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.
Can it be worse than the sanitised results they give you now?
Kagi. But you free loaders would have to pay for something.
You Kagi shills never give up, do you? Also, information wants to be free, hack the planet yadda yadda.
I was with kagi for a year.
It was fine.
Their CEO is an asshole though. There was that thing where he went a bit nutty over some mild criticism. I don’t remember the details.
Anyhoo. Searx is nice for the moment.
I feel like Kagi, after tuning, provides the best results at the moment (even including Google sometimes). You definitely need to tune it though since the default results are not that great. Agree about their CEO. TBH, at this point, I also wish they weren’t based in the US.
It’s been a few years since I last tried Searx, but I remember the results being pretty bad. Has it gotten better?
Searx just proxies other engines, so the results are the same as the upstream results.
I’ve never really had a problem with results from any engine TBH.
The main thing I’ve learned over the last few years with Searx is that some instances are terrible while others are great. Some are slow, and often get blocked and take days for the admin to get a new IP or whatever. Right now I’m using perennialte.ch and it’s been great. They also redirect results at reddit to an alternative frontend which is a nice touch.
The weirdest thing about switching to kagi was learning that the first few results have a good chance of being relevant. I got so used to scrolling down after a search. It was just weird to have the useful results on top. Similarly, learning that search syntax is actually meaningful and respected by the search engine (for the majority of cases).
I’m interested, but a bit reluctant. I find DuckDuckGo quite adequate for most things, except shopping online, something that I have to rely on for certain categories of items. How is Kagi on shopping?
I’ve been using Kagi for a bit. If I search for things one can buy, I get results similar to Google.
What have you found lacking in DDG for online shopping?
It seems to take more keywords to home in on the kind of speciality items I look for, and does not always appear to detect connections between those keywords, for example in trying to find certain kind of veterinary support devices made to national specifications. One of the other commentors says Kagi is okay for shopping, so maybe I’ll give it a whirl because I’d love to be free of Google once and for all.
Shopping online locally or just finding certain items? It’s not great locally because it doesn’t seem to use your location for searches (which is good IMO), but it’s usually been fine for me if I’m just looking for something I want to buy. Note that you need to tune the results for them to be good (you can adjust site rankings for yourself).
I mean their search results have gone to absolute shit anyway, the AI is probably better at this point.
I hate this.
DuckDuckGo is pretty easy to switch to. You can go to settings and disable AI chat in it.
this sounds like what Google wanted to be since its inception: ask a question, get an answer
somewhere along the journey, the reality of needing to make money drove the enshitification of search results: ask a question, get offers to sell you an answer
this seems like a step in a better direction
Right because when I search for factual information what I really want is an LLM to tell me “sorry Dave I can’t answer that question right now.” (See: any election related information. As in it doesn’t just kick you back to the web search results it just straight up refuses to give you the answer.)
It baffles me how wholly some people are just accepting the complete erosion of the internet. I have lecturers at university, so theoretically educated people, who tell us point blank to plug any questions we have about weekly topics into ChatGPT. The respect I have for these teachers and their content is less than zero at this point.
Then you have to check those answers, so you need to search for an authoritative source anyway… which means you need a regular search engine. At that point you may as well have used the search engine in the first place.
If Google does this, you’ll need to find an alternative search engine to check Google against… so you may as well just switch to a different search engine in the first place.
There are things that LLMs are good at, being a search engine isn’t one of them. Although I have asked searchy type questions and got some interesting links back which I probably wouldn’t have found on a normal web search with the terms I was using, so they can be useful as a supplementary search tool. I’d rather that than it just giving the answers, which then need to be fact checked elsewhere.
