"simplifying online shopping"
I loathe that this has become such a integral part of search. This should be a totally separate search so that my results for non shopping queries aren't contaminated with shopping BS.
this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
20 points (85.7% liked)
Technology
84816 readers
3887 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
But then how will those poor starving companies sell ads to you so they can steal your data so they can sell ads to you so they can steal your data so they can sell ads to you so they can steal your data so they can sell ads to you...?
“When people use our A.I.-powered features in search, they use search more,” Mr. Pichai said in an interview Tuesday before Google’s annual developer conference.
So either it's a worse product and you have to spend more time just trying to get the information you want, or people find it easier to use and hence use it more. Given that Internet advertising is usually built around generating friction to keep the user on the page for longer, my inner cynic says the former is far more likely than the latter.
I think it's a way more simple thing
The classic point of an online search engine is to send you to the site with the information
Now they want you to not go to the site and instead see the information they stole from it without ever leaving their site
It used to be a bridge, now it's a doorman motivated to keep you at the door
I like a simpler analogy, with websites featuring lots of scraped text to appear in search engines and show you ads (sometimes serve malware).
Was absolutely normal 10 years ago. It's just Google itself doing this now.
There's a degree of convergence between different directions of exploration of new technologies' applicability, one can say.
But also they have a technology a bit too expensive to run locally (not sure of that honestly, but for the same quality of results definitely) but not to run server-side, and much of public Web's development happened the way that companies that made something couldn't optimize it niche-wise so that it benefitted only them.
It's a solution of the problem of freeloaders, in some sense.
I wonder if crowd-funded AI is still going to become a thing. After all, people don't expect free AAA games, but people do expect free search engines and also free AI chatbots and in general many free things on top of the paid thing they are using to run the free web browser.
I'm optimistic in the sense that paying for stuff is a solution. Most important things being in appearance free is the trap we've been dwelling in. Models and datasets are too expensive to just be competitive volunteer undertakings, but making it a business, it's not end of the world. Until, of course, it's not illegal to compete with Google and Meta, it's not.
EDIT: At the same time I'm not missing the fact that in this case Google is too acting awfully similar to those freeloaders mentioned.
I love that analogy, and it works because sometimes I don’t want to go in, I just want to know if a small piece of info. When are you open until? Do you serve food?
I finally watched the end of Kobra Kai last week and wanted to look up if the Sekai Taikai was a real tournament.
The first link takes you to a wiki then you have to read through a load of random stuff to get to the no.
The issue I have with AI is that if it had told me no (or yes), I wouldn’t have believed it.
Online food/drink recipes are even worse. I don’t need to read about your trip to Tuscany, or Lille, before I get to the list of ingredients or the recipe. I just want the info.
The thing is, that was because of another bad Google decision years ago. They decided to downrate short pages in the search results (such as a page with a nice simple recipe on it), and people realised they got no hits unless they padded the page with guff.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said Gemini’s speed and affordability made it possible to deliver it broadly — which will ultimately benefit Google.
Meanwhile, everyone else suffers.
Turns out data centers are very affordable when you‘re a tech giant and simply rob power and water from the people.