Most of the time it's quicker, sometimes it's just bad.
The argument is that there's so much garbage on the open web that clicking through to the source has a lower signal-to-noise ratio than the AI summary.
This rings very true in my experience.
Google's AI summaries definitely make mistakes, but in most cases they're higher signal than the source websites.
I really think Google is making an error using such a lightweight model for the page. That's one of my only firsthand exposures to genAI, and it's awful. Use a decent model, or if that's too expensive don't put up a summary at all.
Now it's just speed. This is a grave error.
Imagine winning search by being the fastest and most accurate, then replacing it w/ constant hallucinated errors.
Given my sample is biased as I am using it for an outlier of difficult web searches (including web searches localized to Iceland). But I would think that if your parent was correct, at least majority of my uses would be correct, but in my experience, Gemini fails most of the the time traditional web search fails. So to me at least, it is effectively useless.
For people who use it in place of normal web search, it is probably worse then useless, because of how confidently wrong it is.
I find it easier to recognize bullshit from its source vs an LLM's confident and well written regurgitation of it.
(Obviously far from perfect, often far from even good... just better.)
Which is not a good look for the Search teams/execs.
My mother never used search. She found it too hard to manage. She uses Gemini all the time, it gives answers in her language and she does not need to type. She is incredibly happy.
My daughter talks to Gemini. The idea of going through links seems primitive to her.
The future of interface is chat/talking not going through clickbait.
I think schools should have some basic control on how kids can use AI but saying that they want to freeze the learning experience in 2020 is simply not right. It is like saying we wont allow whiteboards and markers.
So I can’t understand how one would trust the summary but not what is being summarized.
mistakes vary from "obviously wrong" to "looks vaguely correct, but the source states something different" to "looks plausible, but the cited page is completely irrelevant, the AI clearly made this up" Even for straight fact lookups, I've seen it cite pages and claim one number, and then i click through and the source matches the vague shape of the answer but has a different number.
Its just constant hallucinations. "thats a common problem, just change this <setting that does not exist> or set <option that does not exist>". Full gemini seems more capable, but whatever google is throwing at the top of their free searches is awful IME.
The relative effectiveness of the search is immaterial.
This is gross.
This is all very tragic. we built a magic network where we could stash all the worlds information and access it from anywhere, except its been trashed by people with sleazy motivations trying to get between us and what we'd like to see.