Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google

moezd•about 3 hours ago

The problem with WWW was that in a graph, you needed to find a way to rank the nodes. That was PageRank and it was the right tool for the right problem. When AI tries to do that, it essentially consumes a "curated list" of pages and sounds knowledgeable to fool the ordinary man. That's not search, it's just more of the "curated content" that we're forced to consume every day.

skynotblue•about 6 hours ago

I remember search being excellent about 10-15 years back. Does anybody know what ruined it?

I find it hard to Google stuff anymore, the AI helps even if it has a tendency to be wrong/inaccurate 20-25% of the time. It's pretty helpful when I'm asking a question that has a binary answer.

sds357•about 5 hours ago

Greed

jqpabc123•about 6 hours ago

Similar liability issues are waiting in store for others (doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, etc.) who willingly choose to rely on a tool that produces flawed results on a fairly consistent basis.

verdverm•about 4 hours ago

This is a bit of a different situation. Professionals (individuals), especially those with certifications, can go to Ai to help them in their job, but they are ultimately responsible for their communications on an individual level. We have laws and processes to deal with this already, which are also being used already.

When consumers go to search, there is an existing understanding, and they are being given ai output directly from a machine without asking. My hunch is that search will be ended as a consumer facing product, instead putting users directly into an Ai interface, where Google can argue it is no longer search and the same rules no longer apply, because it is a new tool with different ToS and intent.

Search will move (is moving) to a pay-for-results, contractual relationship, mainly to power agents. This is how I do search now.

jqpabc123•about 4 hours ago

AI lulls people into accepting flawed results in order to save time. Otherwise, AI is a lot less useful.

If a doctor relies on an AI assisted diagnosis that is bad, he can be held accountable. But so can the vendor of the flawed AI tool.

There is plenty of liability to go around here.

https://www.medboundtimes.com/medbound-blog/when-ai-gets-it-...

verdverm•about 7 hours ago

Honestly, Ai is the only good way to search the internet anymore, but with my agent looking through the results from multiple search engines, visiting pages, and synthesizing the results into an answer. Google search overview sucks by comparison

jqpabc123•about 6 hours ago

and synthesizing the results into an answer.

*An answer* but not necessarily a correct or accurate answer --- and therein lies the problem.

verdverm•about 5 hours ago

Humans do the same thing, how is the problem different?

With Ai, I can have multiple agents review the synthesis. When given original source text, they are now quite good at piecing it together with citations. You still have to review as a human, just like when evaluating all the source material when using trad search and clicking a bunch of links. The main advantage of the new method is that it can go through a large number of search results, fetching the page content, and seeing if it actually applies... much faster than I can. I get a much better starting point in much less time.

jqpabc123•about 4 hours ago

I get a much better starting point in much less time.

So you're not actually reviewing the results? If you were, the time wouldn't be "much less".

You're getting something that you *assume* is a better starting point but you don't really know if the results are flawed or not.

If Google AI was telling people your mom was an ax murderer, would you *assume* it is providing a good starting point?

This is what AI does --- it lulls people into accepting bad results as a time saver. And this is the root of legal liability issues.

Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google

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