I’m a heavy Google search tool user. I’ve tried several of the alternatives (Bing, DuckDuckGo, and so on) but Google finds references they miss and I appreciate that. Google’s web crawlers, site ranking algorithms, and caching for rapid retrieval have been the best for decades.
Lately Google has added generative AI to their results.
This is not progress. It’s a disaster.
First, people should understand that until AI, Google did not offer answers. Their results were references to sites with content that matched your search criteria; the sites most frequently referenced were placed first with a few lines from each source. The user was left to draw their own conclusions, and who better than the user to draw those conclusions?
Now, Google uses generative AI to extract a summary of the information it gathers from its Large Language Model (LLM). The search results follow the AI summary. This is supposed to make life easier for users.
Unfortunately, Google’s summaries are unreliable trash. Don’t expect Google’s AI results to be factual, only to sound plausible. That’s what generative AI and Large Language Models are all about. Plausibility, not facts.
If plausibility is all you want, AI is fine. But what kind of person are you for whom plausibility is good enough?
I had a great uncle Adlepate (that’s not his real name) who was a great story teller. According to him, he lead an exciting life as a bootlegger running whisky from Canada and his garden was always had the earliest ripening and largest vegetables. But his stories would never pass fact checking. I soon learned not to count on the truth of Uncle Adlepate’s stories, and I realized that he was a repetitive and colossal bore.
Pay attention to Google AI summaries and prepare to join Uncle Adlepate.
I knew better, but until today, I had begun slipping into paying attention to Google’s summaries. Today, Google revealed itself as Uncle Adlepate.
I am working on turning some of these posts in Vine Maple Farm into a book about life on Waschke Road when I was a kid. One of the posts I intend to include in the book refers to Thoreau’s famous phrase “a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove.” The context in the original post was a little hazy so I wanted to reread Thoreau. I looked the phrase up with Google. The summary told me which chapter the phrase was from. The wrong chapter. I wasted– well waste is a bit strong, reading Thoreau is never a waste– but a good half hour of my day was misdirected.
When I went back to Google and ignored the AI summary, I quickly found the phrase.
So much for Google. I’m looking for a good way to turn the AI summaries off. I’m an old man. I don’t have time for them.
A late addition: I used uBlock Origin advertisement blocker to turn Google AI summaries off on Firefox. Took more time to find the method than to apply it. Just add ” www.google.com###Odp5De” (no quotes) to the “my uBlock filters” tab in uBlock settings.
A later addition: The uBlock Origin block has ceased working. Google AI marches on. I’ve tried Kagi, suggested by Steve Stroh in a comment below. It’s promising, but I will use it more before I dump Google.
I’ve begun using ChatGPT Plus for such queries and it’s generally better than Google with the bonus of no ads.
If you don’t want AI in the mix, just the search engine experience of Google when it was good, that’s Kagi.
Hi Steve! Haven’t tried Kagi, will take a look. I just added a paragraph to the post on how I blocked the AI summaries from Google.
I have to say that I have mixed feelings about generative AI because I’m leery of anything that leads people away from thinking for themselves. It’s still early days and I have faith in humanity that eventually AI will lead people to think more for themselves when they realize they consistently have better ideas than LLM extractions. I’m also concerned that LLM energy use is excessive and not enough effort is going into more energy efficient implementations.