News Musk asserts AI will make search redundant in comment on Google Search share dipping below 90%

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My prediction has always been that "AI" will fizzle out (when the next hype comes along) and will turn into Search 2.0.

"AI" that we have today is next evolution of search engines.

But it's certainly not intelligent.
 
Google has never been the best, fastest search engine. It is just popular because it is the default one for the most popular web browsers.
It used to come as addon malware to "free" software downloads. It's use is a great example of artificially induced product popularity.
 
"AI", in this context, is just essentially "An Index" that's more interactive than a simple search and can "understand" conversational text so you can refine the results, but at its heart it's still a metasearch engine that's only as useful as the inputs, and are as prone to false information as an elementary school child's book report if it's not drawing from reputable sources.

Now where Musk is right is that AI will replace general searches when it comes to custom AI trained on very specific and known good information, such as law libraries and medical libraries, but those aren't what he's talking about here.
 
This makes no sense at all, but that's par for the course for Musk and his inability to predict anything further away than his next poo.

If I have an expensive heritage turkey I want to brine and I need to look up the ratio of salt to water, do I just trust whatever the AI spits out, or do I have to take the extra step of asking it for a source, then checking that source to make sure it didn't tell me to use 2 pounds of salt per cup of water? If I have to verify the artificial idiot isn't hallucinating that doesn't save any time or effort over using a standard search engine and hitting a reputable site to get the correct answer. About the only way you could get around that is to ask the idiot for a site that tells you how to brine, but even that isn't any quicker or easier than just using a search engine, and you still need to verify the results manually.
 
There's a reason "why can't I find anything on Google anymore" or "what happened to Google search" are popular searches.

It's because current Google CEO Sundar Pichai turned away from their traditional PageRank search algorithm to AI, so now all search results heavily prioritize low-quality or even useless AI-generated content and SEO-optimized pages over actual useful hits.

Instead of how many views or links there are to a page, AI attempts to find the most confidently authoritative sounding ones.
 
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I am happy to have "AI" (nowadays mostly meaning LLM, which is not really the same as AI) search as soon as the very very serious problem of hallucinations has been solved. Which most likely won't be in the next 10 years.
Elon Musk says many interesting things, like fully autonomous self-driving will be available in 2017. Or 2018. Or 2019. And so on. Claims which all have turned out to be false. I don't think Elon Musk knows and understands much of the things he says. He is a poorly informed person.
 
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uhhh... but Google search already uses AI?
Google AI, Gemini, gives decent answers most of the time, anecdotally.
And it cites its sources, instead of "I pulled it out of my ass"

Where as Grok is... well, I don't see it having any "understanding" or "empathy" of humans, despite the origin of it's name.
 
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From what I understand about statistics, a decrease of a share, doesn't necessarily mean an overall decrease of the use of search engines. Like when a car company's market share dropped, after its CEO learned about politics from Grok apparently (which in turn may have taken e.g. text by Goebbels at face value), that doesn't mean, that people are already using hoverbikes.

Btw, StatCounter also has a graph about AI Chatbots. Grok isn't even listed:
https://gs.statcounter.com/ai-chatbot-market-share
 
Besides the 17 examples in the linked article there are some infamous ones thanks to joke subreddits which Google seems to never devalue for some reason, showing all that is required is to sound certain in the answer
google-ai-being-helpful-v0-9ee0a4rc6r2d1.png

But Reddit is not required for AI to be dumb. Here its source was Wikipedia but just misunderstood
google-ai-being-helpful-v0-qaqy8u3c6r2d1.png
 
Translation. We will take the data from your public websites without giving you advertising data and report it to our users.

Then 10 years from now when all the sites are gone, we will just manipulate the data however we want.

This is just the next version of a news or site feed like news.google.com where they funnel others hard work through their machine to make money. Now they do it without sending you to sits at all. That is the whole point of this.
 
Most AI is really a query interface to search databases with some strategies to infer answers it doesn't have or tell you how it got them.

There is probably a huge problem with them not being able to track and explain how they got their results and give a relative explanation of the certainty of their results which may be unknown information and incorrect approximations using statistical methods. You might need to already be an expert in what you're using the AI for to validate its results.

Since 2016 when google first started using AI in their search engine, people have been saying they're having issues with the quality of the results. You can really see that it is no longer actually searching for anything, but seems to be returning a limited cache mixed with ads. You used to be able to fine tune your search to stumble upon even little useful nuggets of information. This is gone. Now it seems to autocorrect your search queries like you must have made a typo and it thinks its smarter than you and knows you must be searching for something it already has cached. There is no way to tell it to only search for exactly what you entered anymore.

This seems to be a problem with most search engines now. Especially online stores like Amazon which seems to now return random junk that has nothing or little relevance to your search. It doesn't even make smart recommendations.
 
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SomeoneElse23 said:
My prediction has always been that "AI" will fizzle out (when the next hype comes along) and will turn into Search 2.0.

"AI" that we have today is next evolution of search engines.

But it's certainly not intelligent.
Click to expand...
hopefully, but then... the other fad never was pushed into absolutely everything.

LEDs? they werent that much effective.
Crypto? only affected certain hardware and stuff.
But AI? its being forcefully down our throats everywhere.
 
Yeah right lol. I can't recall a single search I've done where the AI answer at the top of the page wasn't wrong. Literally wrong, or useless. Also Google actually does produce the most consistently useful (non-AI) results for me so I don't agree with people saying it's just users moving to a different search, I've tried others. As we all know more than half of all people are, to put it generously kindly, a bit slow, so you really think a significant amount aren't blindly accepting whatever AI tells them? Oh the naivete.
 
SomeoneElse23 said:
My prediction has always been that "AI" will fizzle out (when the next hype comes along) and will turn into Search 2.0.

"AI" that we have today is next evolution of search engines.

But it's certainly not intelligent.
Click to expand...
Maybe. But at some point it is coming---maybe we're a bit too early in Humanity's technological developments for it to truly take off, but I see it as pretty much inevitable.
 
What is mainly needed is for google to move away from AI answers and summaries, and move towards AI based counter-AI features. One of the biggest issues with google, is the SEO abuse where an increasing number of results are simply malicious results where it is gradually becoming like finding a needle in a haystack to find proper results. AI such as Grok does a decent job at filtering out that stuff, but for most searches, a chat interface is not desirable, and it is not efficient when you are looking for a website and not an AI summary.

What I want is for Google to develop an AI that is good enough to return the site to how it was in the past before the flood of malicious sites designed to ruin the ability of search engines to deliver accurate results.

AI chat bots have their uses, for example, they are good at piecing together and interpreting tons of arbitrary information, thus you can use them for tasks such as finding a TV or anime series where you don't remember the name of the show or character names, and only remember bits and pieces of some episodes. The AI will be able to search the web and parse forum posts and other content and effectively figure out the show you are talking about with only vague details, while a regular search engine will not yield any usable results.
 
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It's worth noting, this is the same person who said we would have full self driving cars, will colonize Mars, and thinks the Cybertruck is cool. He bought Twitter for double what it was worth. blew his chance to be part of OpenAI, and keeps hyping a so-far teleoperated-only robot. His government efficiency department fired scores of vital federal employees that had to be rehired. The list goes on. Why oh why, must we still pretend this guy has any clue?
 
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I'm just sick and tired of trying to search for something on any search engine, browse through a dozen+ results looking for the answer or thing I'm looking for, only to spend several minutes on each page sorting through absolute junk, garbage, and monetization focused content only to find it doesn't have the content I'm looking for. Or I can just use any of the major GPT options and get that information in seconds, now with references to the original content. I'm tired of search engines. 30 years of them has been enough. It's time for something new and AI has replaced that.
 
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