The recent post on EU's search index got me thinking: the real reason I (personally) haven't been able to shift to other search engines (like duckduckgo; I currently cannot afford Kagi) is Google has these information cards that "summarize" useful information in an information card. For example, it can give you the recent results of the sports team you searched for. Or it can give you synopsis of a movie and the list of its cast and crew.

However, recently Google has started replacing these information cards with AI-generated content. Not to be against AI summaries, but the whole UX is pretty bad (I can't just click the cast member and go to their information card on Google); and it seems it is only going to get worse.

So my question: Are there any search engines that do this well?

I know duckduckgo has an information card which usually is a summary of the wikipedia page of whatever you searched for. I would use something like letterboxd or goodreads on the first go but I have found (a) the websites to be a bit clunky for a quick search (b) they are not as good for fuzzy search.

A photographer I knew passed away, and I was trying to see if there was any information. This was the top result I got on google. The part after the ellipses says “killed in a plane accident in Pantanal.”

He did not die in the plane accident! That’s another piece of Brazilian news, about the architect Kongjian Yu. The search result is even tagged with Yu’s Sponge City/Cidade Esponja.

So why is this showing up for a post summary about José Bassit? There’s nothing in the post comments or the post itself saying anything like this.

Between Meta announcing that its AI, Meta AI, reached 1 billion users[1] and Google saying that AI Overviews are used by 1.5 billion[2], I’m curious to know how many of these people intentionally use the feature, or prefer it to what the AI replaces.

AI Overviews appear at the top of searches, with no option to turn them off. Meta AI, I suspect many people trigger accidentally by tapping that horrible button in WhatsApp, in search results across its three core apps, or when trying to tag someone in a group by typing an @ symbol.

It’s very easy to reach enormous numbers when you already have a giant platform. I don’t think that’s even part of the discussion. The issue is trumpeting these numbers as if they were earned, rather than imposed.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/28/zuckerberg-meta-ai-one-billion-monthly-users.html
[2] https://www.theverge.com/news/655930/google-q1-2025-earnings