Thread

Study: Young users (9 to 18Y) ditch Google for AI, with unknown consequences

66 points · 119 comments · giuliomagnifico

ls612 · 1790069127 · focus · HN ↗
Never mind kids, I’ve largely started asking Claude any nontrivial questions that I used to Google. It’s night and day the difference.
1. codedokode · 1790069616 · focus · HN ↗
  Yes if you search anything in Google, you typically get sites that have a cookie panel, ask to allow notifications, show "Login With Google" popover taking the keyboard focus, and lot of ads before you can even read the content. No wonder people do not want to use Google anymore.
  1. netdevphoenix · 1790070083 · focus · HN ↗
    To be honest, that's the fault of the websites themselves. Google is just an amplifier of a world web wide problem.
    luka598 · 1790070498 · focus · HN ↗
    While true, google can punish them by ranking the offending sites lower than non offending ones.
    Macha · 1790070928 · focus · HN ↗
    I think we can blame google for the login with google prompts given they provide an SDK for that exact use case.
    Gareth321 · 1790071060 · focus · HN ↗
    It's symbiotic. Google has been aggregating data from these websites for years to serve as summaries in search, reducing traffic to the sites. More pernicious is AMP, where the site is basically copied to the Google server. This force websites to use AdSense and structure the content in certain ways. If a site doesn't want to use AdSense, or allow Google to summarise the site, it gets down-ranked in search. A death sentence. Further, Google's algorithms routinely promote spam because this is most profitable for Google. Hiding the important information 3/4 of the way down a 10,000 word article with a hundred different kinds of ads on the page. Since the "good" websites have to compete with these spam websites, they either adapt or give up monetisation.
    One of the more horrifying stories to read was about [Code Yellow back in 2019.](<a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-2019-code-yellow-blurred-215036448.html" rel="nofollow">https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-2019-code-yellow-blurr...) Google's algorithms were getting too good. Users were finding what they wanted too fast. They'd type in their query, the first result was good, then the user would close the tab. For Google, this meant less ad revenue. They wanted users to stay on Google for longer. *So they chose to degrade the algorithm quality.* Users would have to click multiple links to find the information they wanted, and inside every link was ads served by Google. This is one of the pivotal moments in one of the worst cases of enshitification in software history.
2. amelius · 1790070504 · focus · HN ↗
  For most things, it's the same with Gemini and it is faster.
3. Tade0 · 1790070818 · focus · HN ↗
  The other day I found that one old game of which I originally caught just a glimpse and remembered only a fragment of what one voice actor was saying is in fact Lords of Magic.
  I attempted to google this a few years ago to no avail.
4. o_m · 1790071288 · focus · HN ↗
  I use Kagi Assistant. It doesn't just give a summary, it is more like a personal "Googler"/web surfer. I feel like I'm involved in the process.
  My coworkers use Google and often quote back the AI summary me instead of checking the source and referring to that. It's scary seeing even those with higher education behave like this.

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