The new AI-powered Search box is Google's biggest redesign of its core interface in more than 25 years.
Until now, AI has shown up in Google Search in the form of its so-called AI Overviews and in a separate AI Mode that feels more like talking to the Gemini chatbot. A new interface will instead adjust to match the tone and results of your search query -- including an "intelligent search box" that lets you ask longer, more complex questions. Here's what's coming to Search from Google I/O.
Robby Stein, Google's vice president of product for Search, framed this year's I/O updates as a major step in combining Google Search with advanced AI, tracing progress from AI Overviews to AI Mode and, now, a unified AI search experience. He said a billion people use Google's AI Mode each month, and they're asking it more questions. These tools let people ask virtually anything and get rich, real-time answers from Google's extensive knowledge systems, he said.
[...] AI Overviews now transition seamlessly into AI Mode for follow-ups. So instead of just getting an AI-generated answer in Search, you can have a conversation with the AI providing your search results to get the answers you're looking for.
Stein also introduced dynamic, interactive "widgets" and larger "super widgets" generated by the system (enabled by Gemini and developer tooling). These can simulate physics, visualize concepts, build calculators or become persistent mini-apps for tasks such as moving, health tracking or trip planning -- optionally using connected personal data (Gmail, Photos, Calendar) to personalize results across 200 markets and 98 languages.
Stein described Search moving into an "agentic" era where AI agents can assist you with a range of tasks, such as monitoring topics, sending alerts (like when your favorite artist announces a tour) or booking services. While the agent cannot book a reservation on your behalf, you can share your details -- like the preferred dates and times, and number of people joining your party -- to receive a list of matches with updated availability and pricing, and links to officially finalize your reservation booking. These capabilities will be available this summer.
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Last week, after Google announced its huge overhaul to Search, I overheard a woman on the phone saying she was switching to DuckDuckGo because you can "opt out of using AI."
"Google just isn't Google anymore," she said. It seems that others had the same idea.
At I/O, Google's annual developer conference, the company said it would transform its search box into a conversational engine that expands for longer queries, anticipates user intent, and autocompletes searches. Rather than just returning a list of links, it will use AI Overviews to answer questions directly first. Google also unveiled a more seamless AI Mode, allowing users to ask follow-up questions within AI Overviews.
While a Google spokesperson noted that AI Overviews have existed for two years and AI Mode is not the default, the backlash has been sharp.
Some have argued it will kill the open web, while others shared concerns that AI overviews surface inaccurate responses and take away control from users who might not want to use AI. It also overcomplicates simple things. Just try to Google the word "disregard."
In response to Google's changes, many have begun defecting to DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused alternative that has never been able to break past Google's dominance, accounting for only around 2% of the U.S. search market.
During Google's search antitrust trial in 2023, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg testified that Google's exclusive default search contracts harmed its ability to pitch itself as the default on other browsers.
"Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out," Weinberg said Tuesday in a statement, referring to Google's Search overhaul. "As a result, their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want."
Now, it seems that DuckDuckGo is beginning to benefit as consumers flee AI.
[...] DuckDuckGo offers its own AI product called Duck.ai. It's free and doesn't require users to make an account, but provides access to models, including Anthropic's Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta's Llama 4 Scout, Mistral's Small 3 24B, and OpenAI's GPT-5 mini. All chats are private because DuckDuckGo strips the user's IP address before requests reach model providers, deletes conversations within 30 days, and prevents chats from being used for training.
Related: Google Search is Becoming Something Fundamentally Different
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30, @03:40AM
/thread
(Score: 4, Informative) by stormwyrm on Saturday May 30, @05:17AM (15 children)
So now I've been search engine hopping like it's 1997 again. Don't need that garbage, Google. Switching between DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Ecosia and turning off all "AI summaries" wherever they appear. Kagi is something I'm thinking of trying as well. Anyone have more alternatives to suggest?
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2, Informative) by SST-206 on Saturday May 30, @08:42AM (8 children)
udm=14 still works (at least for now...)
https://www.google.com/search?q=udm%3D14&udm=14 [google.com]
https://udm14.com/ [udm14.com]
And Firefox offers Google Web as an option in the drop-down box.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday May 30, @09:38AM (6 children)
Well, that didn't last long. I tried your link and Google rejects it, saying I am a robot (standard Google page works as normal though). No option to do a captcha or anything to confirm I am a human, just "Sorry" and my IP/browser string.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Saturday May 30, @10:01AM (2 children)
I can confirm it still works. I don't use google these days, so maybe your rejection is based on having been seen w/o udm=14 in the past too often.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday May 30, @10:53PM (1 child)
Fair enough, I have not used Google in years hence why I missed this trick out before. However just tried again and it works now, so maybe it was a temporary restriction due to traffic (is it possible we soylentted something?)
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Monday June 01, @02:10AM
google applies blocking at random per IP addresses that occasionally may or may not reset, if you aren't logged into a google account that confirms the IP is "halal".
If you really must have google results, please consider not running google's proprietary malware and instead try startpage.com without JavaScript (and if that doesn't work, ironically 4get.ca with the "Google API" scraper always works).
(Score: 5, Informative) by Common Joe on Sunday May 31, @02:57AM (2 children)
Try https://www.google.com/?udm=web [google.com] which I explain a bit more in a nearby post.
So, I have a similar story as yours from about three or four weeks ago with a something that fixed my problem (although you won't like the fix): I got that problem you describe when I downloaded a bunch of larger videos from youtube. There was no problem at first. I downloaded a bunch of videos with music (which I then strip to mp3 later). Youtube continued to work until a few hours later when some backend process must have caught up. Youtube started hassling me by accusing me of being a bot. It wanted me to log in to prove I wasn't a bot. I finally logged in, and youtube worked while I was logged in. I then immediately logged out and cleared my cache. (I have Firefox clear my cache when I exit Firefox.) It accused me of being a bot again... until a few hours later when the backend process finally caught up again.
My advice is clear your cache, login with your account, logout, clear your cache again, then wait about 6 hours. That's assuming you have a Google account.
If you can't or don't want to login, I'm not sure what to tell you.
Obviously, I'm on the hunt for something better than normal search these days. DuckDuckGo is still an option. It merely presents you a button to turn on AI, however, there is now a URL parameter to completely shut off the AI option there as well: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ [duckduckgo.com].
Shit is wild these days.
(Score: 2) by fab23 on Sunday May 31, @11:34AM
I was recently watching some videos with the DuckDuckGo browser with their own player and after a few videos I also was requested to login in to continue watching. I did not log in, but cleared all data in browser, restarted the browser and tried again, and still got the login prompt. But after a few hours it worked again. So not sure based on what they are blocking, but could be IP address based for a limited time.
In the past at a workplace I have witnessed something similar with Google Search, where one of my coworkers occasionally was doing repeated test searches to see how our site was ranked in the results. At some point the whole office got Captchas with each search. As we had a dual-uplink Internet, this was the point where I did route the traffic from his computers out through the backup line, so only he was affected from the Captchas and not everyone else in the office.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Unixnut on Sunday May 31, @06:48PM
Now that is interesting, because I too downloaded some YT videos (same reason as you, to strip out the audio for offline listening), and I did do that a couple of days beforehand. I didn't think they would track me quite that much, and no, I don't have a google account. It did not occur to me that actions like using yt-dl might flag me as a bot, yet not do anything immediately but a day or so down the line, and possibly for a completely different service.
If it is IP based filtering, then no doubt one reason it started working after a short while is because I am behind CGNAT, the ISP probably has an IP address pool it load balances across, so some requests go via one IP address, then later through another. It also brings up the futility of IP based filtering in an era of CGNAT.
If there are a thousand people sharing one public IP address, then from the point of view of the service that lots of people use (like Google/YT) it can look like an automated DOS attack or heavy bot utilisation, causing them to block the IP address. Then the traffic moves to another IP address that gets blocked, and round and round we go with odd connectivity issues.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Common Joe on Sunday May 31, @02:43AM
I think (but far from sure) that you posted an older method which still happens to work. The link https://www.google.com/?udm=web [google.com] seems to be the modern equivalent of udm=14.
When you surf to the main google page, then search for something (anything will do) and get your results back, you then get a menu. In the menu, you can click on More --> Web and that generates the "udm=web" URL parameter (plus a zillion other parameters but they are only for google). This option / URL parameter takes away the AI reply.
Who knows how long this trick will work, though.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30, @11:34AM (3 children)
I honestly have some decent luck with Yandex.
When DDG throws up the duck-choice captcha, or throws "No results, because you quoted a word," it's off to Yandex I go - and it usually gives me the result (often the source) that I'm looking for.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Common Joe on Sunday May 31, @03:20AM (1 child)
For those who care: Yandax is a Russian owned company [wikipedia.org].
I am curious how a Russian made company makes money while serving the rest of the world under sanctions. That cannot be cheap.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday May 31, @07:09PM
From a search online at duckduckgo, it seems governments representing approximately 40% of the worlds population have sanctioned Russia (mostly NATO countries and their allies). That is quite large, but still leaves 60% of the world to make money in. There is probably plenty of business out there for Yandex to keep them going.
Also the sanctions are not all-encompassing (like say an Embargo would be). AFAIK most of the sanctions have been on oil/fuel/commodity exports and restrictions on tech/manufactured imports. While I have not followed the whole thing closely I don't recall hearing about any sanctions on exports of tech/internet services such as Yandex.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday May 31, @06:58PM
Yandex currently is (for me) the best for "old-style" search engine (i.e. no AI, actually gives relevant results on the first page without a bunch of sponsored links or AI slop), followed by duckduckgo.
Yandex seem to actually do they own crawling and index generation, not just cribbing other search engines indexes. I only know of Google and Bing nowadays that do that. Only thing is that Yandex seems to really like to throw captcha's at me, like every 3rd/4th search query, and it gets tiring after a while to keep doing them. Especially as I run umatrix with tight javascript lockdown, which usually breaks the captcha.
Duckduckgo is still decent results wise, but far more accepting of non-mainstream (or JS disabled/filtered) browsers, I can even use lynx with it via ( http://lite.duckduckgo.com [duckduckgo.com] ), while Yandex just says the browser is too old (it has some JS based DDOS protection) and gives up.
(Score: 3, Funny) by epitaxial on Saturday May 30, @02:47PM
Sometimes I will ask Claude because it's able to sift through all the garbage spit out by google.
(Score: 5, Informative) by fab23 on Saturday May 30, @04:22PM
As I already have mention in the past in some [soylentnews.org] other [soylentnews.org] comments, try out Kagi [kagi.com], I am using it already for more then 2 years, and I am happy with it, it did even find stuff where DuckDuckGo failed. And it has a lot of more features like to raise, lower or block sites from your search result. You can even do Redirects (URL Rewrites) [kagi.com]. They do have a public Changelog [kagi.com] and Feedback [kagifeedback.org], which also functions as their issue tracker.
Even John Gruber (Daring Fireball) and Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic) are using it, see e.g.:
There is a Trial with 100 searches, and depending on your search amount you may get away with the Starter for $54 / year (annually paid) or higher depending on your needs, see Individual Pricing [kagi.com] overview. They have also offers for Duo and Family [kagi.com] which then would be even less per person, but only available as Professional. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time; your unused balance will be pro-rated and applied to your new plan.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Ingar on Saturday May 30, @06:10AM
Useless.
Love is a three-edged sword: heart, soul, and reality.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday May 30, @02:28PM (9 children)
When are they adding ads and ad biases? I don't think they'd get away with outright lies or outright "please hold for this important commercial message" and insert an ad for Diet Coke.
They probably would get away with the LLM providing some rather suspiciously profitable advice.
"Oh given your list of list of shopping criteria I would totally suggest the new Datsun SUV, the WTFmobile, sorry as an AI response I won't even let you doomscroll lower ranked results from Ford, GM, Toyota, etc. Nope you gotta buy the new Datsun WTFmobile now with quadraphonic sound and external airbags for pedestrian safety. Only available in green, for greenwashing purposes. Would you like me to have your local dealer contact you over and over and over and over until you give up all hope and buy the goddamn thing?"
The future of search isn't just what you'll be shown, but what you'll be censored from ever seeing. Oh Pepsi sent Google $1B this week for advertising, guess the AI generated "Rum and Coke recipe" results will all use Pepsi products oh what a total coincidence the very existence of Coke products are now memory-holed as if they never existed. Trust your AI, its all you're going to be allowed to get so you may as well trust it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by liar on Saturday May 30, @03:13PM (8 children)
Something you might like, if you haven't already seen:
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/new-google-ai-22279112.php [sfgate.com]
"Google hates you
SFGATE columnist Drew Magary weighs in on the dire consequences of Google's AI pivot"
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday May 30, @03:45PM (7 children)
LOL I've seen the "Whats New in Search" video linked elsewhere but I can't watch it, the constant stream of 3-d movement and shaking and animations make be slightly seasick.
The author misses the point that humans posting stuff on the internet to attrack human ad clicks is a dying industry. The majority of stuff being posted is AI generated slop, essentially unreadable, and the majority of clicks are advertising fraud bots.
For an example of what I'm talking about go to google and search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe" its pages and pages of AI generated long form advertising filled slop. At least the AI response gives me the classic "Nestle Toll House" recipe which is at least pretty tasty.
The internet is ALREADY dead for research like "chocolate chip cookie recipe" the author of the linked article doesn't get it yet. As a human posting on the internet he's not going to get clicks ever again, not because of google search but because a zillion competitors can post slop about as good as his for "free" and make a higher profit because they don't pay a human.
When you go to the supermarket, look at the printed product next to the cash registers. All that slop used to be written by humans, now AI. And that slop exists on the internet, and again, it was written by humans, even recently, but now there's so much slop you can't find human generated content anymore.
My facebook feed is mostly bots so I don't use it anymore. My youtube algorithm is mostly AI slop so I disable youtube history and don't use an algo anymore. Eventually there will be a "dotcom" like crash due to "Dead Internet Theory" as the last humans leave the internet and then the advertisers (probably) follow.
Why does SF Gate need to exist? Its a world wide internet of AI generated slop. Why do I need a company in SF to enter AI queries for me, when I can ask the AI query myself? Why do I need a company in SF on the internet, its not like I live there and the internet is worldwide; can't some random site in Tibet type in AI prompts for me just as well as SF Gate? Why do I need the author of the linked article to post on the internet? Well, I don't, and nobody else does, so they're going away.
The article is comical where the guy who owns a hammer thinks everything is a nail, so of course magically getting the government involved and breaking up Google will fix everything because... well there's no logic behind that at all other than thats how they try (and fail) to fix everything where he lives.
Then people will stop using it. Why would they?
LOL yeah I bet. MySpace doesn't "do it" for me anymore so dozens of times a day I type "myspace.com" into my web browser because... oh wait no I don't.
How will the world survive without SFGATE... looking at their front page, I think we'll survive pretty well LOL.
The really interesting meta commentary about AI slop is reader hate slop and the only problem with AI slop is it cheaply makes more slop. Its not like I'm going to suddenly start voluntarily consuming slop, LOL no. Meanwhile the only problem writers and creators in general have with AI slop is the first word, AI. They just don't like free market competition and don't like that a machine can make infinite slop for "free" and that ruins their human slop generating grift. Well, I'm not going to miss them. At all. Bye!
(Score: 2) by fab23 on Saturday May 30, @04:35PM
Maybe it is also time for you to give Kagi a try, as it does down rank sites with click bait titles and/or filled with ads:
chocolate chip cookie recipe [kagi.com] (shared search result)
Does this show what you would like to see for that search?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday May 31, @02:21AM (5 children)
Behold approximately my rant the day I bailed out of Google search for good, That was over 20 years ago, and I've probably used it five times since (always followed by "How does anyone stand this shit?") Switched to Startpage the day I discovered it, and DDG shortly after that arrived in 2008.
DDG lets me turn off the functions I don't want (you can save your options, since it's per-browser presumably it sets a cookie, tho I vaguely recall it also offers sync), and still works without javascript, here:
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ [duckduckgo.com]
So now the main problem is that everyone's crawlers are overwhelmed by AI slop, so sometimes there are no real results to be had, even 2 or 3 or 4 pages down.
Lately most of the AI slop sites are nice enough to mark themselves with "Discover the whatever..." so I can discard them immediately. Maybe -discover would be a useful search term....
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Sunday May 31, @03:10AM (4 children)
Well, DuckDuckGo is still pretty crappy. I just typed in four unique words in order which should have brought me to personal online website. It didn't. Putting those four words in quotes didn't help either. It gave me zero results. But if I slipped in part of my URL, it found it, so it it's definitely been cataloged. It's just ignoring an h1 at the very top of my website.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday May 31, @05:39AM (2 children)
I think that may be a rankings problem, and that rankings depends in part on sites being updated a lot, and the search algorithms considering that as a search factor. Used to be if I typed in a certain term from my own site, it would come up #1, plus a whole bunch of other results from my site (which is about 300 pages, but has not been significantly updated in years). Now my root site still comes up #2, but only because I own the domain that is also the search term. NONE of the other expected results show up anymore, but a near-miss term that is updated a lot dominates the results.
I checked not long ago, and it was the same with all the major search engines, including Yandex.
So you're probably suffering from the same problem I am, and it's just the way things work nowadays. :(
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Common Joe on Sunday May 31, @07:28AM (1 child)
Fully agree. This is the fundamental problem they don't fix. Sure, put a date when the last update was found so the person searching can make an informed choice, but some good information simply doesn't change with time or changes very slowly.
I ranted about this on another post [soylentnews.org]. My theme: We need to discover people and ideas. Search engines are not allowing either. If that's the case, then what are we searching for?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday May 31, @01:13PM
Yep. The whole point of search engines was a better way to FIND things, so we didn't have to periodically buy the Internet Yellow Pages and hope for the best. Discovery used to be readily possible; now it's both hit-or-miss and so buried in slop that way too much is undiscoverable except by chance.
Yeah, it's often possible to route around, or dig under. What about the new folks who lack that experience and skillset, and only know the slop (and occasional hallucinations) that search engines feed them?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 01, @09:36AM
DDG is, AFAIK, still a Bing wrapper. Bing is very heavily biased in favor of "general interest" content. It does not matter how specific your query is, it will always try to find a result that provides basic information that is at least tangentially related to at least one of your search terms, rather than a site that closely matches what you actually searched for. I don't think it considers quoted strings at all, or rather just strips off the quotes and treats them as generic search words. Other, better search engines will give you more specific results for a more specific query. Bing seems purpose-designed for frustration: The more precise your search query, the worse it gets.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fab23 on Saturday May 30, @05:28PM (1 child)
I just came across the posting from Glyn Moody (Walled Culture):
Link of the full article with many links as well, for which I was to lazy to copy here:
Why Google’s new AI-saturated search page will be a disaster [walledculture.org]
Would maybe also be worth for an own submission, but I think this will also work here as a comment.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday May 31, @07:22PM
Problem is that their AI-search is actually very good. For all the suckiness of their traditional search, as far as general queries and knowledge their LLM chat so far seems the best of the ones I tried. It sucks for technical tasks (e.g. asking it to write code for you) but for general information it is very good.
Also like the original Google search, they made it a clean, uncluttered ad-free interface, which of course compared to their search page is bliss in comparison.
However no doubt we all know that won't last, and as soon as they can get away with it they will return to their old behaviour with this technology as well, so best not to rely on it. Plus every time I use it (and all the third party LLM chats) I feel like everything I say and ask is being monitored (no doubt for future monetisation and more nefarious purposes), so when possible I do as much locally as possible.
Also remember, you can ask the LLM to provide you with its sources. Perplexity does this automatically in the form of links to the sources as a reference, which is one of the reasons it is my go-to third party LLM service, but you can ask ChatGPT, Google, etc... for the same. I always want to review the sources myself as it gives me an idea as to where the LLM got its answer from and whether it makes sense.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PinkyGigglebrain on Sunday May 31, @12:00AM (2 children)
I switched to DuckDuckGo years ago, and now that DDG is also starting to drink deep at the Koolaide trough I'm using Startpage more and more.
As long as there is a search engine that does not try and force AI summaries and related slop at me I will give them my page views.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Common Joe on Sunday May 31, @03:15AM (1 child)
Don't get too comfy. Startpage isn't without its own set of controversies [wikipedia.org]. It claims privacy, but is basically owned by an ad company.
Happy
sufferingsurfing.(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Sunday May 31, @07:14PM
It also by far gives me the worst results for any search I do. Honestly even Google gives me better results. I only came across startpage because it seems to be the default on waterfox, so every time I do a clean install I search for something in the search bar and hit upon startpage, which then reminds me to change to another search engine.