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A comment on Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results. Parent comment

Re:Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results by mghackerlady on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @05:43PM (#47955136)
Doesn't even have to be a query where you intend to spend money, I can't tell you the amount of times I look something up wondering if it exists or to learn more about it and it tries to sell me something
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Re:Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results by blueg3 on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @07:01PM (#47955831)
This is, annoyingly, because bare noun phrases as a search term are highly correlated with an intent to buy.

You get completely different results if you search for "what is a sofa bed" instead of "sofa bed".

I say it's annoying, but it comes from real user behavior.

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Re:Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results by kimos on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @05:55PM (#47955264)
This is partially why search is doomed. Sure LLMs are overtaking search, because search has been enshitified to the point you need an LLM to even get thr answer you’re looking for.

I keep thinking how often LLMs are used to “solve” problems we created.

“Meeting starts at 3” gets fed into an LLM to turn it into a 3 paragraph email, only to be summarized by a different LLM on the other email client end as “Meeting starts at 3”. What a waste.

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