Why is that?

Of my recent searches, I’m either 1) just clicking the top link anyways as I was searching for the exact #1 result and need their website, not info. Or 2)searching for a quick snippet of info where the AI summary is sufficient, like a cooking measurement conversion.

What’s your usage where AI in the results is an issue that AI-free results are better?

if you're giving it to kids where wrong information in the search summary could mislead them badly. The AI overviews, because they are highly optimized to be instantaenous and clearly draw from caches to some extent, often have really wrong information, like "opposite of correct" answers to things that are not as simple as cooking measurements.

But non-AI search results are no better. It’s easy to get opposite of correct answers via websites too. If it was a choice between looking it up in an encyclopedia and AI summaries, I’d get it, but there’s plenty of flat earth websites out there.

a plain search result gives you a lot of hits on a lot of sites and you can choose from them, where you then have to read each one to see if it's correctly applicable to what you asked. a wrong "AI summary" result OTOH is a flat out factual error that claims to answer the search query exactly.

It's not that unusual for the AI summary to be incorrect, and that the citation link doesn't support the summary. I've seen it multiple times, and a recent study indicated it happened about 10% of the times.

Recently I was struggling to explain to a friend why I've disliked the AI in search - right from the early days. Yet I have my own bot that uses Kagi Search + Extract to get me information, and I love it.

It comes down to the UX and lack of choice. Sometimes I want the AI to go do the research and get me the answer. Other times I just want to do a search to find a link - I do not want a summary. It's noise and takes up space.

If Google (without requiring an account), let me default to no AI and have a separate button to get the AI summary, I'd likely be happier.

> What’s your usage where AI in the results is an issue that AI-free results are better?

Searching for specific local information. Questions like "Does <local business> provide this service?" or "When does this park close?" produce hallucinations frequently and confidently.

I don't have inside knowledge, but I'd be willing to bet that search without the LLM summary still involves plenty of non-LLM ML models along the way, classifying and pattern matching. “No LLM summaries” would be a tractable request; “no AI” would not be.

That's what I meant: when I use a search product, I want the whole screen devoted to search results. That's not to say a hybrid product that includes an LLM summary section is useless. I just want to decide when to see it.