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Comment by mawadev | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused, so google made websites indirectly unusable with all the advertisement incentives and then the AI summary came that usually just summarizes some reddit posts and now they subtly and indirectly block universities from using their entire search engine because unis block the AI part of search? What incentive does google even have on presenting the ai summary?

Does anyone even understand the world currently? Its so absurd to me, why does it exist to begin with and why is this drama appearing?

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I'm guessing it's less about the AI in search and more about making sure kids are exposed to the larger Gemini ecosystem

They want to make everyone cognitively dependent on AI so they can further insert themselves into our lives for profit. The younger they hook us the easier that will be.

They also need the children's use of AI for behavioral training data so they can better capture that user base.

*dependant on the Gemini ecosystem.

Not just universities. If it were universities it wouldn't be so bad since most students have their own laptop and can make their own decisions. This is a play to get AI in the hands of young kids. Most public K-12 schools use Google, so they either have to opt-in to AI and/or their 'helpful' educational chatbot, or not use search at all.

Dons tinfoil hat

Have you noticed how many people already use AI to do their thinking for them. They just ask it what to think, what to do, for everything. They want that for as many people as possible. They don’t want people going outside of Google to other websites to decide what to think. Yes they will put ads in it eventually. But in the end they will also use it to influence what the population thinks.

We already have some leaders and politicians outsourcing their thinking in this way. It will make these companies incredibly powerful.

if you can go direct like that and influence peoples basic schema of thought, there is no further need for contemporarily structured ads.

as far as ads go, the razor cuts to the bone when you realize that microtargeted ad campaigns, are overly complex, and have folly. what you really want is to predict someones shopping list, rather than recommend items that were already purchased in gross quantity.

Yes they will put ads in it eventually. But in the end they will also use it to influence what the population thinks.

The former is a subset of the latter.

> Yes they will put ads in it eventually.

There are already ads in it, and also the chat stream is sold to companies which resell it to advertisers for targeting outside the chatbot.

The AI will eventually incorporate ads.

Or already is. Subtly recommending/promoting certain products over others seems reasonably likely.

You should offer at least a shred of evidence when making accusations like this.

Here's a shred of evidence for ya:

https://beomniscient.com/blog/the-9-best-llm-seo-agencies-fo...

Right now it's either ChatGPT ads or gaming search data to try and end up in AI overviews.

This is not different from standard SEO. You adjust the page to be more likely to select in the results. That's not the same thing as that LLM providers injecting explicit ads or steering results.

C'mon. It is almost like we haven't lived this in everything else (search, social, ...).

Oh, I agree that is probably BS right now, but when the bias is hidden in the weights, you’re never going to find it.

Just wait for “$1000/mo for a 10% chance your product is mentioned in the AI summary for an auto parts search”.

More-diffuse manipulation become possible too: The National Dairy Society or whatever can spend $ on generally boosting mentions that calcium is an essential mineral and that you can get it from certain drinkable sources.

Baking ads right into the weights would be extra evil, so they will probably do it. But, also, it would take me probably 10 minutes to write a skill to, say, call an API to retrieve advertising instructions and incorporate them into the output.

It's not an accusation, but a very reasonable supposition.

What is an alternative monetization method for Google Search if not that?

A couple that I can think of are: banner ads, sponsored results, subscriptions

Ok so the same old ads and subs. So as usual I expect the ads to be interwoven in the valid results inline with the last 20 years or so.

They could innovate and let people buy unobtrusive ads triggered by keywords. Crazy, but it just might work.

Nah, the more obtrusive an ad is, the more profit the advertiser makes.

Google is a company that is famous for its advertising business. It would be foolhardy to require proof that they are advertising. If they are not already doing it, it is highly highly likely that there are several teams working on it.

“…seems reasonably likely.”

I don’t think the burden of proof for seeming reasonably likely is terribly high. That it sounds very much like something they’d do seems sufficient.

In the 90s, when we used dial-up, I would set Google as my homepage because it was fast and ad-free.

> What incentive does google even have on presenting the ai summary?

I have some guesses:

They can artificially inflate the number of users who use their AI by including everyone who uses their search engine.

It trains people to be increasingly dependent on whatever google tells them instead of checking and reading multiple sources, and verifying information for themselves.

They hope to let people pay them to manipulate what their AI returns for certain searches (either mentioning certain things/products or suppressing mention of them).

Google search is getting increasingly useless as the unending flood of ad-filled AI slop websites dominates the search results and people will abandon searching with Google if they can't find some way to provide people with the information they are looking for. (it's not going well so far https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/04/analysis-finds-google...)

> They can artificially inflate the number of users who use their AI by including everyone who uses their search engine

Yup I could see that being plausible. It’s like Microsoft and Copilot. Project managers got to boast how they got AI “adoption” numbers up just by shoving it into people’s faces.

Frankly this seems like a good decision to me.

Google's search is increasingly AI driven (as it should be, i do not want to click on reddit links and waste my time skimming through the 1000 comment threads), asking Google to maintain a non-AI search engine is like asking Tesla to come up with an ICE engine car right now. It is not happening.

Google Search I would expect will increasingly become more like Gemini and less like traditional search. Schools could certainly go to DuckDuckGo or other search engines that are free. (Google has shown that it does not care if they do as it sees it as a dying business.)

> asking Google to maintain a non-AI search engine is like

...is like asking your company to maintain its SQL database instead of shoving everything into a document the LLM reads and suggests edits to.

Even if you're using an LLM to talk to the user, there still needs to be some kind of deterministic search engine back there in order to do things well, or to answer any kind of question that involves information newer than X months ago.

There needs to be retrieval, but ranking can be fully offloaded to LLMs and they would probably do better. Legacy search engines do both parts, and their ranking is highly gameable judging by how SEOed they are.

> ranking can be fully offloaded to LLMs

If someone searches for "mexican food" you require ranking anyway because you aren't going to load those ten bazillion hits into the LLM first.

Spoiler: regular search ranking doesn't see very many results, either. I mean, have you seen the results for a crowded query like this? They are trash.

Yeah yeah, search is hard and gets adversarial, we already knew that.

What's missing here is your imagined alternative: What exactly are trying to propose where Google can ditch having a search engine, and why do you believe it work well instead of badly?

Well, for some factual queries it can just know the answer inherently. Plus you can provide it all the curated data feeds that currently back first party results. But most of all, if there's no simple ranking signals to game, then SEO gets a lot harder.

And what, pray tell, will this search engine search?

If nobody is visiting anything on the internet, because every search engine response is an AI output, then where will any information for this AI output come from?

This paradox was clear from day one, pretty sure I posted on here about it years ago. AI search will kill the dataset that AI itself relies upon.

You know what's replacing the open web and reddit? Conversations with AI models that were never posted to the open web.

That's exactly why they MUST have everyone opted in, even if they don't like it.

Peer review is what made information on sites like Stack Overflow and reddit have value. One on one conversations with an LLM are not an equivalent and direct substitution.

Multiply those conversations by a thousand and you got some sort of ground truth.

It's a shame they will be siloed and get biased over time. I think AI labs will come up with ways to not-compete in certain areas too.

That depends on whether the purpose of web search is to get answers or find references. Since students are still developing their reading and research skills, the latter goal is much more relevant in an educational setting. AI boosters have a vested interest in conditioning people to treat chatbot output as primary sources when they most certainly are not.

The problem is that Google's AI search basically doesn't work. It routinely can't understand even simple prompts and is the only AI I've used that routinely hallucinates.

And this is good for academia?

Desperation to keep the fad alive a little longer? Maybe Google is secretly a huge fan of Kagi and wants to force Universities in that direction?

Kagi depends on Google's search API still. So they get paid either way, I guess.

I do sort of wonder how much longer Googles search API will even be a thing. They clearly have no interest in running a search engine anymore and are becoming actively hostile to the open web.

Annoyingly though, Reddit which apparently has some fucking stupid exclusivity agreement, results, are still a lot of the time found on Google, not even with Kagi using Google's API

And then you click and it takes you to a page where all relevant comments are pre-hidden, and soon you'll have to log in to (not) see it...

With the quality of content on Reddit in recent years, I think you are better off not opening the site. The good ol' days where "some topic" +reddit have been long gone.

It's the most centralized decentralized thing. "Most real place on the internet"? Please. The site bans you. Subreddit mods ban you. Subreddit mods collude/have the same ones per subreddit

There was a period of time where even posting in r/lockdownskepticism would get you banned from (I'm making this up, I don't have the list. the point is it's like all the mainstream subs) r/funny r/pics etc etc

Turning off Reddit sounds like a feature…especially as it’s being overrun with “SEO specialists” hocking their shitty, meaningless wares.

Kagi uses Google API as one among a number of sources, I don’t know if it’s a particularly vital one though. Personally whether it’s Kagi or something else I think the future of search will be tiered:

Free, terrible ad-riddled and essentially broken

Paid, you are the customer not the product.

I think they're just asserting control. They want to control what you see on your devices. They own the worlds largest search engine, and they think they get to pick what's on it.

World makes complete sense. Its just ran by properly fucked up sociopaths who can't ever reach happiness so they hyperfocus on competitive zero sum games with short ego boosts and with no regard for anybody else, future of their kids or anything larger. They think their legacy like that is something that will be admired for generations because they got a lot of money and who cares how they got it, right.

Most will end up in deep regrets, ie how jobs regretted being an asocial dick and all above to his own family before dying (thats the better outcome, many simply see them as stars of their show till last moments, like potus for example). Its not some secret cabal, these people if smart naturally bubble to top of social and financial hierarchies.

It used to be much less visible, some sort of on-surface decency momentum and shit behind the curtains, now everything is out in the open for whole civilization to see instantly and its pretty tiring and nauseating.

If you don't get it its fine, it means you are a normal human being, probably well balanced. Folks like that abhor such people personally, be it c-suites of corporations or politicians or just a pos colleague.

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