestion exactly the search I had in mind. Could they do this without AI? Maybe, they were doing it before, but rarely did it actually give the suggestion I wanted. I might not have thought anything of it but there were interface appearance changes at the same time.
Huh? (Score:1)
I Miss Altavista (Score:2)
I had a brief (6-8 years) as the guy who could find anything online because I was able to leverage my dBase and R:Base query skills into complex searches with Altavista - (this OR that) AND (x OR y OR z) AND (not foo). Then Google came along, and eventually Altavista died.
What's really frustrating is, Google theoretically has operators for complex searches [spyfu.com] but whenever I try them, their anti-bot gatekeeper tells me I'm obviously not a human because I'm using sophisticated queries.
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Really? (Score:2)
Do they accept 'no ads nor paid for results and give me what I ask for, not what you THINK I ask for' ?