Like it or not, this is exactly what normies have always wanted out of search engines - a little guy in their computer they can talk to for answers, advice and reassurance. They've always been trying to use Google Search this way and have been confused and annoyed that it doesn't work. And now it does! It's a massive quality of life improvement for the average user and a huge product win for Google.

Its also why Google Search "went to shit years ago"

Technically adept people would search using ordered keywords and phrases, which would have excellent results with Google 2006:

Dario Turkey NBA "never coming over"

But regular people agonized over this because to them a search was

What were some of the memes about Dario staying in turkey

Google put immense effort into calibrating search for regular people instead of engineers.

I'm not sure about this. I know complete normies that lament how bad Google is now and how often the search is useless. I think many people just want search to search.

So if enough 737's crash into the water Boeing will start making submarines? Product managers deserve a special express queue when in line for the Warm Place.

No, we did not want it to offer weirdly irrelevant fake sympathy. We just wanted to talk in plain English and get relevant answers back in plain English, without us having to reel it it from going down some emotionally schizophrenic rabbit hole (like in TFA).

I was always taken aback when I’d see people type fully formed sentences into an old Google search, when a couple keywords would have done just fine.

It reminds me of the motion controls we now have in video game controllers. In the 80s I remember my parents moving the controller as if that was going to help their Teris block or Mario go a little further than the D-pad alone. We laughed when people did this. Now, the controllers respond to what people had been doing for decades with no effect.

I suppose this is what technology should do, adapt to how people naturally use the thing, rather than trying to rigidly adhere to conventions users are expected to learn… that were only conventions due to the limits of technology when it was first developed.

I understand this "vibe search" meme is the prevalant narrative coming from "users just want star trek" google, but I've got to wonder what long-term impacts focusing on users who don't grasp how to work software will be. It's probably fine or positive for short-term revenue, but this is also culture loss: the users who know what they want will move on to more functional software. 100% of the feedback I've seen about recent changes has been frustration that a reliable tool has stopped working. Obviously, this is selection bias but it's still meaningful.

And the impact on discourse has been, frankly, scary. People screenshotting the search output as a source seems to be the norm now, even if it's obviously incoherent or straight-up incorrect.

EDIT: I suppose I can adapt to a search engine that expects me to interact with it like a human. I just have no clue how to translate most of my skills. I am desperately hoping there's a way to turn off semantic interpretation of a given query.

I'm going to agree and disagree.

I agree that plain language queries is what people wanted. We've been seeing Google shift in that direction for well over a decade. And of course people are looking towards search engines for answers. There may be different expectations for where those answers are coming from, and there are cases where people are simply trying to source information, but those differences are likely just noise as far as Google is concerned.

I don't agree with people expecting advice or reassurance from a search engine. There will be some people who do that. It may even be a sizeable number of people. But using this article as an example that a majority of people want such a thing is silly.

I mean, look at the query. To the author, it was an attempt to source information. Yet the author also realised that the reader would need context to understand why Google's response was weird in their mind. What they failed to do was give context to Google, so the LLM interpreted it as asking for social advice.

New technology requires new approaches. It's as simple as that.

I absolutely despise when people cite google as a source, especially now where 90% of the time they're citing the LLM overview. The old answer widget was at least a direct quote from some website.

It's just a typical case of XY problem[0].

X is search engine. Y is to get answers. (most) People want to get answers. If they can skip search engine part it'd be a net positive for them.

Ironically that programmers should be the ones who understand XY problem the most (after all the name is coined by a programmer to address it), not the "normies."

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

Yeah - exactly this. And yet people still say they've lost the AI race because Gemini 3.5 Pro or whatever has not been released yet... And here we are with fast and decent AI being served to and used by billions of people (most without them probably even realising), making ever-increasing revenue, gaining back market share etc. Who cares if their coding models are not as good as opus 5.5 when they're printing more and more money every quarter.

yeah, except that when it goes wrong then it's also pointless, the fault's on the users themselves though

How on earth did you figure out what the 'average' person wants? 'Average' by the way doesn't exist, its an artificial math concept. What people want is an endless list of things and a bot no longer being objective, as in just addressing the search query, isn't one of those things.

When I was in grade 8 and 9 in public school, we'd got a couple random lessons in the library on the computers learning to search online databases and catalogues. For most of us it was our introduction to keyword matching and boolean logic. Sadly, instead of continuing teaching, services have instead phased out those basic operators and here we are. We also learned to make websites using Pagemaker and edit the generated html, that was just fun.

This is also why even lowest-intelligence emoji spamming slop models from ChatGPT are a massive hit

and something like 3% of LLM userbase pays to get access to the higher tier models with actual useful thinking

No it isn't.

I feel like there's certain formula where any enshittification is justified as "this is what the normies want". And sure, all the crap is something someone might want if they didn't think for half a second. But even normies are better than that once forced to think.

The debate doesn't end there yet because what's considered a "scam" is a point on the gradient of user acceptance.

Too many users still reject this for it to not be a scam. The highest acceptance is from boomers and the delusional. Neither group gives a shit if AI actually works because they don't have work to do.