> You know how StackOverflow is dead because AI provided an alternative? That's happening in search too.

Stack Overflow isn’t dead because of AI. It’s dead because they spent years ignoring user feedback and then doubled down by going after respected, unpaid contributors like Monica.

Would they have survived AI? Hard to say. But the truth is, they were already busy burning down their own community long before AI showed up.

When AI arrived I'd already been waiting for years for an alternative that didn’t aggressively shut down real-world questions (sometimes with hundreds of upvotes) just because they didn’t fit some rigid format.

I don't agree that ChatGPT gives an overall better experience than Google, let alone an actual good search engine like Kagi. It's very rare that I need to ask something in plain English because I just don't know what the keywords are, so the one edge the LLM might have is moot. Meanwhile, because it bullshits a lot (not just sometimes, a lot), I can't trust anything it tells me. At least with a search engine I can figure out if a given site is reliable or not, with the LLM I have no idea.

People say all the time that LLMs are so much better for finding information, but to me it's completely at odds with my own user experience.

Is it common to use Internet search like that??? You're typing in literal questions to a search box rather than keywords, the name of the site you're looking for, or topics you want to read about. Maybe I'm just too old school, from the time where internet searches were essentially keyword searches, but it would have never occurred to me to type an actual english question as a full sentence into a search box.

If that's how most people use search engines these days, then I guess the transition into "type a prompt" will be smoother than I would have thought.

Google also has AI and has integrated it into search. It's not Google Search vs ChatGPT. It's Google Search + Gemini vs ChatGPT, where the Google option has a huge advantage of falling into people's already ingrained habits and requires no user education.

StackOverflow is dead because its rules are nonsensical and many of its users are dicks.

It's going to be a real problem going forward, because if AI hadn't killed them something else would have, and now it's questionable whether that "something else" will ever emerge. The need for something like SO is never going to go away as long as new technologies, algorithms, languages and libraries continue to be created.

Google is the only serious competition to Nvidia right now. AI is both a threat to their core business and a core strength of their business. They invented transformers and a cheap inference chip. Their models are top-tier. I think google will be fine.

>(Btw, someone gave me the hint to set its personality mode to "Robot", and that really helps make it less annoying!)

Kimi K2's output style is something like a mix of Cynic and Robot as seen here https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11899719-customizing-you... and I absolutely love it. I think more people should give it a try (kimi.com).

> AI is a competitor.

AI isn't competition for Google, AI is technology. Not only is Google using AI themselves, they are pretty damn near the top of the AI game.

It's also questionable how this is relevant for past crimes of Google. It's completely hypothetical speculation about the future. Could an AI company rise and dethrone classic Google? Yeah. Could Google themselves be the AI company that does it? Probably, especially when they can continue due abuse their monopoly across multiple fields.

There is also the issue that current AI companies are still just bleeding money, none of them have figured out how to make money.

Is StackOverflow dead now? And because of AI?

It still usually has the standard quality of answers for most questions I google. I google fewer questions because modern languages have better documentation cultures.

so what you're saying is that we're about to get ad-spammed Ai as well...

I pretty much exclusively use chatgpt search now. Best thing about it is you can have all kinds of follow up questions

I personally have moved almost all my Stack Overflow usage to LLMs. Just wondering if other folks have done the same…

quit that narrative! stack overflow is dead because it's garbage! try to visit it without being logged in, the entire screen is covered by four halfscreen popups! then search is useless and require to be logged. when you finally give in, the answer is deleted by overzealous power tripping users.

it's a miracle it survived that long. and i think it saving grace was that nobody wanted to browse reddit at work, nothing else.

so tired of AI apologists exploiting this isolated case as if it is some proof AI is magic and a solution to anything. it's all so inane and expose how that side is grasping for straw.

Correct. I’ve been using ai chatbots more and more instead of google search (I still use google quite a lot but considerably less than a year or two ago).

...but ironically that chatbot is Gemini from ai studio, so still the same company but a different product. Google search will look very different in the next 5-10 years compared to the same period a decade ago.

Exactly this. Another way of putting it is that LLMs are doing all the clicking, reading, researching and many times even the "creating" for me. And I can watch it source things and when I need to question whether it's hallucinating I get a shortcut because I can see all the steps that went into finding the info it's presenting. And on top of it replacing Google Search it's now creating images, diagrams, drawings and endless other "new work" that Google search could never do for me in the first place.

I swear in the past week alone things that would've taken me weeks to do are taking hours. Some examples: create a map with some callouts on it based on a pre-existing design (I literally would've needed several hours of professional or at least solid amateur design work to do this in the past; took 10 minutes with ChatGPT). Figure out how much a rooftop solar system's output would be compromised based on the shading of a roof at a specific address at different times of the day (a task I literally couldn't have completed on my own). Structural load calculations for a post in a house (another one I couldn't have completed on my own). Note some of these things can't be wrong so of course you can't blindly rely on ChatGPT, but every step of the way I'm actually taking any suspicious-sounding ChatGPT output and (ironically I guess) running keyword searches on Google to make sure I understand what exactly ChatGPT is saying. But we're talking orders of magnitude less time, less searching and less cost to do these things.

Edit: not to say that the judge's ruling in this case is right. Just saying that I have zero doubt that LLM's are an existential threat to Google Search regardless of what Google's numbers said during their past earnings call.

Google does AI.

AI has a huge advantage over search. It gets to the question you want answered rather than adjacent search terms. I honestly trust the congealed LLM slop over the piecemeal SEO optimized AI slop for many questions.

How long is the rear seat room is the 2018 XX Yy car? What is the best hotel to stay at in this city? I’m interested in these things and not interested in these amenities. I have leftovers that I didn’t like much, here’s the recipe, what can I do with it? (it turned it into a lovely soup btw).

These are the types of questions many of us search and don’t want to wade through a small ocean of text to get the answer to. Many people just stick Reddit on the query for that reason

Yeah, without Google's funding, Firefox could be in trouble, but I doubt it will be destroyed. And nobody is selling it. Or what 'only' browser are you talking about? xD

Destroying Chrome would be a net positive for the world. Also it is not even remotely the "only browser".

The entire world would be better off if it was destroyed. That is sort of the point. We have very unqualified people making decisions that force the entire Internet to comply because the monopoly says to. The Internet could hardly be in a worse place than it is now.

Under good Monopoly law, you would remedy the situation that got them to this point, not worry about their future. Chrome + Deals got to them to this point so that's what you unwind. If it causes Google to get weakened and AI finishes them off, that's just creative destruction at work and oh well.

>Google is bleeding so hard right now from Gen Z and especially Gen Alpha deciding to use ChatGPT

Is this an evidence based claim? From the Q2 2025 numbers Google saw double digit revenue growth YoY for search.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/23/google-expec...

I'm Gen X and recently been using ChatGPT a hell of a lot more than Google, especially for queries similar to sibling comment. Instead of trying to word my query optimally for search, I just write what I'm trying to achieve in natural language and I get an answer, instead of having to scan a few results to know if they're likely candidates. Even with the made up shit on occasion this is a win.

Or by people like me with LM Studio, a lightweight GGUF from Hugging Face, and maybe some kind of vector database MCP tool.

According to scotus they can just give the judge a thank you gift for doing such a good job.

[dead]

How humorous it may sound, but there’s no pressure or binding on Google to hire that judge :-)

There's an antitrust case ongoing right now involving Michael Jordan and NASCAR.

What's so mind boggling about this decision is that if there's one thing virtually all of America agrees upon, it's that Google needs to be reined in.

The Trump administration initiated this lawsuit. The Biden administration took it over and won the case. It's back on the Trump administration now and they wanted structural remedies.

The majority of Americans when polled express concerns about data privacy, security and monopoly in relation to Google - things Americans generally don't get that worked up about, but with Google, they know there's a problem.

Amit Mehta sold them all out with the most favorable outcome for Google that one could imagine. This guy, literally sold everyone in America out, the left, the right and the middle, except for Google management of course.

(This decision probably isn't even good for Google shareholders -- historically breakups of monopolies create shareholder value!)

I think Amit Mehta's impartiality here needs to be the subject of a Congressional investigation. I personally don't feel this guy should be a judge anymore after this.

If his decision stands this is going to be a landmark in American history, one of the points where historians look back and say "this is when American democracy really died and got replaced with a kleptocratic state." The will of everyone, people, the Congress, the Executive branch, all defied by one judge who sold out.

Same feeling for me as well. It was like the old Google where it lead you to the right answer. ChatGPT is similar but in some ways smoother because it's conversational. I think most days I don't even use Google at all.

That said their "Dive into AI" feature has cause me to use it more lately.

Those answers with the awful model they're using are frequently wrong and aggravating to have displace search results.

I'm losing braincells relying on Google Search shoving ad riddled trash in my face and even worse AI results. Gemini frequently just straight up lies to me. Saying the opposite of the truth so frequently I have experienced negative consequences in real life believing it.

The only people who are being homogenized or "down-graded" by Chat GPT are people who wouldn't have sought other sophisticated strategies in the first place, and those who understand that Chat GPT is a tool and understand how it works, and it's context, can utilize it efficiently with great positive effect.

Obviously Chat GPT is not perfect but it doesn't need to be perfect to be useful. For a search user, Google Search has not been effective for so long it's unbelievable people still use it. That is, if you believe search should be a helpful tool with utility and not a product made to generate maximum revenue at the cost of search experience.

Would you say that people were losing braincells using google in 2010 to look up an animal fact instead of going to a library and opening an encyclopedia?

Sure you could end up with occasional misinformation, but the speed at which you can get information more than makes up for it. Niche topics that would otherwise take hours or days to pull together and summar ise obscure sources takes minutes with LLMs.

Funny, I use LLM's for so much search now because they understand my query semantically, not just its syntax. Keyword matching fails completely for certain types of searching.

Tools like GPT-5 Thinking are actually pretty great at linking you to primary sources. It has become my go-to search tool because even though it is slower, the results are better. Especially for things like finding documentation.

I basically only use Google for "take me to this web page I already know exists" queries now, and maps.

Gemini 2.5 always provides a lot of references, without being prompted to do so.

ChatGPT 5 also does, especially with deep research.

it's not syntax, it's data driven (yes of course syntax contributes to that)

https://freedium.cfd/https://vinithavn.medium.com/from-multi...

At its core, attention operates through three fundamental components — queries, keys, and values — that work together with attention scores to create a flexible, context-aware vector representation.

    Query (Q): The query is a vector that represents the current token for which the model wants to compute attention.

    Key (K): Keys are vectors that represent the elements in the context against which the query is compared, to determine the relevance.

    Attention Scores: These are computed using Query and Key vectors to determine the amount of attention to be paid to each context token.

    Value (V): Values are the vectors that represent the actual contextual information. After calculating the attention scores using Query and Key vectors, these scores are applied against Value vectors to get the final context vector

ChatGPT provides sources for a lot of queries, particularly if you ask. I'm not defending it, but you can get what claim to want in an easier interface than Google.

That Searlesque syntax/semantics dichotomy isn't as clear cut as it once was. Yes, programs operate syntactically. But when semantics is assigned to particular syntactic structures, as it is with word embeddings, the computer is then able to operate on semantics through its facility with syntax. These old standard thought patterns need to be reconsidered in the age of LLMs.

Since when does google give your primary sources for simple queries? You have to wade through all the garbage. At least an LLM will give you the general path and provide sources.

ChatGPT gives you web citations from real time web searches.

Like others have noted, I think it's far from obvious that Google's LLM prompt is the best experience in the space, I would say it's clearly not in the top tier and even that relatively speaking, I consider it bad compared to the best options.

Assuming we're talking about the AI generated blurbs at the top of search results, there are loads of problems. For one they frequently don't load at all. For another search is an awkward place for them to be. I interact with search differently than with a chat interface where you're embedding a query in a kind of conversational context such that both your query and the answer are rich in contextual meaning. With search I'm typically more fact finding and in a fight against Google's page rank optimizations to try and break through to get my information I need. In a search context AI prompts don't benefit from context rich prompts and aren't able to give context-rich answers and kind of give generic background that isn't necessarily what I asked for. To really benefit from the search prompts I would have to be using the search bar in a prompt way, which would likely degrade the search results. And generally this hybrid interaction is not very natural or easy to optimize, and we all know nobody is asking for it, it's just bolted on to neutralize the temptation to leave search behind in favor of an LLM chat.

And though less important, material design as applied to Google web sites in the browser is not good design, it's ugly and the wrong way to have a prompt interaction. This is also the case for Gemini from a web browser. Meanwhile GPT and Claude are a bit more comfortable with information density and are better visual and interactive experiences because of it.

If Google went all-in on the AI overview and removed search results and invested more heavily in compute, it could be pretty good.

But as it stands, it's a terrible user experience. It's ugly, the page remains incredibly busy and distracting, and it is wrong far more often than ChatGPT (presumably because of inference cost at that scale).

It might be good enough to slow the bleeding and keep less demanding users on SERP, but it is not good enough to compete for new users.

What? The Google LLM assisted search experience is... not the best option by a long shot? It's laughably incorrect in many cases, and infuriatingly incorrect in the others. It forces itself into your queries above the fold without being asked, and then bullshits to you.

A recentish example, I was trying to remember which cities' buses were in Thessaloniki before they got a new batch recently. They used to rent from a company (Papadakis Bros) that would buy out of commission buses from other cities around the world and maintain the fleet. I could remember specifically that there were some BVG Busses from Berlin, and some Dutch buses, and was vaguely wondering if there were some also from Stockholm I couldn't remember.

So I searched on my iPad, which defaulted to Google (since clearly I hadn't got around to setting up a good search engine on it yet). And I get this result: https://i.imgur.com/pm512HU.jpeg

The LLM forced its way in there without me prompting (in e.g. Kagi, you opt in by ending the query with a question mark). It fundamentally misunderstands the question. It then treats me like an idiot for not understanding that Stockholm is a city in Sweden, and Thessaloniki a city in Greece. It uses its back linking functionality to help cite this great insight. And it takes up the entire page! There's not a single search result in view.

This is such a painful experience, it confirms my existing bias that since they introduced LLMs (and honestly for a couple years before that) that Google is no longer a good first place to go for information. It's more of a last resort.

Both ChatGPT and Claude have a free tier, and the ability to do searches. Here's what ChatGPT gave me: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b78eb7-d7b4-8006-81e0-ab2c548931...

A lot of casual users don't hit the free tier limits (and indeedI've not hit any limits on the free ChatGPT yet), and while they have their problems they're both far better than the Gemini powered summaries Google have been pumping out. My suggestion is that perhaps you haven't surveyed the market before suggesting that "by far the best LLM-assisted search experience today is available for free at the Google prompt".

Just like google cloud is the best ;)

I have seen way more hallucination from "AI overview" than ChatGPT.

You are biased, sure, but it seems that you haven't even used ChatGPT or other similar products enough to even attempt to give a fair assessment.

It basically rules out structural remedies, so what's left is pinky promises of not misbehaving again. Whatever these promises are, that closes the case for me.

Unless the remedy is that Google's online ads has to be spun out into a separate company away from their control, I don't see how any remedy can be effective.

What can honestly be done to punish them? I mean punish too, certain entities of Google should not exist.

That’s very different, as discussed at the time.

Apple never allowed it, Google did then had secret deals to squash it.

It was the secret deals to squash competition they got in trouble for.

Any country trying to break Google will be fighting the US gov. It doesn't matter if other nations are better or worse in comparison, only the US has the power to rule over Google.

At best the EU could push penalties on Google, but nothing more.

They can’t be, because the FAANG (or whatever we call them today) companies are de facto a part of the US government (with the context of some other country trying to break them up)

Antitrust that is nonexistent is far more harmful.

So much of this should have been stopped long long ago, like the purchase of Doubleclick.

We’re dealing with fallout decades later and trying to rule on that.

I mean you can't blame Trump for this one. Trump 1's DoJ initiated this case. Trump 2's DoJ asked for structural remedies e.g. breaking up Google (can't remember if the Biden DoJ was the first to talk about breakup, they probably were, but Trump DoJ carried on with it).

The news of the day is that the JUDGE told both Democrats and Republicans, as well as a supermajority of the American public, no you can't have what you want. Even though Google is guilty, you don't get it. Instead, corporate power will win again.

Imagine an alternate American history where the judge decided not to break up Standard Oil. I think it's Marc Andreesen who's literally made the comparison that data is the modern day oil. We are about to get that alternate history where the corporate robber barons win and everyone else loses. Mehta sealed the deal.

Google sucking isn’t google’s algorithm getting worse; it’s the internet getting more competitive and polluted. If you magically turned on the recommendation algorithm from 2010 but with today’s internet, the results would be far far worse.