Learn as you search (and browse) using generative AI

Ironically, articles got pointlessly long because of Google. Everyone stretches their content because long form ranks better.<p>A few hours ago I wanted to know the difference between a typhoon and a hurricane. Here is the answer: they&#x27;re the same thing, just in a different ocean. I clicked three or four articles and had to read for a few minutes to get to that answer.<p>It&#x27;s even worse with videos. It takes 10 minutes to answer the simplest questions, because that&#x27;s the ideal length for monetisation.

I assume this is all done server-side, with Google feeding your interests and investigations into your personal profile. I really wish this could be done on-device. I don&#x27;t want Google slurping up even more data about web users.<p>I use FF mainly on desktop and mobile, and there&#x27;s probably a great opportunity for Mozilla to build an offline, privacy-first summarization model.

“Summarize this YouTube video” (given a link) is what I’d like to see and Google could easily do when there’s a transcript, but they’d probably rather make people watch the video.<p>I think Kagi might do this? Any other good solutions?

This sounds like a fantastic feature. And honestly I think all of these negative comments are just the HN reactionary trend. Lots of people are going to use this tool and it&#x27;s going to be great to bypass all those annoying sites that have a lot of crap on them. Being built into the browser makes this very useful.<p>Also, all this wailing and gnashing of teeth is really quite annoying. Look at you people embarrassing yourselves.

Privacy aside if it&#x27;s done server side, I think this crosses another dangerous line.<p>With this, Google controls how content you read is summarized, they could introduce biases, intentionally or not, and I&#x27;m not sure we should trust such an actor for this.

There is no neutral source ofninformation. Legacy tv is often controlled by governments and corporations. Social media are also controlled, by corporations, and by some degree by governments. There is also bias, censorship and moderation.<p>People were Hunters before. Were searching for food. We do not need now to hunt. We had to hunt for information, we do not need now.<p>We rely more and more on services and corporations. We choose the jest one, which becomes monopoly after some time. After some longer period of time monopolystic corporation becomes monster.<p>Circle of life.<p>We may not want to use chatgpt or other bots, but eventually we will. Common people use the easiest route. They will decide, what is popular, and what will be used.

Great, another excuse for people not to read the article.<p>We&#x27;ve got enough problems with people reading a headline and running with it. I hate to think of google summarizing some scientific study - particularly some &quot;pop&quot; scientific study - and have everyone confidently reciting it as though it&#x27;s been conclusively proven without making any effort to look at the source.

Shouldn&#x27;t they worry about Search being incredibly low quality nowadays first?<p>They&#x27;re literally featuring a wrong ChatGPT answer as an answer to this question: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=country+in+africa+that+starts+with+%22K%22" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=country+in+africa+that+start...</a>

The second item is &quot;Better understand coding information in AI overviews&quot;. Is there really such a big demand for this from the average google user, or is it just something that&#x27;s easy to do with these language models?

Articles written by an AI and then summarized by another program. Nothing can go wrong here.

Google searched has encouraged long pages for SEO. Now Google sells us the idea that Google can help you reduce the useless words on the internet.<p>Maybe de-index receipes talking about how this soup was my grandma’s preferred soup. It’s not so hard, you still have the full power on search engines, Google! For at least 2 more full months! Do it!<p>You are the problem, Google.

Articles are getting too long? Since when has this been a problem? I think it&#x27;s the amount of crap ads injected while I&#x27;m trying to read the article that is the main problem.

They already have your browsing data, folks. This is just caused by the LLM push at Google. They got a top-down mandate to sprinkle LLMs on everything and this is the result.

I&#x27;ll use AI to puff out articles with nonsense so they get higher ranks, and then Google will use AI to shorten them again.<p>The Dead Internet theory will soon be indisputable.

Anyone who has spent time with AI chatbots knows how often they are just completely wrong, often in surprising and confusing ways. It&#x27;s hard enough to parse articles for accuracy and coherency without first passing them through as random error-adding machine.

So if you opt in then your website won&#x27;t get clicks -&gt; no ad revenue for you since google will &quot;steal&quot; the clicks via their summarization.<p>And if you opt out google will eventually just push you down.

I wonder how much they&#x27;re projecting to spend on this? Or maybe they&#x27;re prepared to eat a loss on this just to stay relevant in the face of Bing&#x2F;Kagi&#x2F;OpenAI?<p>Results from these models are orders of magnitude more expensive than traditional search. Maybe they have some benefits of scale where they can cache and serve up the same summaries to many people?

I understand the worries about privacy and monopoly power.<p>But this doesn&#x27;t change that this is a useful feature.<p>PS: That being said, I have started developing a distaste for google search. I have been served so much SPAM lately, that I am now starting to associate that search box with low-quality content.

This is where you start to sympathize with the news people in Canada who want google to pay for links. If google just summarizes at scale, interdicts the traffic and revenue, where&#x27;s the incentive to create content?<p>This is a failure mode for the information economy.

Good feature, I might actually start using chrome again if recipes are summarized how I expect them to. Generally speaking, there&#x27;s already a problem with people only reading the titles and basing their opinion of off that. Hopefully this will encourage people to read more, since it will be significantly shorter than the actual article. This won&#x27;t affect the people who care about the topic.<p>I&#x27;m not really worried about bias, since from my experience, summarization software will inherit the bias of the creator. Sure, it&#x27;s behind generative AI, which can introduce more bias but it&#x27;s not like the original article is hidden. No one is forced to use it.

LLM&#x27;s already summarize articles for you. This approach to me combines the downsides of individual articles and the downsides of LLMs. I guess Google likes it since you presumably might be finding these articles through Google search.

Reading is not a binary process and you can scale your engagement with any written work. If you use a variety of techniques, there is probably no need for a machine summary.<p>For example, start by skimming and scanning an article and you may be able to pull out all the salient points and satisfy your reading goal or choose to go deeper with your analysis depending on time and interest and what you are trying to accomplish:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;advice.writing.utoronto.ca&#x2F;researching&#x2F;skim-and-scan&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;advice.writing.utoronto.ca&#x2F;researching&#x2F;skim-and-scan...</a>

I do believe contextual link previews help with overall browsing UX. I like how Wikipedia has a summary when you hover over a link. Where this summary comes from does matter.<p>For those who don&#x27;t like when Google summarizes content for you but like the idea of getting a link preview with a summary provided by the website owner via meta tags before navigating to a third-party website - I&#x27;ve built a product called Linkz.ai [0] - that allows website owners to install link preview popups with 1 line of code.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linkz.ai" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linkz.ai</a>

At the risk of sounding like an old man — heck, I guess I am — is this innovation ethical for humanity&#x27;s future? A one-click &quot;tl;dr&quot; button for the web?<p>There are studies saying overall human attention span is shrinking. Anecdotally, I know people in their 20s who use TikTok daily, and they&#x27;re no longer able to watch a movie without losing focus.<p>Squeezing all aspects of our digital life, including learning new skills or reading the news, into a bite-sized &quot;summary,&quot; is not going to lead to a better-informed and more productive society.

This sort of thing is why Canadian media wanted a cut of big tech profits. Imagine how harmful this is to websites that need to grow audiences, particularly news websites

OK Google, now summarize YouTube videos so I don&#x27;t have to watch the entire videos or the ads.<p>Luckily there are AI tools out there do this.

Interestingly, OSX has had a Summary Service for as long as I can remember: Simply select text &gt; App (Menu bar) &gt; Services &gt; Summarize[1]. I still use it from time to time, and it&#x27;s pretty good, and completely offline!<p>[1] It&#x27;s off by default these days, you&#x27;ll have to turn on the Summary service under service settings.

The example really doesn&#x27;t sell it to me. The search &quot;what is the most common element on the periodic table&quot; currently returns a big display with &quot;Hydrogen&quot; as the answer, followed by a brief explanation.<p>That&#x27;s all I need for such a query. In comparison any text written by a &quot;generative AI&quot; is mostly noise.

Seems popular enough that all I am getting out of it is &quot;Can&#x27;t generate key points right now&quot;.

i use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;cbgecfllfhmmnknmamkejadjmnmpfjmp?hl=en" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;cbgecfllfhmmnknmam...</a> for summaries with GPT4 (API Key)

There are other Chrome extensions that will do stuff like this. I&#x27;d never choose to have Google do it for me if I could have a third-party extension that I trust do it instead (or even one I don&#x27;t trust 100%, but which offers some level of anonymization).

But yeah, keep using Chrome because it&#x27;s allegedly &quot;faster&quot; or so you don&#x27;t have to test the page you are developing on 3 different engines.

Welp... I wondered when Google would start encouraging me to put my work profile into Firefox, I guess today is the day.

As if people needed <i>even more</i> encouragement to be too lazy to read? Awful feature, this is bad for society.

Hard pass. I don&#x27;t want my browser doing <i>anything</i> except displaying webpages.

Net effect: fewer clicks to source websites, fewer clicks on ads on said websites.

Google Reader will aggregate articles for you.

And of course there is no way for a publisher to opt-out of this without removing them from the search engine entirely.

Just another trick to spy on your internet activity.

No thank you.

No thanks.

Hard pass. I don&#x27;t want Google, or even a trustworthy neutral party, to decide my view of the world. (Compromised as it may be already.)<p>We&#x27;re all unique and unpredictable. In a given article, a random sentence or point considered throwaway by most people and algorithms could turn out to be meaningful to me.<p>I&#x27;ve been trained not to even trust the basic facts they pull of out content like movie showtimes or whatever. Once you see it wrong a few times you realize it&#x27;s folly not to keep the responsibility of finding information yourself.

I&#x27;d stay away from anything Google does. They have proved to be sectarians in politics and machiavellian in business and privacy