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.
Technofascists really benefit from certain kinds of information being inaccessible…
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To borrow Alex Jones’ term - it is information warfare. Train people to accept the outputs of LLMs, attack media literacy (in conjunction with the fact that public schools in the US spent ten years not teaching children how to read), and hide actual sources.
You can have your LLM trained to weasel around the fact that the chattel slavery of black Americans was the primary cause of the Civil War, or falsely represent science surrounding gender and sexuality (they’re explicitly tuning Grok on this).
You don’t have to worry about subversive messages on war or women in your “AI” generated “Ghibhli” film. Have all the fun space faring of Star Wars, without the prequel geopolitics everyone hated until they saw it happen.
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I’m stoned so:
The technocrats (Bezos, Thiel, Zuckerberg, etc) are SEELE. Musk is Gendo - ie, at the table but rogue (and I don’t want to imagine what he’d do with a planet full of Yue/Rei’s) Thiel doesn’t trust Musk, so Vance is like his Kaji. (Misato is like literally a Freud caricature of a woman, so we can make her a couch to fit the whole sexual ethos)
COVID was the second impact. The angels are attendant disasters that go with it and things like climate change etc.
Luigi is Kaworu, a gorgeous bisexual twink who is being crushed by the system.
The American people are Shinji, paralyzed under stress and trauma. Asuka is a bunch of other countries, being very angry at Americans for not doing shit while not really coping with their own problems.
Rei is obviously the internet/technology.
The globalists have been priming us for this information the entire time! Pre programming! Please buy my protein power.
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They did that long before AI.
Google, Apple and plenty others have regular meetings with defense people to accomodate them.
No surprise Eric Schmit left Google to form a defense company since some employees there had a consciense and didn’t like working on killer drone programs.
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.
No, this will be the AI that ignores your content and just spits out sponsored content. AI doesn’t really have to be involved much, but if it is, Google doesn’t have to pay up when you file a class action lawsuit for misleading content because they can say “It’s not our fault, thr AI did it.”
I am no longer feeling lucky
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%.
Yeah I think most of my searches start with the name of the site I want results from.
I had to ditch ddg when they started injecting my vpn’s geoip as a search term in almost every search. It was to the point where I could literally be including an actual city and state as a search term and I would mostly get results for the vpn’s location. Naturally there is no option to disable this behavior.
Startpage is
nice thoughdoing the same thing now, fuck.
Why is everything shit
Capitalism. Next question…
Sounds cool, can’t wait!
Hmm, in theory I don’t have a problem with an AI telling me the answer to my question or whatever I’m searching for - but this isn’t a web search. If I’m actually searching for a particular page or context, then I want to be able to do that.
These are two entirely different things, and if Google goes down this route they aren’t a search engine anymore - they are an LLM provider.
Couldn’t agree more. I use both tools as they have their place, but when I want a search engine, I don’t want to get an AI answer for the result. Like if I’m searching for documentation on something, what benefit would the AI provide me over just giving the link?
Yes, the problem is that the place for LLM “search results” is the garbage can.
I’m decrepit enough to remember pre-Google web, with competing search engines. Bring back webrings!
sometimes you just gotta ask Jeeves
The fact that Ask Jeeves isn’t an AI-only search engine is just beyond me. It was laughable that someone thought to personify a search engine 25 years ago, but now is pretty much the right time for that.
Altavista baby.
Please! We need more competition for Google.
AI is over hyped and doesn’t need to be shoved in our faces. Ugh.
It’s another tech bubble like the dot com bubble. But at this point, the AI bubble, the crypto bubble, and the capitalism bubble will all crash at the same time as the world economy falls apart and we end up in another global war. I guess the accelerationists that survive will get their wish and see what remains and if it’s the neofuedalist white supremacy utopia they dream of
Stick to SEARCH, not making shit up (euphemistically called “hallucinating”).
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.
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Who asked for this?
Unlike most of Lemmy, I actually like AI and even I don’t want this.
Wait, google does searches now too? Wow they have a service for everything.
How many cases of “You should eat at least one small rock per day” AI bullshit does Google think is acceptable for production deployment?
More than zero, which is too many for my taste.
I was just dealing with a plumbing problem the other day, and I was like, “I know, I’ll ask AI!”
Basically everything it told me was completely wrong. And this was Claude Sonnet 3.7, one of the best!
Wait…you shouldn’t be doing that? Damnit! What am I going to do with the small rock mine I just bought?!
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The model uses “advanced reasoning, thinking, and multimodal capabilities”…
Well, LLM’s are incapable of actually doing the first two, so we’re already off to a great start.
I don’t think it’s much in the way of hyperbole to say that if they make this the default or worse, only search output option then this will be the thing that literally destroys the company.
No one except idiotic boardroom denizens actually wants this. Google failing to provide actual search results is the singular one and only thing that could actually get users to switch away from using it – and not do that thing where they just grumble and bitch and moan but keep using it anyway. And if no one is searching on Google then nobody is seeing ads on Google, which means Google will not be selling ads.
I will laugh so hard if this happens.
Sadly, I’ve seen how much the average non-tech enthusiast LOVES all this AI stuff. Like, people’s parents/grandparents who only occasionally use a computer when they have to. The types of folks who will call tech support and actually need the answer, “Is your computer powered on?” And there are far more people out there like that than many tech folks think. That’s the market that keeps powering this stuff.
Somehow, a huge amount of people hate thinking. Like it’s painful or like exertion or something. Anything that can just give them what they want is better.
It doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong. They just want an answer. They don’t want to know why, or how, they want to know now.
It’s the shortcut to knowledge all the ancient parables warned us about. Instead of physically destroying your mind, it stops it from working at all.
That being said, we are still in the early phase of the “information age”.
IMO industrialization and rise of “modernity” (in the sense of a historical, sociology-political time period) were far more disruptive than what we have seen in the information age so far.
It is likely we still have to go through some sort of highlight disruptive events (the 21st century equivalent of WW1/WW2) before we come to terms with the pros/cons inherent to the information age.
