Technology
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Clickbait headline. What Google did was add a new tab for web results (only) in their search page, similar to images and news.
I do find it interesting/funny that Google felt the need to actually provide this, as a sort of acknowledgement that their main search "results" page is so full of random info boxes and generated content that people can't find actual links anymore.
What?
Web results only? As compared to what? AI results? What's in the first tab? You're... searching the web for results. What else would be in the first tab??
Edit: I haven't used Google in a while. I just searched "who is Dr dre" on mobile. That's a lot of boxes. Wikipedia box, albums box, songs box, people also search for box, videos box, you really gotta scroll down before you get to the results. Google doesn't really link you to the answer anymore, it just answers you. Wow.
Yep, very little of the main page is links anymore.
The article actually does make an interesting argument that the web is becoming a legacy format in favour of generative AI and social media interaction, and takes this as an example of that trend.
I hate this change. While these features are neat if I just want a quick answer for something like if I wanna know some random fact about a person, it makes it so much harder to do any level of actual research on something anymore because you have to dig through so much garbage to find the real content.
And Google isn't alone in this. Bing and pretty much all of the big search engines are doing the same thing now. And while there are definitely alternative search engines out there, they lack the reach and rank sorting that Google and the other big players have already perfected.
So my options are either spend extra time with every search I perform by switching to various tabs and scrolling past auto-generated nonsense and sponsored results to find the answers I need, or use an objectively inferior product which may not even be able to point me to what I need within the first few pages of results. Neither option is a particularly great experience these days. The internet sucks so much lately.