As a developer I use Google dozens of times a dayI Googled several times just writing this post, most recently for how to spell "disincentivizing" for reasons that will become clear for technical documentation. For the last 20 years it has been an incredible resource and I have always been amazed at how it could produce useful results for even the most oblique, misspelled, or just wrong search terms.
I am less a fan of the (relatively) new AI Overview that Google shoves in your face but I must admit it is really getting better. However, the improvements to the AI Overview seem to be at the expense of Google's search results.
Today I had the occasion to Googling pybind non-owning pointer and received the following AI Overview:
Here the AI has done a bang up job - neatly summarizing the problem and producing some example code which is actually exactly on point. But what of the search results:
Remember how I said that Google was great at returning the results you needed? Not anymore. The AI produced a pretty good summary of the document I actually wanted, which was well down the list of search results at position number 6. The top five results were somewhat related but not useful.
Still, number 6 isn't too bad, right? Here is my problem.
Google obviously knew exactly what I wanted - the AI Overview was exactly right for my search terms and based on precisely the correct document. So why were the search results in such an unhelpful order with 5 useless results?
I would hate to think that Google is deliberately deprioritizing the most relevant results to make their AI Overview seem more powerful while disincentivizingGoogle still works great for spelling queries clicking through to visit useful sites.
This would turn Google's search engine from an incredibly useful tool for websites into effectively a competitor, changing the equation for website owners allowing Google to spider a site from a win-win for both them and Google to a clear disadvantage for the site.
It would be a shame if Google wrecked the goodwill they have in the tech industry by ceasing to send visitors to the original sites that the AI Overview was trained on.
Maybe I am wrong and it is just an unfortunate glitch.