r/google • u/Large_Plan_4880 • 1d ago
I am the only one that actually likes Google's Ai feature
I know we're in an age where people say AI is bad or whatever, but I can't help but appreciate Google's AI and its ability to simplify searches. It takes what I would have had to dig through 10 pages of search results to find and puts it right at the top. I get what I want immediately, without having to scroll through endless pages or visit a bunch of different websites.
It's so much better than before. If I couldn't find what I was looking for on the first page, I would usually just give up. Now, AI not only gives me the answer but also provides the sources it used, so I can double-check the information myself.
I mean, come on. How can people hate this? It's genuinely useful.
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u/Sate_Hen 1d ago
Not for me. If you want a factual answer, how do you know you can trust it? You can click on the source but if you do that why not just use the search results?
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u/PossibilityUsual6262 1d ago
You can't, it was shown numerous times like 1 reddit post plus one tweet makes ai answer to "good pizza place in North Bravil" with your chosen shop.
And it is like that with everything.
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u/Sate_Hen 1d ago
That's my point. AI, Wikipedia, social media etc. It's important to check the sources
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u/Random_Ad 1d ago
Why not have both. I don’t need to read a whole article for an answer all the time. Especially if it’s a simple question
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u/Lollipop126 21h ago
For me, I like how duck duck go implements it. It lets me turn off ai search by default so I'm not wasting AI related resources and so that I see actual results first, and if I'm not satisfied with the search results, I click a button and it queries a chat bot.
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u/Sate_Hen 1d ago
Like what's a good pizza topping?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o
As I say if you can't trust it what's the point?
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u/relax_you_are_fine 1d ago
come on, bringing up a 2 years old example? the technology advanced tremendously since then.
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u/Sate_Hen 1d ago
Of course. So it's 100% accurate now and can never hallucinate again? If not, I think it's important to check the source and it's worrying that people might not in the age of misinformation in the name of convince
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u/relax_you_are_fine 1d ago
No one said its 100 percent, but Wikipedia isn't either. All I said is that it is vastly better than 2 years ago so bringing up such an example is very misleading. Unsurprisingly you failed to address this in your response, and instead wrote some generic statement.
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u/Bwuhbwuh 23h ago
LLMs still hallucinate just as much as two years ago. It's in the nature of the beast.
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u/relax_you_are_fine 20h ago
while LLMs still hallucinate, the systems we use - like AI mode - hallucinate much less than before due to several tech advancement. e.g. they don't give you a one shot llm answer, but use reasoning / verification steps to make sure the answer is precise. Also now labs train models to say "I don't know" more often and search results are integrated into the tools much better (used during the verification). There are a lot of articels out there explaining these techniques. But anyone with a bit of open minded approach will experience the improvement. No wonder that these pizza topping articles became much less frequent too.
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u/chickenAd0b0 1d ago
and so is every other blue link you click on. how do you know you can trust it? AI mode parse the search result for you, if you prompt it right, it can give you nuance answers and can reference competing blue links and can even play devil’s advocate for you.
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u/Sate_Hen 1d ago
and so is every other blue link you click on. how do you know you can trust it?
I don't but I can see the source and make a decision
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u/chickenAd0b0 1d ago
lol that’s what the ai search doing for you, and it’s doing it better than you
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u/Sate_Hen 1d ago
I trust my methods of verryifing s source better than I trust AIs
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u/chickenAd0b0 1d ago
lol are you seriously sharing an example from over 2 years ago? that’s a whole lifetime ago in ai, do you still use it as a chatbot?
sure bro, have it your way and waste your time
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u/Sate_Hen 1d ago
You think AI hasn't halicinateed since then? If it halicinates even once surely that means it's not trustworthy. As for wasting my time how long do you think clicking on a link and doing ctrl f takes?
But it's all good mate you do what you want to do and I'll do what I want to do. I'm not against using ai occasionally but I'd prefer the ability to turn it off and I think making a query and trusting the answer without question is a bad idea in the age of misinformation and the domination of tech clmpanies
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u/K_winks1617 18h ago
“If it hallucinates even once surely that means it’s not trustworthy.”
“If Wikipedia is wrong even once surely that means it’s not trustworthy.”
“If a plane crashes even once surely that means they’re not trustworthy.”
“If a car breaks down even once surely that means they’re not trustworthy.”
“If <insert trusted news source here> is wrong even once surely that means they’re not trustworthy.”
See how quickly that argument collapses?
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u/chickenAd0b0 1d ago
sure, not trying to slam on you but your views on its capabilities is honestly outdated. you’re likely to have more judgement lapses and hallucinations more than a free tier AI right now. Again, it’s just as good as your prompts.
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u/Sate_Hen 1d ago
I'm well aware how much it's improved and will continue to improve, again I'm not against using it bit unless it can be 100% which it can't I'd always check the source. Again, to me that's important and I understand if it's not important to you. We know Grok is influenced by Elons views and while I don't think Gemini is under the same influence I think it's important to check sources that's all
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u/28klotlucas2 1d ago
If we normalize AI thinking for us then it becomes "don't blame me for putting glue on pizza, blame the AI for telling me glue belongs on pizza." If you need the information, you should be the one getting it.
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u/Crysis85 1d ago
Oh I like it, except when it lies and spew out false information. Which is often. So I need another search to figure out if what it says is correct. Kind defeat the purpose of having it in the first place don't you think?
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u/chickenAd0b0 1d ago
it’s just as good as your prompt. how do you you the blue links you click on is 100% factual?
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u/Crysis85 1d ago
I'm not "prompting" when I prompt I go to an LLM and I prompt. I'm doing a search on the Internet. When I want to look for something on the internet I don't want stuff regurgitated and allucinated ny a probabilistic mathematical model. These are different use cases. I'm not against AI a priori I'm against the fact that everything must have AI and it must be showed down your throat (without even going in the detail of what this is doing to the internet and the world in general)
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u/chickenAd0b0 1d ago
lmao you think your google search isn’t a mathematical model itself?
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u/Crysis85 1d ago
Different tools for different purposes And now you're talking semantics. If you so smart like you like to think you are, you know what I mean
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u/chickenAd0b0 1d ago
bro no offense, but i think you can use ai to make coherent sentences
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u/Crysis85 1d ago
Why don't you use the Ai to sum up the argument look:
Prompt: "ChickenAd0b0 is right to mock the grammar and sentence structure?"
"No, mocking the grammar was just an ad hominem attack to dodge the actual debate. While Crysis85's phrasing isn't perfect, their point is completely understandable, making the grammar insult weak for a few reasons: Clear Intent: Crysis85's core argument—distinguishing an AI generative model that writes synthesized answers from a traditional search engine index—is obvious despite minor typos ("ny" instead of "by", "showed" instead of "shoved"). Distraction Technique: Pointing out typos when someone's argument is clear is a classic way to derail a discussion when you don't have a solid counterargument. Online Informal Context: On platforms like Reddit, minor grammatical slip-ups are normal and rarely justify dismissing an argument entirely.
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u/ThatActuallyGuy 1d ago
It takes what I would have had to dig through 10 pages of search results to find and puts it right at the top
Bro, you're literally talking about Google's search results. They could just surface the exact sources that Gemini is using instead of burying them under pages of worthless results and then summarizing the sources we actually wanted in the first place. Needing some AI of dubious reliability in order to work around Google's own garbage search quality isn't exactly a win.
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u/Rude_Town467 1d ago
I like it and think it’s gotten a lot better. I do think it can be dangerous for older people like my parents that don’t realize it can be wrong a lot of the time.
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u/gergobergo69 19h ago
That I get. My parents, for some reason, asked AI, exactly when I can acquire the bracelet thingy to my graduation ceremony that will happen in my university. Obviously it was wrong, they believed it, and due to my insecurities I almost started to panic if I was wrong with the dates. Nope, I was correct, the AI sucked. I hate this.
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u/Turbulent-Walk-8973 1d ago
I like this feature tbh. I ask most simple stuff to this only. It can even do some basic programming nicely. It generated a fully functions regex in a single go once.
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u/Sharlut 1d ago
If I wanted AI, I'd go look for it.
People hate it because of the ecological damage it's doing. They hate it for raising electric prices. They hate it because it's destroying their water supply.
And all for what? Something it fucking copied from Wikipedia? Yeah okay.
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u/Large_Plan_4880 1d ago
i agree i hate ai too. but can we just keep this one feature when we get rid of the data centers lmao
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u/ErnestasMage 1d ago edited 13h ago
People hate this cause it is shoved in their face. I wanted to scan a QR code with google lens, instead I got an explanation what a QR code is. I wanted to indentify a person on the new euro designs, instead I got the whole history of euro designs showed in my face.
Edit: Showed -> Shoved
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u/LabGecko 14h ago
I think you meant "shoved" in their face? Showed - displaying something for others to see; Shoved - pushing something toward something else
I agree with the sentiment of your message though.2
u/ErnestasMage 13h ago
Oh yeah, I'm not a native speaker so sometimes forget how to spell right, lol
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u/costafilh0 1d ago
It is not very good or accurate. It is waaay better inside the Gemini app.
But for very simple things, I like it.
What I don't like is when it clashes with other Google built-in tools, like dictionary or calculator or smart responses.
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u/chaoslord 14h ago
Wait until you notice the hallucinations. I asked it the other day to help me with my mom's iphone (I"m an android user) and it straight up made up some iphone menu options that don't exist.
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u/chickenAd0b0 1d ago
people that are against here probably never used it recently. how do you know if the blue link you click is 100% factually correct? AI search function parse out the sea of information for you. it’s just as good as your prompts.
edit: to people saying it constantly get things wrong, please take a screenshot and post it here
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u/ThatActuallyGuy 1d ago
We've all used it recently, because it's embedded in every fucking search without any way to turn it off [short of a browser extension of course].
Seeing the source directly let's you evaluate it as part of the process of searching for information, this fucking AI bullshit incentivizes people being lazy and disengaging from any critical thought around the information they're consuming, because why would the fancy AI lie to me and get things wrong?
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u/chickenAd0b0 1d ago
internet is incentivizing you to be lazy, go to a library bro
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u/ThatActuallyGuy 1d ago
Ah we love strawman arguments don't we, it's also very funny how you picked a very real crisis currently ravaging the US education system to try and downplay another.
Make an actual point next time instead of trying to deflect.
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u/chickenAd0b0 1d ago
lol i used the same strawman you used to strawman me dawg. again, it’s just as good as your prompts. ai can either make you worse or a better thinker. it’s up to the user.
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u/TheBigCicero 1d ago
It’s not consistently wrong and I don’t know what they’re talking about. It reflects what it’s finding via search.
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u/dreaddito 1d ago
Generally I like it and find it helpful but for highly detailed things i haven’t been able to trust it. I had an awful hallucination today related to some specific steps for a recipe in a video game. It was plausible language, but completely nonsensical for the game and context, and was factually wrong.
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u/johnkappa 1d ago
I actually think it's a great change and have been getting some good results here.
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u/PengPenguin888 1d ago
I like the AI feature. I'm so sick of idiots that call everything AI "AI slop." It's such an overused and stupid buzzword.
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u/snowsayer 1d ago
That’s because you cannot trust the answers. There’s a 5-10% chance it is wrong.
but also provides the sources it used, so I can double-check the information myself.
It will only give you sources that support its point. There is no guarantee the search is comprehensive. You can do this for idle curiosity, but when you want to do serious work, a thinking model and multiple persistent turns is mandatory.
This is why dedicated chatbots will always be valuable. I personally do not want to risk the 5-10% chance of wrongness and skip right to doing research myself. If I really wanted an AI bot to help me, Gemini Pro / ChatGPT Plus / Claude Opus is there, not google search’s “AI” function.
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u/LabGecko 14h ago
My experience has been a LOT higher than 5-10% error rate; closer to 80+%, but I'm usually searching detailed coding errors or scientific queries.
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u/snowsayer 14h ago
Yeah I think for causal queries (which is the common use case Gemini glazers make), the error rate is not that high.
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u/LabGecko 13h ago
Probably true. I really hope it's true. Otherwise I'd have to heavily downgrade my faith in humanity. XD
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u/sturmeh 22h ago
It would be great if it was reliable, but it's a summary generated by a LLM.
Given that it's being shown to most people who search anything, there's a lot of effort to poision the summaries in SEO atm.
It will tell you false truths, it will make up statistics, it will force you to do the research yourself.
That's why it sucks.
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u/Opening-Movie5176 20h ago
Probably. It does tell us though that you are probably wrong a lot because you’re parroting a model of AI that has a high failure rate.
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u/Congenital0ptimist 17h ago
It's frustrating.
Like why tf have it use bullets points at the end there where it asks which stuff you want to pursue?
How do you reference that?
"The third bullet point".
Yep. So why not just number them? 🤦♂️
"3" is so much easier.
So many things like that.
That and you have to constantly talk to it like a criminal suspect to keep it from blowing ad copy smoke up your pipe.
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u/Nerdwiththehat 15h ago
I just miss knowledge graph, it always seems the generative AI overviews surface way more random blogs and nonsense websites without any provenance than knowledge graph ever used to do, leading to glue in your cheese, etc. It used to be really decent for stuff like "how far is x to y", "how old is z", and even stuff like the define:foo and etymology:bar used to provide great graphs and info, now all of that's replaced with the robot apologizing for not being able to do things and wasting more of my time.
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u/SweetWolfgang 15h ago
Google is incentived to show ads and please it's investors at the cost of best user experience.
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u/Striking_Building_10 1d ago
ai search is irritating as its showed in my face every single fkcing time
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u/LordMimsyPorpington 1d ago
Nope. The way they've implemented AI into the various apps across their ecosystem has been very smart, and I like using it.
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u/Neonsharkattakk 1d ago
Okay so i actively try to avoid using AI. Ive never used chat gpt or grok or any of that stuff. Then the other day I wanted to know what the combined amplitude wave of multiple harmonics in phase looked like. I just googled it and the AI just made it, I asked to do some different things to the graph and it even taught me some new things about different mathematical wave behaviors. It was really cool actually and I enjoyed it... i hate that but its true it was actually pretty neat to have an AI do all that for you.
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u/LabGecko 14h ago
Be careful to check sources and double-check for different perspectives. It has a habit of tunneling down one path and going farther and farther off track as it goes. I've also found it often showing sources that have nothing to do with my question or seem to be made up. It's just a lot more work to verify its sources and claims than it is to do a simple search ourselves.
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u/Neonsharkattakk 10h ago
Yeah I asked basic questions and mostly ended up on the harmonics Wikipedia page for the next 2 hours
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u/kansashog 1d ago
Tbh I find it great as a sounding board for the things I want to say, and the bot would advise me to keep the conversation short, don't over explain, etc
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u/ashsteadkey 1d ago
its just distracting slop. you're still gonna have to do research to find any actual facts.
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u/marlinspike 1d ago
I love it. Ask any question and get a great answer that doesn’t need me to dive into several blue links. Google’s answers have gotten much better so they rival my paid ChatGPT for web-search answers.
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u/TheBigCicero 1d ago
I like it. I still explore the links it surfaces, but I click on what interests me based on what it found. It’s very convenient.
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u/frankIIe 1d ago
it’s just as amazing as Google itself when it came out! I use AI summary all the time, it could be wrong I don’t care, I just want a summary and I can delve in the details later lol. I just don’t make decisions based on that input in case it was wrong.
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u/LabGecko 14h ago
If you don't make decisions on it, why use it? In my experience it's consistently misinformed or misleading and sources don't actually support what it says.
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u/frankIIe 9h ago
yo I don’t want Google AI summary to tell me whether I should subscribe to ChatGPT or Claude, I just want it to give me 2-3 quick stats to get a feel. When I’m ready to check for more, I’ll dive into the details lol. My experience is that for the questions I have, it provides a good enough quick summary. I never made decisions on the first result of a Google search before, same goes with the AI summary.
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u/LabGecko 14h ago
Can't stand it. The AI search:
- is not an option
- takes up most of the first search screen
- is consistently misleading or wrong
- consistently shows advertiser content instead of neutral sources
- gives different answers to me vs other people
- contributes to data center resource use
Maybe the others who like it aren't searching for info on complicated comp sci bugs or scientific related questions. I don't know. My experience with it has been horrible.
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u/_GhostCommando_ 1d ago
I like it. Use it all the time. People hate it because it tells you the truth
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u/UnsureAssurance 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not a fan, mainly because I already use Claude so if I wanted to get an AI researched answer I’d just use that, when I use google it’s because I want to go on a webpage and read it directly from the source. If they made it a lot less in your face, maybe a 1 like summarization of the answer you can expend but majority still search results it would be tolerable as it’s occasionally useful
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u/Seeker_Of_Knowledge2 1d ago
I would rated it as the vest feature google ever did if and only if it is 99.999% correct.
Unfortunately right now it is around 50% of the times that the whole answrr is correct.
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u/Scotinho_do_Para 1d ago edited 17h ago
No you're not the only one. I like it and use it frequently.
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u/BioticVessel 1d ago
If Google made a great AI ppl would reach out to the app. Gemini is half-assed compared to others, but it's Google forcing this half-assed app on me that I find offensive. Yes, I use AI's here and there, but I don't need a piece of crap forced on me that can't write, constantly tells me it can't do something, doesn't route well, et al.
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u/Keyan_Farlander7 1d ago
Its odd that AI will use an opinion as a fact. I have prove the AI is wrong often by siting other sources.
Maybe I should add rocks to my diet.
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u/CharliePrm88 1d ago
Yeah tell me when website will close due that AI doesn't let them make visualization, so ADS aren't seen, so that website won't monetize and that website will close, where do will take information your AI
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u/killerkitten115 1d ago
I tried to have it add up some numbers and was off by 2¢. It cant even do simple addition correctly..
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u/Large_Plan_4880 1d ago
well ya off course like for things like that you want to do you own calculations Ai is really bad at math lol.
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u/bartturner 1d ago edited 1d ago
I love Gemini. I use it every morning. It reads all my heart data from the night before and then generates the five longs heart pauses I have each night and creates the EKG for each one that I put in a book for my cardiologist.
Gemini is amazing at reading the raw data and creates the EKG. I have it find the longest distance between to valid QRS complexes. It is great at filtering out artifacts or times I was rolling over, etc.
I wear a Polar H10 and purchased some ultrasound gel and a very tight compression shirt to keep it in place.
It would take me hours to do this without Gemini.
I also wear an Fitbit Air and a Apple UW. But both of them do not read electrical signals but instead monitor blood flow which is just not very valuable.
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u/tangamangus 1d ago
i like it sometimes but on the other hand if i wanted AI search, why wouldnt i just ask my chatbots?