Google did most of what they do now ten years ago, before their activity had much arguable "intelligence". They have used AI to enhance various existing services but the improvements hardly seem earth shattering to me [insert earth-shattering counter example HERE]. Google's more pure AI product such as the Google Car are so-far vaporware at best.

Calling Google an "AI company" seems like calling Ford in 1962 "a streamlining company" - which is does violence to the concept even if Ford in 1962 maybe some money with streamlined cars.

I think there's a dramatic difference in search 10 years ago compared to now, due to better natural language understanding, which is very much an "AI" technology IMHO.

I've had to un-learn my search query habits from the past. I used to attempt to express queries in ways that I thought would help the search engine (limit it to keywords, suppress keywords that are likely to produce false positives, etc.). Now, it seems better to put in sentence fragments, and the old way of a few specific thought out keywords is actually worse at producing the result I want.

The difference is small to the average HN user (most of us are just as capable of expressing queries both ways, and we'll find what we're looking for) but the latter kind of query is far more accessible to the average person.