3mo ago

AI-generated search result descriptions

Not sure who is doing this exactly, if it's DDG or Reddit or someone else. I was looking for a comparison of epic vs steam and noticed that the description of the search result is AI-generated, instead of actually showing anything from the thread.

A user asks why they should buy games on Steam rather than Epic, and gets various answers from other users. Some of the reasons include Steam's features, performance, community, and exclusivity.

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A user makes a post expressing mild infuriation on a search result with an AI summary, and gets various results from other users. Some users express delight at summaries, others prefer to use their preferred AI interface.
I miss the days when you would get a cached page highlighting the exact places where the search engine found your keywords. The pool of websites felt bottomless and the only thing holding you back was the challenge of picking the exact perfect combination of search terms and operators to narrow it down.
Search engines have no nuance anymore. It feels like they just dumb down your search to the most relevant thing you can buy now and fill out the rest with vaguely related filler sites. That or they dump you on quora where they will harass you to log in to read anything and spam you mercilessly if you do.
I agree, this is annoying. It's taking the place of what used to be an excerpt, giving me a hint about actual text on the page.
I haven't seen that yet... hopefully it's on the Duckduckgo side and a setting I can turn off. But it's probably Reddit continuing to be frustrating.
I'm not against having the AI summary and I do see the utility, it should just be very clearly separated from the real content.
- From what I understand, this is a Bing ~~bug~~ feature that makes its way "downstream" to DuckDuckGo results. Someone please correct me if I am wrong.
  
  lol, is that why duckduckgo was down yesterday?
  
  i'm not getting it on DDG, so there's that
I've noticed this a month ago or so, but not on Reddit but for Wikipedia. And it's genuinely so awful, and cringe and bad in comparison to the normal description that just works great.
Jesus Christ. Enshittification because of "AI" is getting out of hand.
If this isn't happening in other search engines, then DDG is likely doing it, which would be awful as it neuters the point of showing snippets for search results.
EDIT: I just tried on DDG, and I'm not seeing that summary result, even when I enable AI features. It's entirely possible that DDG (or reddit) is A/B testing this as a future feature. You should have an option of "leaving feedback" in the three dot menu beside that search result.
Next they are going to index the ai summary instead of the page. So we can get steam cleaning tips when we are trying to figure out how to change a setting in Steam desktop
- I think that's what's already happening here. Reddit is intentionally giving useless information in the page summary to increase click through rates.
  
  Incompetence is more likely.
I saw that yesterday specifically on Reddit posts in my search for a software issue, and not on sites like stackoverflow, so my money is on reddit
Most likely DDG, but you can disable it with a couple of clicks.
- https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
  
  That's epic. But I already have the setting on ddg to only use AI when prompted to
I have the feeling that it's reddit showing that ai slop when they see the crawler
I should use this AI to make helpful comments for my code.
c

//Add 1 to i i = i + 1; //Check if a number is even bool isEven(int num)
Iirc reddit only allows google to index them, all reddit results should be old ones so I doubt they implemented ai for that.
Digg does this too and I really enjoy it. I don’t see the problem.
- The problem I see is that it introduces another degree of separation between the user and the wider Internet. Instead of indexing sites, browsers are trying to interpret them for us. The extreme edge case of this is not having websites at all anymore, just apps and an omniscient AI that answers anything. Cool in theory, but in practice these omniscient beings really aren't and instead are very fallible. Presumably these tools are also owned by corporations with shareholder values that are often contrary to user values. I can only speak for myself, but I experience these summaries as a loss of control over how I interact with the Internet and a step down a path I would rather not tread.
  In this example the AI also does not provide anything valuable. It only defines a forum thread in terms of the question asked.
  
  The very last sentence of its summary provides extremely useful context that may make you want to click through to find more in-depth answers. I have no idea what you’re talking about.
- The problem is when you're searching up a problem, you typically want its whole context. If you need AI summarizarions, you would instead ask for it from your preferred AI, not search it.
  
  True
  
  Absolutely nothing is stopping you from reading through for the full context. Y’all are just insufferable.
- I have a problem with it. None of the information in that summary is useful except for maybe the list of Steam features at the end. So... about four words out of the whole thing.
  The rest is context that I can already assume based off the page title and the URL, without some AI limply regurgitating it to me.
  
  The first part literally summarizes the context, and the last part summarizes the reasons, it’s extremely concise you’re just nitpicking and bitchy.
i'm not getting the summary on DDG
- If I search for "steam vs epic" I still see the AI-generated summary. It probably depends on when the page was scraped and when Reddit (I assume) started doing this.
cool!

34 comments