- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.
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Who asked for this?
Unlike most of Lemmy, I actually like AI and even I don’t want this.
thinking google is about offering you a quality search at this point is like thinking facebook is about improving your social experience. they both started like that and that’s how they hooked people up. but they have their own interests now. those interests revolve around affecting how people act and think. one central thing they need to do to fulfil those interests is controlling what people see and know… and that’s very hard to do when this pesky external content generated by other that is hard to control gets into way…
They always had their own interests. If you thought otherwise, you’re naive. People generally start a business to make money.
maybe i am naive, maybe you are cynical.
some people do somerimes start business cause they have a good product in mind…
Oh I’m definitely cynical, sometimes too much so, but its often warranted.
You’re right, though, just because the (vast) majority are money grabs doesnt mean they all are. Lots of businesses are started by someone trying to figure out how to make a living doing something they love. Or genuinely trying to solve a problem, money being secondary. I’ve never had that drive, but I do know e.g. artists who are “in business” for themselves and quite happy at it.
…hmm that’s kind of shitty and it uses ten times more energy! Let’s go full enshitification!
I don’t get what they gain out of this, doesn’t it remove the sponsored results? Or will people pay to nudge AI weights to recommend their products?
Example:
How do you make the best cookies diy?
…the new Nabisco Cookies can be crushed to a fine powder mixed…
What are other non-nabisco cookies I can cook?
…Nestle chocolate chip cookies of course!
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Why is everything shit
Capitalism. Next question…
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.
Housing - 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.
Every single one of these flows from wealth inequality.
Excellent point!
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.
(and reinforces it)
No.
Don’t forget about housing! Can’t even have shelter from the elements without paying through the nose to some rent-raising billionaire or giant corporation…
Updated! :)
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.
The heck is tilde??
Text explaination. My ADHD brain doesnt have the patience for a video when I just want to know the answer and move on.
https://machaddr.substack.com/p/the-tildeverse-a-brief-overview
The https://tildeverse.org/ is an online community comprising several servers, known as tilde communities, where users can engage in a wide variety of activities that harken back to the early days of the internet. The term “tilde” refers to the Unix/Linux tradition of using
~(the tilde symbol) as shorthand for a user’s home directory. Each tilde community is typically hosted on a Unix-based system, and these servers provide access to shell accounts and a range of tools to help users communicate, collaborate, and explore computing in a text-based, terminal-driven environment.
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
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.
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
Also Homo Deus.
And yet, resistance seems very weak…
People need hope to fight. We’ve become so black-pilled about everything that many people think it’s impossible for anything to improve.
It’s a reminder about why we need balance. Yes, there are a lot of problems. But not everything is fucked. There’s still a propose to fighting for a better future.
That’s weird – we water our soil with nutrients like “there’s no point in voting”, “they’re all out to get us”, “politicians are shit”, “nothing changes”, “governments are bad”.
I wonder why people haven’t been motivated to fight. Whenever they express faith in our leaders, or institutions, or have any positivity, we’re quick to shut them down. But still.
Time to turn inside. Whatever around you gets fucked, essentially no one can order you “be miserable”. If this one thing gets fixed a hundred percent your way, the rest is just a question of what you can do and how much of that you are willing to do
But does it seem a very long road to become fully in control of own interiority.
I did not come up with this on my own, just picked if up from someone else, but can’t argue with it
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.
I am no longer feeling lucky
Number one reason to at least distance oneself from the big G. They shove unwanted shit down your throat despite the loud protesters
Wait, google does searches now too? Wow they have a service for everything.
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.
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 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.
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 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 though.
Yeah I think most of my searches start with the name of the site I want results from.
startpage. you’re welcome.
it’s also not us owned or based.
Startpage is owned by System1 who are based in LA.
Well you already said I’m welcome, but thank you anyway.
Unfortunately it’s been sold to the US.
well that’s not good :/ sigh
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This is my choice
But start page just returns Google and Bing results. If Google stops offering it, then you’re left w/ Bing. Microsoft has its own AI thing going, so if Google kills search, so will Microsoft.
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searxng
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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