I was thinking the same, who on earth would want that, so did my technical colleagues, but since the AI summaries rolled out over here, non-technical folks I've asked about it actually seem to like it.

I'm also a big fan of perplexity, using it for about a quarter of my searches.

Seriously? I think that's what most people want from a search engine, even if they wouldn't phrase it that way.

Today I heard my wife ask our HomePod which US state was most similar in size to Germany. First, I was absolutely shocked that it gave a useful and correct answer. Well done, little dingus, and sorry to have doubted you. But more relevant, her goal wasn't to do a search. Her goal was to get an answer.

For the most part, people want an answer from Google, not a list of pages that might potentially answer them if they're lucky. Sometimes I do want to see a long list of results I can skim through for the most likely answer, especially if I'm looking for technical details on something. But if I ask "how long do I bake a frozen 20 lb turkey?", I really just want a correct answer.

So maybe people wouldn't actually say they want Google to summarize their search results if you phrased it exactly like that. But I bet most people, most of the time, would say that they wish the thing would just look at the 437 pages of results and tell them the answer.

True. We've gotten used to searching the web being like this: Type in "how long to cook a frozen 20-pound turkey," scroll past a few ads, and then either spot the direct answer in the blurb of one of the results, or see a promising-looking one and click through.

There's a lot of skimming and scanning that we've come to expect as part of the process in locating a piece of information, and we do it quickly with practice, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way.