Real "Unpopular Opinion" hours, but a lot of the Google AI results are honestly helpful and significantly less annoying to navigate than the links they reference.

No annoying or intrusive ads or DONATE PLEASE pop-ups or demands that I give them permission to add cookies. No miles of irrelevant fluff text. No captchas or other weird security features.

This feels like a patch on a patch on a patch, given that so much of these annoyances are a consequence of aggressive AI data harvesting and Google Adsense incentives and decades of privatization championed by Silicon Valley libertarians.

But here we are, regardless. AI answers filter a lot of that crap out

They shit in the search results precisely so we’ll use the ai instead

I used to always magically find what I was looking for. Now I don’t and sometimes only the ai results include the relevant webpages I was searching for

AI search will win because they already are making it so

I think it's more like "most of the time they choose to generate an AI summary is when people are searching for the kinds of quick and usable answers it can easily generate, information that was already being made available in link previews before AI was a thing anyway"