Unlike the common opinion here, I find the AI search results on top really good. 50% of times it appears it answers my question and I don't need to scroll past it to get to the actual search results.

> it appears it answers my question

"Appears" to me is the key word here, how do you know that what it said was true?

It will very confidently "answer" your question in a way that is convincing but if you actually try to click through you may find that the answer is straight up wrong.

I feel like most of the time that I am looking up something that is not niche but also not a major thing it does this and at best useless at worst actually harmful since people won't click through for the real information.

The biggest problem being that these systems can be right enough times that you gradually start trusting it and stop checking. Which is what google wants, if you have to check its work in the first place why does it even exist.

Edit:

Yesterday I tried using one of these research tools because I was curious and it was low priority so figured why not. I was looking for an open source solution to a problem. I specifically mentioned one that I had seen but I was cautious because it seemed to have been abandoned so was looking for others. It confidently told me how wrong I was about thinking it was abandoned despite the last commit being in early 2024 (it even said 2024 in the report) and even before that was clearly slowing down.

Now thankfully in that case it actually told me in the report the 2024 part which clearly told me how bad the report was going to be, but that is clearly bad and tainted the entire research.

Me too, 99% of the times I'm not using Google to search for super critical information, so even if we have some flaw in the Overview in general I feel that it's better then the work that I would do for 30 minutes to get a similar conclusion ( with failures as well, not because I'm human that I dont make mistakes just because I'm able to open 8 tabs per google search ).

I think the quality of that feature and underlying LLM improved dramatically from when they initially deployed it to now.

I think even if the AI response at the top of the search result is good, I question what it means for the "open web".

If all your content is consumed and presented via a third party - how does that change the nature of "content publishing".

It's the summarisation of Wikipedia and the like on steroids.

it appearing correct is not what matters.

it actually being correct is.

google ai summaries are laughably bad and it is completely unethical that google even launched this feature in its current state.

eventually we will have to admit that next token generators are fundamentally flawed as a source of trustable information.

agreed. I am always praying for AI result in search so i don't have wade through junk.

I am a huge fan of AI (including LLMs) but I really couldn't disagree more. Basically every model out there seems way better and more reliable.