Google Search vs AI: The Search for a Straight Answer

Asking AI for help feels like a throwback to when Google was actually useful.

I have a lot of questions. Every day, I run into something I don’t know or need to troubleshoot. Traditionally, I’d turn to Google and craft a search query to find useful information. Lately, though, I’ve been directing these questions to AI tools like ChatGPT, Meta AI and Google’s own Gemini instead.

Despite the bad rap AI gets for hallucinating facts or fumbling basic math, it often gives a better result than taking the same knowledge request to Google. That's because Google search results seem optimized for manipulation (and frustration) right now. Most Google search results pages are weighed down by rows of sponsored product links or sponsored results, followed by mostly low-info junk content (I'm looking at you, Forbes/Forbes Advisor) gaming the results. 

Anything of real value is pushed below the fold, an old newspaper term that's been co-opted to mean anything that appears after the first screen of search results.

It's little wonder many of us have taken to adding "Reddit" to our Google searches, hoping for something closer to a genuine human opinion. But Reddit is its own self-selecting microcosm of reliability, with legit experts and self-aggrandizing blowhards in equal measure. 

So I find myself turning to AI more often, for everything from fact-checking to how-to advice to product and software recommendations. And I do this even though I’m fully aware that AI gets things wrong, hallucinates or goes off the rails. 

I'm willing to overlook all that because, at its core, AI chatbots are designed to give the user a useful response. And that intentionality counts for a lot. 

This goes to the heart of what I think a lot of people are looking for: A Straight Answer.

This goes to the heart of what I think a lot of people are looking for in an online query: A Straight Answer. Not a sales pitch. Not a guy holding open his jacket showing you all the wristwatches pinned inside. Not SEO-optimized word salad designed to trick the search algorithm. Not a simple recipe preceded by a long biographical sketch and links to cooking supply stores. 

We're also looking to interact with Search agents using natural language. The ability to have seemingly organic-feeling conversations with AI still impresses me, especially after decades of training myself to carefully word Google queries like I'm trying to ask a genie to grant a wish without the Twilight Zone twist. Now I can spew a stream-of-consciousness question to an AI bot and generally feel like I’ve been understood.

Having worked with, and sometimes against, the current generation of consumer AI since its introduction, I've gotten a pretty good feel for what it can or can't do. That's why recent research concluding that AI bots don't really "reason" but instead just try to "replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data," wasn't surprising. I've always worked under the assumption that it's just an advanced form of Mad Libs. 

But that's still better than your average search engine search. Google knows it's on the losing slope of public opinion, and its search product runs the risk of becoming the next Facebook: a once-useful giant that’s now barely tolerated. Hence the growth of SGE results -- those AI snippets designed to provide an elusive straightforward answer (without sending web publishers valuable user traffic, mind you).

In the end, ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI, Claude, and others are now getting as much of my search time as Google. Is the experience perfect? No. Is it reasonably close? Sometimes. But I'd rather deal with a system that, between hallucinations, at least tries to give me a useful answer rather than a search engine overtaken by SEO spam, affiliate junk and buy-it-now links. 

Here's my crystal ball prediction for what's next: Come back in five years and we'll all be engaging in fluid, real-time conversations with AI-powered chatbots through a mix of voice, text and visual input, and the idea of typing a query into a search engine box and sorting through the messy results yourself will seem painfully archaic.