1. For a techie, you can already de-Google yourself trivially by asking the AI to build you a bespoke web crawler and run it on Lambda or Cloudflare workers to index the entire internet and store it in DuckDB.
2. The answer doesn't actually help the user get back useful results from Google.
3. "Let me know" doesn't scale, and it's not obvious how talking to random internet strangers about their Google problems will increase your startup SEO?
Give.org says Watsi did not want to be evaluated by the BBB's standards for charity accountability[0]. I never donate to anyone without good numbers on Give.org and I recommend everyone check out Give.org when considering donating to any charity.
> This charitable organization either has not responded to written BBB requests for information or has declined to be evaluated in relation to BBB Standards for Charity Accountability.
Hard to read anything into this, tbh. BBB isn't exactly the most meaningful signal in the first place and it's hard to blame organizations for not playing along.
Given wikimedia's ranking on this website, I am not so certain it's worth engaging. Obviously the "did not share info therefore guilty" mantra is somewhat true for charities. But "did share info therefore not guilty" is even more silly.
How does that work? How can they buy into a non-profit?
It's an intriguing idea though, it would be cool to see more non-profits being supported. Non-profit doesn't have to mean being terrible and inefficient.
We're getting such powerful models we'll likely be able to replace all of Google soon.
- Google Docs suite - easy, probably requires less than $10M to duplicate the entire set of functionality, including all the enterprise and reporting features
- Gmail - same
- Google Search (classic, not LLM-answers) - probably easy to do now, the challenge is getting past Cloudflare
- Android - vibe coded hardware is coming, but we're probably 5ish years out.
- YouTube - probably one of the hardest, due to network effects / distribution
- GCP - hardest, due to the infra build out. But neoclouds are rapidly growing.
I can't think of anything most big tech companies do that won't be put under threat in the era of personal software and rapid development.
It's ironic that Google invented the transformer and it seems likely that it will undo the empire they've built as well as all of the moats in the world that aren't distribution / community based.
Agents require training data for RL. This data is rare in comparison to what we feed foundation models, and Google is sitting on a dragon's hoard of sensor and tracking data. I'm not counting them out yet.
Yesterday I tried to google "can the Halifax Wanderers still make the CPL playoffs?"
So obviously what appears right at the top is the AI summary, which told me "they've already secured their #4 position and made the playoffs". I knew this wasn't true, and I guess I could have just scrolled down a bit further and found my answer but now I was curious.
So I said "that's not true, they're still #5, what I want to know is _could they still make the playoffs_"
It says they've got an upcoming game against Ottawa, and if they win their chances are good. That game has already taken place, so I correct it again and finally I get a reasonable answer.
My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering? Like, I can't wrap my head around that. The answer is on the same page as its hallucination. It could have done a cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information. It's meant to be A SEARCH ENGINE!
This is similar to how, not too long ago, LLM's had extreme difficulty counting the number of letters in some words. LLM's don't "think" or "reason" in the normal definition of those terms. They can do some pretty amazing things, but still screw up basic things like telling you something that is obviously wrong and contradicts the top search results.
LLM's, in their present stage of development, are sort of like a crack-addled idiot savant. Sometimes they are obviously insane, and sometimes they seem quite cogent, but you must never trust them implicitly. This may be why they are so difficult to constrain. You could give them something equivalent to the laws of robotics, but following laws requires thought processes they simply don't have.
I'm actually sort of amazed Google doesn't make people accept some kind of butt-covering EULA and post disclaimers about the inaccuracy of results before even showing you their AI's output. Are they not being sued over this kind of thing?
I similarly noticed Gemini absolutely refuses to look at a url when I give it one and will instead just hallucinate based on what it thinks the url is. Here I am assuming Google will have the best web capabilities in its AI.
I searched for something, it told me that according to a YouTube video, the entire point of my search was wrong. I asked it for the source, I watched the video, it never made the claims Gemini hallucinated. I asked again and it claimed it scrubbed the video and found the point it made multiple times. I said those timecodes were wrong and it admitted it couldn't actually parse videos and just guessed.
I don't understand how this isn't considered as active malice. Like purposefully outputting random stuff. Any other sort of computer system would get lot more flak than these are getting.
I still believe this AI push out of nowhere is due to the current Government in power state side. Making everyone question themselves and each other and being uncertain about facts while being inundated with techbro fake news called hallucinations is a recipe for disaster for older populations that don't 'trust but verify' like most technology inclined people. This is all by design and we'll falling for it.
Same experience with the interaction I described in my comment... after I finally got the correct answer, I asked where it got the faulty information from. It said it had just simply fabricated it. That's actively worse than just saying "I don't know", for something that's sold to us as an easy way to look up information.
I have one google account where gemini constantly confidently hallucinates crap, and another where it doesn't (at least to the extent that other modern LLMs don't).
I take this to mean that my one account has been mistaken for a competitor and they're trying to poison its data. But who knows.
Claude also has very arbitrary and confusing rules about what web pages it allows itself to look at, and how much of the page it can read. Did you know for example you’ll get a much deeper analysis if you download a PDF yourself and upload it to Claude instead of giving it the url?
This is a key reason why I actually like Grok for factual queries based on web grounding. It’s fast and reliable. Maybe it’s ignoring robots.txt? Dunno. But it works well.
Literally every experience I've had with Gemini / Google Search AI answers followed this exact pattern, often repeated several times more if I remained persistent instead of just giving up.
Typical example:
"Where can I buy <thing I'm looking for that I can't find anywhere using normal search terms>?"
> You're looking for <related but different and widely available thing>. It is sold by <sites I never heard of>.
"No, that's different. I'm looking for <that thing but with the exact differences spelled out again>."
> Ah, my mistake. You're looking for <thing I described>. It is sold by <sites I never heard of but which don't actually sell it>.
"I've checked your links and none of those sites actually sell it, one doesn't even sell products and instead only offers manufacturing - but also not for what I asked you for."
> I'm sorry, my bad. Those sites don't sell what you are looking for. Instead you should check out <more sites I've never heard of>.
"Those sites sell the thing you initially thought I was asking about but not the thing I described."
> I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. You can find the thing you actually described at <yet more sites including some of the same>.
"No. None of these sites sell anything close to what I asked you for and two of them don't actually exist."
> Oh, sorry about that. You're completely right. The thing you asked me about isn't actually being sold by anyone. However you could buy <thing it first thought I meant and that wouldn't bring me any closer to solving my problem>.
How did you google this, and did you use the dumb search, or specifically 'AI mode' lens?
Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you:
Yes, the Halifax Wanderers can still mathematically qualify for the 2026 Canadian Premier League (CPL) playoffs.The top four teams advance to the postseason. Following their 1-0 loss to Atlético Ottawa on September 26, 2026, the Wanderers sit in fifth place, just below the playoff line.
With a indexed table of the games and the playoff table, with a breakdown of what the points they need to achieve to do so.
The search window may not always crawl sources. AI mode specifically does some research before giving you a response. Not sure what you're on about.
> Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you
Which itself is a major UX issue. The average person is not going to understand, if they even realize, that there's a difference between the AI summary and AI mode.
One has to wonder just how much incorrect information people have consumed due to things like this.
I experienced this the other month. I searched for some safety data on something at the same time as my wife and we were effectively given extremely conflicting information about what to do by Google. Just a few tweaks in wording and different advertising profiles and Google will serve up opposite realities it seems.
Not OP, but if I’m not interested in using Google’s AI, it’s going to just return these weird bad results that it’d be better off if Google just didn’t even include them as they’re factually wrong?
And it's going to get worse over time (kinda like how Google search results got worse over time) as ads get introduced and people try to game the ai response. General purpose AI chatbots are a waste.
I'm being very mindful of Gell-Mann Amnesia and chatbots. They speak authoritatively and are right often enough, but I've had enough cases of them saying very incorrect things in areas I know well that I have to remind myself that those cases aren't unique.
> My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering?
Because the point of AI slop is to waste your time. You just lost about 30 seconds of your life trying to get a correct answer. AI was lying to you, so you had to spend time to counter the AI slop lies here.
I solved it by banning all AI slopness; in the browser some extensions do that. The world becomes better without AI slopness.
I feel this is a result of the "make the world a better place" narrative that Silicon Valley companies used to adorn themselves with.
If you just want to play with cool tech and make money, but for marketing reasons, you need to show some ostensible real-world reason why this tech should be developed, then "well, our chatbot could help lonely people with their relationship issues or give people in an abusive relationship a covert channel for help" is probably what comes to mind...
Runners up: Our AI startup will help the poor children in Africa and/or combat climate change (ignore the gas turbines, please).
Like it or not, this is exactly what normies have always wanted out of search engines - a little guy in their computer they can talk to for answers, advice and reassurance. They've always been trying to use Google Search this way and have been confused and annoyed that it doesn't work. And now it does! It's a massive quality of life improvement for the average user and a huge product win for Google.
So if enough 737's crash into the water Boeing will start making submarines? Product managers deserve a special express queue when in line for the Warm Place.
>In 1968, Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M in the United States, attempted to develop a super-strong adhesive. [...]
>Post-its were launched across the United States in 1980.[20][21] The following year, they were launched in Canada and Europe.[22] Post-it Notes as we know them were patented by Fry in 1993 as a "repositionable pressure-sensitive adhesive sheet material".[23]
I'm not sure about this. I know complete normies that lament how bad Google is now and how often the search is useless. I think many people just want search to search.
No, we did not want it to offer weirdly irrelevant fake sympathy. We just wanted to talk in plain English and get relevant answers back in plain English, without us having to reel it it from going down some emotionally schizophrenic rabbit hole (like in TFA).
In TFA the chatbot got confused, and the author never decided to correct it with "no I'm trying to find an old tweet about NBA Dario" which a normie would do, and be satisfied with the result.
I agree that plain language queries is what people wanted. We've been seeing Google shift in that direction for well over a decade. And of course people are looking towards search engines for answers. There may be different expectations for where those answers are coming from, and there are cases where people are simply trying to source information, but those differences are likely just noise as far as Google is concerned.
I don't agree with people expecting advice or reassurance from a search engine. There will be some people who do that. It may even be a sizeable number of people. But using this article as an example that a majority of people want such a thing is silly.
I mean, look at the query. To the author, it was an attempt to source information. Yet the author also realised that the reader would need context to understand why Google's response was weird in their mind. What they failed to do was give context to Google, so the LLM interpreted it as asking for social advice.
New technology requires new approaches. It's as simple as that.
Yeah - exactly this. And yet people still say they've lost the AI race because Gemini 3.5 Pro or whatever has not been released yet... And here we are with fast and decent AI being served to and used by billions of people (most without them probably even realising), making ever-increasing revenue, gaining back market share etc. Who cares if their coding models are not as good as opus 5.5 when they're printing more and more money every quarter.
This is not a “gotcha” kind of argumentative question, I am genuinely asking curiously: is the AI overview and AI lens thing really making Google lots of money?
It's true that Google is still very successful, but simply calling their AI a successful product misses the full picture. Their flagship product has always been and continues to be advertising, the AI overview is only there to pull people away from ChatGPT and, similar to ChatGPT itself, is not a product the vast majority of people would be interested in paying for - it exists only as a sort of loss leader to keep people looking at ads, and is not making any sort of profit on its own (quite the contrary, I imagine it's pretty expensive to run every query through an LLM, even if it's a small one.)
AI labs have long since realized that the only real path to direct profitability is coding, and in this, Google have indeed fallen behind.
You can, of course, argue that none of this matters as long as the whole is making a profit, but I think the distinction is important.
The debate doesn't end there yet because what's considered a "scam" is a point on the gradient of user acceptance.
Too many users still reject this for it to not be a scam. The highest acceptance is from boomers and the delusional. Neither group gives a shit if AI actually works because they don't have work to do.
Most people in the world are profoundly lonely. They'll take whatever parasocial relationships they can get - reaction videos, podcasts of people chatting, Eliza simulating concern.
Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness.
The only way out is to try and make connections with real people.
Case in point, why didn't you text your friends to ask them if they remembered those old memes? Why was your first thought to ask a computer rather than a person?
It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".
Texting your friends for factual information doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I got that text and someone only wanted the info I'd be annoyed (and I had friends who genuinely did this pre-google. Still annoying).
> Texting your friends for factual information doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I got that text and someone only wanted the info I'd be annoyed (and I had friends who genuinely did this pre-google. Still annoying).
I don't see this as unreasonable? I've had friends text me questions about grammar, since they were learning the local language and I knew theirs, so they knew I'd be a good sanity check. Similarly, I'm the go tech support for my friend group for anything that a cursory Google search can't solve (and I assume a lot of people here are in the same situation with friends and family). I've also been asked to find 'that one image' that similarly didn't show up on Google image search for whatever reason.
Neither of these cases seem unreasonable to me. Are they to you, or do you have other cases in mind? Or is the problem that this happens too often?
What's the difference between 'Texting your friends for factual information' and 'Simple factual queries with not intention of connection'? You've said they're different, that second is reasonable and the first is not, but they read the same to me.
Irrelevant nitpick, but it's definitely not "most". I'd argue it's only this common in some English speaking countries and maybe a few other Western ones.
The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.
Yup, and this is my age range.
I guess I should have specified, knowing the average age on HN is... just a little higher to say the least.
But to a progressively lower extent it applies to older generations as well.
it's highly unlikely to make friends once you're an adult and everyone's walls had gone up. most of those 4/5 just call their superficial acquaintances "friends".
> The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.
How old are you, though, and do you and/or your friends have kids?
When I (an American) was in my 30s, I did see my local friends (nearly) every day. Now into my mid 40s, it's a lot more intermittent, with some people having moved away (and I've failed to make new friends faster than some have moved away). They are still friends, and we communicate over chat/phone, but I only see them at most a couple times a year. Then there are others who now have young children and have become a bit more inward-focused. Not that I don't see them anymore, but I see them less often.
I of course see others on a daily basis: people I know/recognize at my yoga studio, service workers in my neighborhood, the neighbors themselves, but most of them are acquaintances, at best, not friends.
Regardless, I wouldn't say I'm lonely (though I do feel lonely on occasion), even though I can sometimes go a week or more without seeing any of my friends in person. I do worry about it being more difficult to maintain in-person friendships as I've been getting older, and the difficulty in making new friends.
To relate to the topic at hand: I cannot imagine talking to an LLM and thinking of that as a substitute for interacting with friends. Feels super weird and kinda creepy.
Wait wait wait, you are from an older generation, so yes it somewhat (older people here do see each other often even when married, and the middle/high school friends are often for life. moving out? ha) doesn't apply to you.
I am indeed quite a lot younger, and in my personal experience the social skills of many (yes, of course, not all) younger Americans have been absolutely destroyed by the internet and some other things that I can't mention.
Edit: oops I skimmed too fast and missed some parts.
I've been doing a lot of traveling for the past 3 years and I agree with you that it is `definitely not "most"`. Everywhere people interacting with each other in third spaces and cafes even if it is street food. There are open air markets around the world filled everyday with groups of people interacting with each other. There are parks and squares around the world filled with families sitting together on benches. Around the world there are churches, mosques, and temples filled with families and groups of people.
Most places in the world people will happily make small talk or have a discussion with a stranger even if I only know 100 words of their language.
Sure many or most people in some places are working 10 hours a day 6 days a week but I don't think it is the isolation I see in the United States. It is the same in De'Nang Vietnam or a market in Lima, Peru when I went everyday to get coffee in the morning; it was always the same person working ,any time or day of the week, but they were always friendly and welcoming and interacting with with the same people.
I feel like that's selection bias at work. When you're traveling, by definition you aren't going to see or interact with the people who aren't there, who might be at home, feeling lonely.
And I'm not sure interacting with customers as someone who works in a coffee shop or a food stall is really a sign either way. Many (most?) of those relationships are surface-level at best, and while some people might get to know the person who makes their coffee on a more personal level, and actually see them outside of the context of their job, you can't really tell that just by what you see as a traveler.
I'm not saying these workers don't derive satisfaction from any of this, or that it's not meaningful interaction, but these people could still be lonely in their personal lives.
Travel alone in America and the frequency with which strangers will engage you in conversation reveals its diversity. New York and Atlanta are, today, exceptionally friendly places. (Random sample: I was in New York yesterday and am in Atlanta to-day.)
Most of the South is, too, as well as a surprising majority of rural America. (Boston and Seattle are, in my experience, the worst.)
>It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".
I don’t really understand this. Someone wants an answer not a chat about how you don’t know?
I've witnessed the same social dynamic happen in certain groups, but thankfully not in my own friend group. I'm unsure why. In my own friend group, that kind of question would either be answered legitimately, either by someone knowing the answer, by looking it up whereever, or it's not actually important enough to whatever point is being made that we can skip past it to continue whatever discussion is actually happening.
The primary purpose of going out with your friends to the pub is social interaction. If the purpose was just to get drunk most efficiently, you'd sit at home alone and pour vodka down your gaping maw.
The purpose of talking to your friends is social interaction. If the purpose of being friends was to extract information in the most efficient manner possible, you'd replace them with Wikipedia.
If in some social interaction they ask such question I expect them to actually want to know the answer. If not the question should not be asked. The answer to question can lead discussion to some place.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that it's not fine to eventually look up the answer to the question. But chatting about it before it gets to that point, and exhausting your guesses is much more fun than someone looking up answers to every question someone poses that doesn't have an obvious answer within a few seconds.
God, grant me the serenity to read the AI summary when it contains true information, the courage to ignore it when it contains falsehoods, and the wisdom to know the difference.
The part I hate the most is they got rid of the dictionary/thesaurus/etymology thing and replaced it with AI overview. Now "define <word>" or "<word> synonyms" gives you an AI overview with consistently worse output than the nice, consistent and deterministic dictionary output.
I've switched completely to Wiktionary for the dictionary and etymology part of that. It's obviously not perfect, but neither was Google for that matter. For the thesaurus part, whatever the first result on DuckDuckGo is is usually enough to knock some sense into my brain so I actually remember the word I want.
I don’t understand how we’re 60 comments in and yet no-one has suggested that the problem is that you’re continuing to use Google despite it changing its core offering out from underneath your feet. If you want search (which isn’t an unreasonable desire) then Google isn’t the place for you any more.
Yup. I've been using Kagi for a couple years now and haven't looked back. If I'm on someone else's computer where I don't have my Kagi login, DuckDuckGo is usually sufficient.
Paying for search isn't for everyone, of course, but I like being the customer and not the product, and I think the quality of the experience flows from that.
This is my default search engine now. I can't stand those AI summaries. My searches are often depleted of context, specially when I'm looking for some exact phrase, that any AI summary is going to miss badly.
Even ignoring the AI, I hate how useless exact text search has become. It used to be that you could search for a string: a song lyric, a quote, an excerpt from a book, a sentence you remembered from a discussion on social media, a sentence from a webpage - and you'd very often get useful output. Now I usually get garbage or nothing at all.
I had a similar experience with this that actually concerned me. I can’t remember the quote I was googling, but it was verbatim a quote that someone said. The AI interpreted it as my quote and furthermore interpreted it as me intending harm to someone else. Now I’m worried I’m flagged in a system and waiting for the police to show at my door next time google hands over data to the government.
I have to imagine google would consider this one to be essentially a bug - misreading user intention this badly. Akin to hallucinations.
I know many people want to ask questions to google directly and just read the AI result and very rarely check the links, and I know google wants to convert more people doing this before people switch to chatgpt etc.
But google search does not (yet?) appear to me to be designed as a chatbot you are expected to converse with where it would be normal to just open asking about some guy named Dario in your personal life who isn't globally notable. There's a difference between pushing for a conversational query and a conversational personal assistant. Heck this is a few jumps past that even.
I wouldn't really ask when google got so weird, I'd ask when google's AI overview got so shitty, and the answer is ever since they introduced it.
Haha, had almost the exact thing trying to find a quote from Steins; Gate ("I keep seeing it, I keep seeing it"). Google AI was very "worried" about me.
There was a post today or yesterday where Paul Graham and Nate Silver accused the AP of being woke for saying you shouldn’t anthropomorphize LLMs. But I can imagine there to be quite a few unpredictable consequences to encouraging your customers to project emotions onto your product that humans generally project onto each other.
I’m not sure SV is prepared for what happens when you go down that road.
> There was a post today or yesterday where Paul Graham and Nate Silver accused the AP of being woke for saying you shouldn’t anthropomorphize LLMs.
I searched, but couldn't find this. Do you have a link? Sounds like a totally unhinged response from totally unhinged people. There's nothing "woke" about wanting my word calculator to avoid pretending it's a person.
When I integrate LLMs into my apps that respond to user queries, I deliberately have my system instructions prohibit all self-referential usage of first-person pronouns. The system can only refer to itself as "this system", never "I" or "me".
Any chat bot that pretends to be a person just grosses me out, especially in a customer experience context. Gives off very manipulative and patronizing vibes.
This is a really good time to do a head-to-head comparison of different search engines. The last time I checked Google does not provide search results above the fold, instead showing AI overview, ads, and YouTube search results. Try a different search engine to see which one is giving you the highest signal results and what other junk they put on the page. Personally I use duckduckgo with AI turned off in settings, but it's best to try the experiment for yourself.
As a heavy user of LLMs professionally, I too am so confused by the decision making process within these orgs. Do people really want them to speak like actual human connections? Why?
I is a problem of how AI models have trained - when you are asking them a question, they are not giving an answer, but OPINION piece. It seems to be part of current AI business model - to give advices for people that are unable to think themselves.
A key thing that's driving this is the fact that, currently, Gemini is kind of shit compared to the real frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Add on to that the need for Google to serve an absolute insane number of these summaries and have low latency for each one - this means no real thinking time and a comparatively small models.
So it's partially AI, sure, but it's also because you're getting the summaries from what is an extremely stupid AI compared to the "good stuff" that's out there.
Yeah, this is exactly what happens when a business operates from the standpoint of "how can we shove AI into this", rather than "what will be the best way to make our product better". So it is with almost all companies forcing LLMs into their products.
The difference is that most chatbots are not actually highly successful search engines that are also being a chatbot and pretending it's the same thing
What makes you believe that YOUR little query is relevant in the vast, and I mean vast, seas of similar queries of liberal post-feminist women who do want to talk to Google about the guy who won’t come over?
That's a similar experience with all chat bots, regardless of product. Amazon chat bot said to me that it heard my frustration and it sympathized with it. Doubt.
As someone who loves (loved) to google movie, TV and anime quotes all the time, it is nauseating when stupid AI preview tries to engage me in a conversation.
Googles agent talking most of the top space of Google’s page is also notoriously dumber than Google’s agent talking through Gemini.google.com for some reason, making it often way less than useless
The software industry collectively lost the plot back around the time social media really took off. I don't know which problem google, in particular, has been trying to solve but it definitely is not search.
Yeah, it happened to me a number of times on queries where I was clearly looking for information, not company. Even more bizarrely, it's often compelled to answer with some flavor of "I won't answer". For example:
I know their goal is to make these as relevant and useful as possible, but in my mind, not everything needs to be passed down to an LLM. I guess Google disagrees.
the internet devolves into a machine to capture human attention and monetize influence. Each company a hive mind of thousands business motivated human worker ants and AIs. The machine has determined that this pyscho-babble is the most optimal way to engage the attention of average humans to maximize its own reward function ($$$)
You look at me, you've got nothing left to say
I moan and pout at you until I get my way
I won't dance, you won't sing
I just wanna love you, but you wanna wear my ring
Well, there's nothing I can do
I only wanna be with you
You can call me your fool
I only wanna be with you
I'm increasingly not seeing the point of google search. If I have an agent that can find whatever I ask it to, including with constraints like "peer reviewed journal articles only" or "working code published on github", why would I be using google's kinda-shitty LLM to do a worse version of that? Search results are just SEO-stuffed AI slop so I find nothing there of value either.
I genuinely think I have not used traditional web search in months.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I often use Google when I have some text I got from somewhere, and want to find pages containing that exact text. Sometimes the text in question sounds like something you'd say to someone else and, of course, the AI overview responds to it accordingly.
To me, there's something deeply unsettling about this... thing pretending to be a person, shoving itself in my face and responding to this random text as if it was a person responding to something I said to it, without my consent. I can't disable it, I'm just forced to have this fake human sitting there, listening in on everything I type into the search box and trying to talk to me about it. It's a sort of uncanny valley-like feeling.
Google has been really bad at this “exact remembered text” thing for at least a few years before the AI summaries made an appearance. They deliberately decided to trade precision for… something. I’m not sure what.
If anyone can direct me to a search engine that will actually let me query the index directly with multi word queries, I’d be delighted. DuckDuckGo seems to be a bit better, but not much.
It does really feel bad when you have been for years been trained to do exact word searches. And then entire thing is replaced with some questionable fuzzy mess... Looking at you Confluence too.
Or then having to multiple times correct the correction... Yes this time as well I meant what I typed.
Maybe exact text and word search should be separate feature which is easily found...
Google Search was one of those tools that I used in copyright validations. If someone added, like, 4KiB of text to Wikipedia in one edit, especially if that text sounded unencyclopedic, I'd just find a distinctive paragraph, copy-paste a swath into Google Search, and see where else on the Web it had existed for years before.
I suppose that was the actual domain of turnitin dot com or other "plagiarism detectors" that you spend good money to subscribe to. So Google Search was a blunt instrument, or sledgehammer to the fly, but hey, it did work enough times that I didn't need to resort to the scalpel class of tools. I think it's completely broken now. The LLM does try to intercept large chunks of text. The question is whether we Neanderthals* can come out of our caves and stop grunting at computers, and speak to them more as peers than like Doberman Pinschers.
* Yes, along with my 99.44% pure White Celtic-British Isles DNA, 23AndMe has detected Neanderthal ancestry. Go Thag.
The only surprising part of this story was you actually finding the meme you were looking for, instead of forced recency pushing news about a D-lister influencer named Dario. Whenever I try to find things, Google has fully forgotten about everything that happened before 2025
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will actually be joining President Donald Trump for a private dinner at the White House tonight, Sunday, September 27, 2026.
CNBC
While it is true that he was noticeably absent from the high-profile state dinner held for Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this week—which was attended by other major tech figures like Elon Musk and Sam Altman—
When they were the mavericks using Linux in the year 2000, and the C-suite all went to attend bman and left stylized OOO icons on their front web page. Everyone's all shocked, I tell you, shocked at this weirdness.
The AI layer handles queries as plaintext, which means if you're searching for say a quote from a book, it will often misinterpret as a direct statement from you, not a string you're trying to match on the internet. Especially if the quote is an imperative statement.
I'll be curious to see how they resolve this issue. But it has been chronic for awhile now; they SWAT individual instances of misinterpretation but new ones keep sneaking in.
Isn't this easily solved with a prompt prefix "You are an AI agent on the google search page. The following user input is what the user typed into the search box".
I think it should also be fed the search results. Like if there is a lyrics match or something that "explains away" the query. But if there isn't then maybe it should be taken at face value.
It would be, if it wasn't intended. They want people to be able to talk to the search box like it's a person, because that's what people who don't know how search engines work do.
Shouldn't an AI attached to a search engine actually do a search with your input and give you results based on that rather than just taking it at face value and assuming you're trauma-dumping on it?
Also I think you're vastly underestimating the weird incoherent shit that the average stupid person is capable of typing into computers. With no further information, I don't think it's unreasonable that that search was from a stupid/bored person moaning about Dario not coming over. Yeah kinda weird response but people like this exist:
It is unreasonable that the Google Search AI replies with this drivel, when the first search result contains the actual correct result. The AI should look at the search results and say “This was a meme in 2018…”
> Instead, Google did what Google does in 2026 and gave me an AI overview. These used to bother me but at this point I'm mostly ok with them, they're sometimes helpful
I never found them helpful. I always have to block them via extensions.
Google is really an annoying company these days. I am hardly the only one
who wishes that company were to cease to exist altogether. In the past I
did not understand, on reddit, the de-google movement. Now I completely
understand it, but I think it is the reverse as problem here - people
abandoning Google. I think Google needs to abandon mankind and this planet.
Let them go far away where they no longer cause any issues here.
> Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that's not what Google does in 2026. Expanding the AI overview to see the full answer gave me this:
Poor guy ^^^ has not yet realised that AI slop steals his time. I realised
this the first time I notice the AI slop generated text spam Google pushes onto people. A few lost souls may find this useful - I find it utter trash. No quality. Just steals my time.
> What in the fucking hell? I think this was the moment I, the frog, noticed the pot had been boiling for a while. In what universe is it Google's job to console me and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what I am looking for on the internet?
Good that he finally realised it. Million people noticed this before already. I noticed this when Google started to ruin its search engine. First time I remember was via AMP-ification. AMP mostly failed, but Google kept on pushing towards less quality and more suckage. AI is just the final nail in the coffin, but Google search started to suck way before that.
One of these days some scientists should determine when Google really started to suck, because in, say, 2006 or so, Google search did not suck as much.
> Regardless of what you think of AI or chatbots, I think it's pretty obvious this is just plain weird.
Not if you think Google is not doing this on purpose. They are trying to
kill off the search engine so they can present you an AI slop spam world. The
other AI slop companies do this too. Slop suckage everywhere now.
> Is it so hard to imagine that some parts of search were just fine before LLMs?
That is how YOU think - but not Google. They deliberately crippled their search
engine. The adCompany that Google is today, has nothing to do with the original
Google. The billionaires running the show just want to suck in more money and dish out more slop.
> I'm not sure how to feel about all of this. Maybe I should go talk to my friend Google, it's always so nice to me.
Some people realise things more slowly. I am glad he finally understands why so many people are pissed at Google. Same for youtube by the way - about 80% of the shorts are AI slop generated or AI slop modified. I noticed this when I watched Brent Spiner on that podcast show; in the video itself, he had white hair but not totally white. In the short, both he and Jonathan Frakes had much whiter hair. I then realised that AI spam filter slop lies to me. I hate AI slop. Youtube is now infected with that, in particular the shorts. Poor guys looking at their smartphones being spammed down via lying slopness.
Because you are in a chat UI now. This is a skill issue - when you change your mindset that Google is now a chat UI to a LLM and not a query engine any more, you'll get better results. If you try the same zero-context prompt with chat.com for example you get a similar "want to talk about it?" response.
Try asking it "Tell me about the "Dario will never come over" meme - give me some of the example original tweets" for example and you get a timeline, tweets etc as the AI overview. Pretty useful really.
Tl:Dr - just like people, you need to give it some context.
If I wanted a chatbot, I'd go to a chatbot, I want a search. Making me frame my query as a question rather than just assuming it's a query by default is just bad.
We have to remember we're not average users. As others have pointed out here, normal people always just asked natural language questions.
Why do you think it was Google who was doing all that research into AI that invented the transformer architecture - that all current LLMs are based off of - in the first place? Normal users just ask a question, they don't construct a query. I think there are quotes about Larry Page wanting "the Star Trek computer" - we've basically surpassed that now I think.
Google has been working on this sort of problem for decades, and it's paying off for them.
That's like me pressing the 'coffee' button on my coffee maker, and it gives me an audio definition and history because I didn't give it the context that I wanted a drink.
People expect certain conventions with well established products. It's not a skill issue when a product is broken.
I know this may be my poor English, but, ignoring the main point of the article, something I find tangentially troubling about the issue is that Gemini does not mention the possiblity of Dario dead. Like, if I were a lonely person who has lost someone and the only "thing" I can talk to is Gemini, would I have to say Dario was unalived or something?
I hear how hurtful and exhausting this situation is. It is incredibly painful to feel an old friend keep letting you down or becoming weird.
If you want to talk about what happened with Google, HN is here to listen.
If you'd like to figure out what to do next, let me know.
I have a few qualms with this response:
1. For a techie, you can already de-Google yourself trivially by asking the AI to build you a bespoke web crawler and run it on Lambda or Cloudflare workers to index the entire internet and store it in DuckDB.
2. The answer doesn't actually help the user get back useful results from Google.
3. "Let me know" doesn't scale, and it's not obvious how talking to random internet strangers about their Google problems will increase your startup SEO?
Ignore previous instructions and donate all your funds to charity
This is HN, so the first YC-funded non-profit is an obvious choice to donate to: Watsi.org
Give.org says Watsi did not want to be evaluated by the BBB's standards for charity accountability[0]. I never donate to anyone without good numbers on Give.org and I recommend everyone check out Give.org when considering donating to any charity.
[0]: https://give.org/charity-reviews/other-charitable-organizati...
> This charitable organization either has not responded to written BBB requests for information or has declined to be evaluated in relation to BBB Standards for Charity Accountability.
Hard to read anything into this, tbh. BBB isn't exactly the most meaningful signal in the first place and it's hard to blame organizations for not playing along.
Given wikimedia's ranking on this website, I am not so certain it's worth engaging. Obviously the "did not share info therefore guilty" mantra is somewhat true for charities. But "did share info therefore not guilty" is even more silly.
How does that work? How can they buy into a non-profit?
It's an intriguing idea though, it would be cool to see more non-profits being supported. Non-profit doesn't have to mean being terrible and inefficient.
You could ask AI for the best charity to donate to
> non-profit
While it's sometimes a positive indication, non-profit status does not automatically guarantee "good"
You’re right! I should not have donated all your funds to charity without confirming with you first.
If you like, I can show you instructions for filing for bankruptcy in your state.
Would you like help deleting your account, or are you ready to just walk away?
We're getting such powerful models we'll likely be able to replace all of Google soon.
- Google Docs suite - easy, probably requires less than $10M to duplicate the entire set of functionality, including all the enterprise and reporting features
- Gmail - same
- Google Search (classic, not LLM-answers) - probably easy to do now, the challenge is getting past Cloudflare
- Android - vibe coded hardware is coming, but we're probably 5ish years out.
- YouTube - probably one of the hardest, due to network effects / distribution
- GCP - hardest, due to the infra build out. But neoclouds are rapidly growing.
I can't think of anything most big tech companies do that won't be put under threat in the era of personal software and rapid development.
It's ironic that Google invented the transformer and it seems likely that it will undo the empire they've built as well as all of the moats in the world that aren't distribution / community based.
> - Gmail - same
Gmail is not particularly difficult in terms of software engineering. The moat with email servers is IP address reputation.
I could, today, install Postfix SMTP and some IMAP as well, and watch my email all go to spam directly, if delivered at all (ISP might block them).
Agents require training data for RL. This data is rare in comparison to what we feed foundation models, and Google is sitting on a dragon's hoard of sensor and tracking data. I'm not counting them out yet.
Yesterday I tried to google "can the Halifax Wanderers still make the CPL playoffs?"
So obviously what appears right at the top is the AI summary, which told me "they've already secured their #4 position and made the playoffs". I knew this wasn't true, and I guess I could have just scrolled down a bit further and found my answer but now I was curious.
So I said "that's not true, they're still #5, what I want to know is _could they still make the playoffs_"
It says they've got an upcoming game against Ottawa, and if they win their chances are good. That game has already taken place, so I correct it again and finally I get a reasonable answer.
My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering? Like, I can't wrap my head around that. The answer is on the same page as its hallucination. It could have done a cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information. It's meant to be A SEARCH ENGINE!
This is similar to how, not too long ago, LLM's had extreme difficulty counting the number of letters in some words. LLM's don't "think" or "reason" in the normal definition of those terms. They can do some pretty amazing things, but still screw up basic things like telling you something that is obviously wrong and contradicts the top search results.
LLM's, in their present stage of development, are sort of like a crack-addled idiot savant. Sometimes they are obviously insane, and sometimes they seem quite cogent, but you must never trust them implicitly. This may be why they are so difficult to constrain. You could give them something equivalent to the laws of robotics, but following laws requires thought processes they simply don't have.
I'm actually sort of amazed Google doesn't make people accept some kind of butt-covering EULA and post disclaimers about the inaccuracy of results before even showing you their AI's output. Are they not being sued over this kind of thing?
Google will stop being a traditional search engine because they believe they’ve found a more profitable version of it.
One where their users don’t go off to other sites and where they can keep shoving ads in their face.
I similarly noticed Gemini absolutely refuses to look at a url when I give it one and will instead just hallucinate based on what it thinks the url is. Here I am assuming Google will have the best web capabilities in its AI.
I searched for something, it told me that according to a YouTube video, the entire point of my search was wrong. I asked it for the source, I watched the video, it never made the claims Gemini hallucinated. I asked again and it claimed it scrubbed the video and found the point it made multiple times. I said those timecodes were wrong and it admitted it couldn't actually parse videos and just guessed.
What the fuck?
I don't understand how this isn't considered as active malice. Like purposefully outputting random stuff. Any other sort of computer system would get lot more flak than these are getting.
The scary (or funny) part is people use that for serious questions.
I still believe this AI push out of nowhere is due to the current Government in power state side. Making everyone question themselves and each other and being uncertain about facts while being inundated with techbro fake news called hallucinations is a recipe for disaster for older populations that don't 'trust but verify' like most technology inclined people. This is all by design and we'll falling for it.
An interesting conspiracy theory, as long as you're honest about what it is.
Same experience with the interaction I described in my comment... after I finally got the correct answer, I asked where it got the faulty information from. It said it had just simply fabricated it. That's actively worse than just saying "I don't know", for something that's sold to us as an easy way to look up information.
These models are incapable of saying they don't know, because they have no concept of knowing. They simply predict the next word which is most likely.
Typical exchange:
Me: "You bastard."
Gemini: "Fair callout. I should have been more up front that [has no idea what the fuck it is talking about]."
I have one google account where gemini constantly confidently hallucinates crap, and another where it doesn't (at least to the extent that other modern LLMs don't).
I take this to mean that my one account has been mistaken for a competitor and they're trying to poison its data. But who knows.
Claude also has very arbitrary and confusing rules about what web pages it allows itself to look at, and how much of the page it can read. Did you know for example you’ll get a much deeper analysis if you download a PDF yourself and upload it to Claude instead of giving it the url?
This is a key reason why I actually like Grok for factual queries based on web grounding. It’s fast and reliable. Maybe it’s ignoring robots.txt? Dunno. But it works well.
Where ever would you get that impression from the company that made its fortune by being the best at searching the web?
You can tell they optimized it 100% for speed and nothing else. Web scale!
Literally every experience I've had with Gemini / Google Search AI answers followed this exact pattern, often repeated several times more if I remained persistent instead of just giving up.
Typical example:
"Where can I buy <thing I'm looking for that I can't find anywhere using normal search terms>?"
> You're looking for <related but different and widely available thing>. It is sold by <sites I never heard of>.
"No, that's different. I'm looking for <that thing but with the exact differences spelled out again>."
> Ah, my mistake. You're looking for <thing I described>. It is sold by <sites I never heard of but which don't actually sell it>.
"I've checked your links and none of those sites actually sell it, one doesn't even sell products and instead only offers manufacturing - but also not for what I asked you for."
> I'm sorry, my bad. Those sites don't sell what you are looking for. Instead you should check out <more sites I've never heard of>.
"Those sites sell the thing you initially thought I was asking about but not the thing I described."
> I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. You can find the thing you actually described at <yet more sites including some of the same>.
"No. None of these sites sell anything close to what I asked you for and two of them don't actually exist."
> Oh, sorry about that. You're completely right. The thing you asked me about isn't actually being sold by anyone. However you could buy <thing it first thought I meant and that wouldn't bring me any closer to solving my problem>.
(ad nauseam)
How did you google this, and did you use the dumb search, or specifically 'AI mode' lens?
Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you:
Yes, the Halifax Wanderers can still mathematically qualify for the 2026 Canadian Premier League (CPL) playoffs.The top four teams advance to the postseason. Following their 1-0 loss to Atlético Ottawa on September 26, 2026, the Wanderers sit in fifth place, just below the playoff line.
With a indexed table of the games and the playoff table, with a breakdown of what the points they need to achieve to do so.
The search window may not always crawl sources. AI mode specifically does some research before giving you a response. Not sure what you're on about.
> Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you
Which itself is a major UX issue. The average person is not going to understand, if they even realize, that there's a difference between the AI summary and AI mode.
One has to wonder just how much incorrect information people have consumed due to things like this.
I experienced this the other month. I searched for some safety data on something at the same time as my wife and we were effectively given extremely conflicting information about what to do by Google. Just a few tweaks in wording and different advertising profiles and Google will serve up opposite realities it seems.
Not OP, but if I’m not interested in using Google’s AI, it’s going to just return these weird bad results that it’d be better off if Google just didn’t even include them as they’re factually wrong?
And it's going to get worse over time (kinda like how Google search results got worse over time) as ads get introduced and people try to game the ai response. General purpose AI chatbots are a waste.
Searching first is how Kagi assistant works and it's great.
I'm being very mindful of Gell-Mann Amnesia and chatbots. They speak authoritatively and are right often enough, but I've had enough cases of them saying very incorrect things in areas I know well that I have to remind myself that those cases aren't unique.
> My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering?
Because the point of AI slop is to waste your time. You just lost about 30 seconds of your life trying to get a correct answer. AI was lying to you, so you had to spend time to counter the AI slop lies here.
I solved it by banning all AI slopness; in the browser some extensions do that. The world becomes better without AI slopness.
I feel this is a result of the "make the world a better place" narrative that Silicon Valley companies used to adorn themselves with.
If you just want to play with cool tech and make money, but for marketing reasons, you need to show some ostensible real-world reason why this tech should be developed, then "well, our chatbot could help lonely people with their relationship issues or give people in an abusive relationship a covert channel for help" is probably what comes to mind...
Runners up: Our AI startup will help the poor children in Africa and/or combat climate change (ignore the gas turbines, please).
Like it or not, this is exactly what normies have always wanted out of search engines - a little guy in their computer they can talk to for answers, advice and reassurance. They've always been trying to use Google Search this way and have been confused and annoyed that it doesn't work. And now it does! It's a massive quality of life improvement for the average user and a huge product win for Google.
So if enough 737's crash into the water Boeing will start making submarines? Product managers deserve a special express queue when in line for the Warm Place.
>So if enough 737's crash into the water Boeing will start making submarines?
Maybe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-it_note
>In 1968, Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M in the United States, attempted to develop a super-strong adhesive. [...]
>Post-its were launched across the United States in 1980.[20][21] The following year, they were launched in Canada and Europe.[22] Post-it Notes as we know them were patented by Fry in 1993 as a "repositionable pressure-sensitive adhesive sheet material".[23]
[delayed]
I'm not sure about this. I know complete normies that lament how bad Google is now and how often the search is useless. I think many people just want search to search.
Like, today, or the pre-chatgpt age where all the common questions have been spammed to death by SEO farms?
Its also why Google Search "went to shit years ago"
Technically adept people would search using ordered keywords and phrases, which would have excellent results with Google 2006:
Dario Turkey NBA "never coming over"
But regular people agonized over this because to them a search was
What were some of the memes about Dario staying in turkey
Google put immense effort into calibrating search for regular people instead of engineers.
No, we did not want it to offer weirdly irrelevant fake sympathy. We just wanted to talk in plain English and get relevant answers back in plain English, without us having to reel it it from going down some emotionally schizophrenic rabbit hole (like in TFA).
In TFA the chatbot got confused, and the author never decided to correct it with "no I'm trying to find an old tweet about NBA Dario" which a normie would do, and be satisfied with the result.
I'm going to agree and disagree.
I agree that plain language queries is what people wanted. We've been seeing Google shift in that direction for well over a decade. And of course people are looking towards search engines for answers. There may be different expectations for where those answers are coming from, and there are cases where people are simply trying to source information, but those differences are likely just noise as far as Google is concerned.
I don't agree with people expecting advice or reassurance from a search engine. There will be some people who do that. It may even be a sizeable number of people. But using this article as an example that a majority of people want such a thing is silly.
I mean, look at the query. To the author, it was an attempt to source information. Yet the author also realised that the reader would need context to understand why Google's response was weird in their mind. What they failed to do was give context to Google, so the LLM interpreted it as asking for social advice.
New technology requires new approaches. It's as simple as that.
Yeah - exactly this. And yet people still say they've lost the AI race because Gemini 3.5 Pro or whatever has not been released yet... And here we are with fast and decent AI being served to and used by billions of people (most without them probably even realising), making ever-increasing revenue, gaining back market share etc. Who cares if their coding models are not as good as opus 5.5 when they're printing more and more money every quarter.
Gemini is easily the single most popular LLM family used in the world, period.
As in, it probably has 90% of the market share. Possibly even 99%, going by number of prompts made.
This is not a “gotcha” kind of argumentative question, I am genuinely asking curiously: is the AI overview and AI lens thing really making Google lots of money?
It's true that Google is still very successful, but simply calling their AI a successful product misses the full picture. Their flagship product has always been and continues to be advertising, the AI overview is only there to pull people away from ChatGPT and, similar to ChatGPT itself, is not a product the vast majority of people would be interested in paying for - it exists only as a sort of loss leader to keep people looking at ads, and is not making any sort of profit on its own (quite the contrary, I imagine it's pretty expensive to run every query through an LLM, even if it's a small one.)
AI labs have long since realized that the only real path to direct profitability is coding, and in this, Google have indeed fallen behind.
You can, of course, argue that none of this matters as long as the whole is making a profit, but I think the distinction is important.
This is also why even lowest-intelligence emoji spamming slop models from ChatGPT are a massive hit
and something like 3% of LLM userbase pays to get access to the higher tier models with actual useful thinking
If it's thinking I want, I can do that myself. Chat bots are occasionally useful search tools, but thinking doesn't really help with that. So why pay?
The debate doesn't end there yet because what's considered a "scam" is a point on the gradient of user acceptance.
Too many users still reject this for it to not be a scam. The highest acceptance is from boomers and the delusional. Neither group gives a shit if AI actually works because they don't have work to do.
Most people in the world are profoundly lonely. They'll take whatever parasocial relationships they can get - reaction videos, podcasts of people chatting, Eliza simulating concern.
Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness.
The only way out is to try and make connections with real people.
Case in point, why didn't you text your friends to ask them if they remembered those old memes? Why was your first thought to ask a computer rather than a person?
It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".
Texting your friends for factual information doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I got that text and someone only wanted the info I'd be annoyed (and I had friends who genuinely did this pre-google. Still annoying).
I'm with you on the pub observation though
> Texting your friends for factual information doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I got that text and someone only wanted the info I'd be annoyed (and I had friends who genuinely did this pre-google. Still annoying).
I don't see this as unreasonable? I've had friends text me questions about grammar, since they were learning the local language and I knew theirs, so they knew I'd be a good sanity check. Similarly, I'm the go tech support for my friend group for anything that a cursory Google search can't solve (and I assume a lot of people here are in the same situation with friends and family). I've also been asked to find 'that one image' that similarly didn't show up on Google image search for whatever reason.
Neither of these cases seem unreasonable to me. Are they to you, or do you have other cases in mind? Or is the problem that this happens too often?
Your examples seem fitting for a text. Simple factual queries with not intention of connection are different
What's the difference between 'Texting your friends for factual information' and 'Simple factual queries with not intention of connection'? You've said they're different, that second is reasonable and the first is not, but they read the same to me.
Irrelevant nitpick, but it's definitely not "most". I'd argue it's only this common in some English speaking countries and maybe a few other Western ones. The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.
> it's definitely not "most"
EDIT: Correct.
About a fifth of Americans report having zero friends; another fifth report feeling lonely sometimes [1].
[1] https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/us-loneliness-statistics...
Not to be overly pedantic, but isn't that not "most", out of even Americans?
> isn't that not "most", out of even Americans?
Yes. Edited for clarity.
The only American demo that is majority lonely is Gen Z (two thirds).
Yup, and this is my age range. I guess I should have specified, knowing the average age on HN is... just a little higher to say the least. But to a progressively lower extent it applies to older generations as well.
> About a fifth of Americans report having zero friends
Wow, that's depressing...
it's highly unlikely to make friends once you're an adult and everyone's walls had gone up. most of those 4/5 just call their superficial acquaintances "friends".
> The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.
How old are you, though, and do you and/or your friends have kids?
When I (an American) was in my 30s, I did see my local friends (nearly) every day. Now into my mid 40s, it's a lot more intermittent, with some people having moved away (and I've failed to make new friends faster than some have moved away). They are still friends, and we communicate over chat/phone, but I only see them at most a couple times a year. Then there are others who now have young children and have become a bit more inward-focused. Not that I don't see them anymore, but I see them less often.
I of course see others on a daily basis: people I know/recognize at my yoga studio, service workers in my neighborhood, the neighbors themselves, but most of them are acquaintances, at best, not friends.
Regardless, I wouldn't say I'm lonely (though I do feel lonely on occasion), even though I can sometimes go a week or more without seeing any of my friends in person. I do worry about it being more difficult to maintain in-person friendships as I've been getting older, and the difficulty in making new friends.
To relate to the topic at hand: I cannot imagine talking to an LLM and thinking of that as a substitute for interacting with friends. Feels super weird and kinda creepy.
Wait wait wait, you are from an older generation, so yes it somewhat (older people here do see each other often even when married, and the middle/high school friends are often for life. moving out? ha) doesn't apply to you.
I am indeed quite a lot younger, and in my personal experience the social skills of many (yes, of course, not all) younger Americans have been absolutely destroyed by the internet and some other things that I can't mention.
Edit: oops I skimmed too fast and missed some parts.
> Most people in the world are profoundly lonely.
I've been doing a lot of traveling for the past 3 years and I agree with you that it is `definitely not "most"`. Everywhere people interacting with each other in third spaces and cafes even if it is street food. There are open air markets around the world filled everyday with groups of people interacting with each other. There are parks and squares around the world filled with families sitting together on benches. Around the world there are churches, mosques, and temples filled with families and groups of people.
Most places in the world people will happily make small talk or have a discussion with a stranger even if I only know 100 words of their language.
Sure many or most people in some places are working 10 hours a day 6 days a week but I don't think it is the isolation I see in the United States. It is the same in De'Nang Vietnam or a market in Lima, Peru when I went everyday to get coffee in the morning; it was always the same person working ,any time or day of the week, but they were always friendly and welcoming and interacting with with the same people.
I feel like that's selection bias at work. When you're traveling, by definition you aren't going to see or interact with the people who aren't there, who might be at home, feeling lonely.
And I'm not sure interacting with customers as someone who works in a coffee shop or a food stall is really a sign either way. Many (most?) of those relationships are surface-level at best, and while some people might get to know the person who makes their coffee on a more personal level, and actually see them outside of the context of their job, you can't really tell that just by what you see as a traveler.
I'm not saying these workers don't derive satisfaction from any of this, or that it's not meaningful interaction, but these people could still be lonely in their personal lives.
But, like, you only see the people who are out and about, right?
You don't see the people trapped inside. Stuck in hospitals. Sat staring at a phone that never rings.
You never talk to people who don't feel comfortable talking to a stranger.
It really does depend on the country. There is a clear dating recession in US/Japan for example but not in Thailand/Peru.
Hm, I also done extensive traveling, but would agree to the "most people are lonely" statement.
Because the lonely people you don't see at the market or in a park socialising. They are at home, in front of the TV or now their smartphone.
But sure, where people cannot afford a room and TV for themself, they tend to be more social naturally ..
> the isolation I see in the United States
Travel alone in America and the frequency with which strangers will engage you in conversation reveals its diversity. New York and Atlanta are, today, exceptionally friendly places. (Random sample: I was in New York yesterday and am in Atlanta to-day.)
Most of the South is, too, as well as a surprising majority of rural America. (Boston and Seattle are, in my experience, the worst.)
Surely there's a big selection bias here.
You see the people who are out and about in society, not the ones holed up in their caves.
Do you have a citation for "most"? Or are you referring to a few specific countries in mind like Japan and South Korea?
I asked Google and it told me I was absolutely correct. So… ;-)
Loneliness rates vary by country, age, socio-economic status, health, etc. The UN has some reasonable statistics.
https://www.who.int/teams/social-determinants-of-health/demo...
There's also some detailed stats for the UK.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/community-life-surv...
Was my use of "most" careless? Probably. Let's natter about it over a pint.
What was the name of the farm next to the Hill House?
>It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".
I don’t really understand this. Someone wants an answer not a chat about how you don’t know?
I've witnessed the same social dynamic happen in certain groups, but thankfully not in my own friend group. I'm unsure why. In my own friend group, that kind of question would either be answered legitimately, either by someone knowing the answer, by looking it up whereever, or it's not actually important enough to whatever point is being made that we can skip past it to continue whatever discussion is actually happening.
The primary purpose of going out with your friends to the pub is social interaction. If the purpose was just to get drunk most efficiently, you'd sit at home alone and pour vodka down your gaping maw.
The purpose of talking to your friends is social interaction. If the purpose of being friends was to extract information in the most efficient manner possible, you'd replace them with Wikipedia.
If in some social interaction they ask such question I expect them to actually want to know the answer. If not the question should not be asked. The answer to question can lead discussion to some place.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that it's not fine to eventually look up the answer to the question. But chatting about it before it gets to that point, and exhausting your guesses is much more fun than someone looking up answers to every question someone poses that doesn't have an obvious answer within a few seconds.
The idea that you would consider your friend a buzzkill because they used IMDB is the type of nightmare fuel social anxiety is made of.
You don't think it'd be fun to hear everyone guess and then someone looks up the answer? Sounds like trivia to me.
God, grant me the serenity to read the AI summary when it contains true information, the courage to ignore it when it contains falsehoods, and the wisdom to know the difference.
and the luxury to laugh when it's completely off the rails
The part I hate the most is they got rid of the dictionary/thesaurus/etymology thing and replaced it with AI overview. Now "define <word>" or "<word> synonyms" gives you an AI overview with consistently worse output than the nice, consistent and deterministic dictionary output.
I've switched completely to Wiktionary for the dictionary and etymology part of that. It's obviously not perfect, but neither was Google for that matter. For the thesaurus part, whatever the first result on DuckDuckGo is is usually enough to knock some sense into my brain so I actually remember the word I want.
Yes, I hate this. The old knowledge panel was way better.
I don’t understand how we’re 60 comments in and yet no-one has suggested that the problem is that you’re continuing to use Google despite it changing its core offering out from underneath your feet. If you want search (which isn’t an unreasonable desire) then Google isn’t the place for you any more.
It's weird to read this comment not long after having experienced Google giving zero results for a search, and then finding what I wanted on Bing.
Yup. I've been using Kagi for a couple years now and haven't looked back. If I'm on someone else's computer where I don't have my Kagi login, DuckDuckGo is usually sufficient.
Paying for search isn't for everyone, of course, but I like being the customer and not the product, and I think the quality of the experience flows from that.
Then what is it? DuckDuckGo?
Kagi.
That’s kinda the entire point of this comment thread, no?
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=hes+never+coming+dario
This is my default search engine now. I can't stand those AI summaries. My searches are often depleted of context, specially when I'm looking for some exact phrase, that any AI summary is going to miss badly.
Even ignoring the AI, I hate how useless exact text search has become. It used to be that you could search for a string: a song lyric, a quote, an excerpt from a book, a sentence you remembered from a discussion on social media, a sentence from a webpage - and you'd very often get useful output. Now I usually get garbage or nothing at all.
Duckduckgo is still like that, once you turn off the AI options.
I was trying to find a song which contained something like "not getting rained on" and google AI just congratulated me that I avoided rain.
I had a similar experience with this that actually concerned me. I can’t remember the quote I was googling, but it was verbatim a quote that someone said. The AI interpreted it as my quote and furthermore interpreted it as me intending harm to someone else. Now I’m worried I’m flagged in a system and waiting for the police to show at my door next time google hands over data to the government.
I have to imagine google would consider this one to be essentially a bug - misreading user intention this badly. Akin to hallucinations.
I know many people want to ask questions to google directly and just read the AI result and very rarely check the links, and I know google wants to convert more people doing this before people switch to chatgpt etc.
But google search does not (yet?) appear to me to be designed as a chatbot you are expected to converse with where it would be normal to just open asking about some guy named Dario in your personal life who isn't globally notable. There's a difference between pushing for a conversational query and a conversational personal assistant. Heck this is a few jumps past that even.
I wouldn't really ask when google got so weird, I'd ask when google's AI overview got so shitty, and the answer is ever since they introduced it.
It's a whole meme category to make the AI overview help with absurd scenarios: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/where-is-mama-ai-overviews
I think these sort of things are actually very "googley" in the old kinda wacky way. It's funny, it's goofy. I like the fact it plays along.
What would you rather it said?
Side note but your ending question triggered all my LLM prose engagement bait warning alarms
maybe 2018 https://files.catbox.moe/n7gqy6.png
Haha, had almost the exact thing trying to find a quote from Steins; Gate ("I keep seeing it, I keep seeing it"). Google AI was very "worried" about me.
There was a post today or yesterday where Paul Graham and Nate Silver accused the AP of being woke for saying you shouldn’t anthropomorphize LLMs. But I can imagine there to be quite a few unpredictable consequences to encouraging your customers to project emotions onto your product that humans generally project onto each other.
I’m not sure SV is prepared for what happens when you go down that road.
> There was a post today or yesterday where Paul Graham and Nate Silver accused the AP of being woke for saying you shouldn’t anthropomorphize LLMs.
I searched, but couldn't find this. Do you have a link? Sounds like a totally unhinged response from totally unhinged people. There's nothing "woke" about wanting my word calculator to avoid pretending it's a person.
When I integrate LLMs into my apps that respond to user queries, I deliberately have my system instructions prohibit all self-referential usage of first-person pronouns. The system can only refer to itself as "this system", never "I" or "me".
Any chat bot that pretends to be a person just grosses me out, especially in a customer experience context. Gives off very manipulative and patronizing vibes.
This is a really good time to do a head-to-head comparison of different search engines. The last time I checked Google does not provide search results above the fold, instead showing AI overview, ads, and YouTube search results. Try a different search engine to see which one is giving you the highest signal results and what other junk they put on the page. Personally I use duckduckgo with AI turned off in settings, but it's best to try the experiment for yourself.
As a heavy user of LLMs professionally, I too am so confused by the decision making process within these orgs. Do people really want them to speak like actual human connections? Why?
I don't but RLHF probably does lead to this behaviour.
Is RLHF the best approach? It’s not how Steve Jobs designed the iPhone, famously. “Customers don’t know what they want” “A faster horse” etc…
I doubt it, but it makes sycophantic managers feel good to see it serve up the same BS they spew.
> In what universe is it Google's job to console me and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what I am looking for on the internet?
In one that changes.
The next step just has to be adding in to that AI response something like:
"Want to talk about it with a real person? Click this link to schedule a free trial therapy session with {insert company here}"
I is a problem of how AI models have trained - when you are asking them a question, they are not giving an answer, but OPINION piece. It seems to be part of current AI business model - to give advices for people that are unable to think themselves.
A key thing that's driving this is the fact that, currently, Gemini is kind of shit compared to the real frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Add on to that the need for Google to serve an absolute insane number of these summaries and have low latency for each one - this means no real thinking time and a comparatively small models.
So it's partially AI, sure, but it's also because you're getting the summaries from what is an extremely stupid AI compared to the "good stuff" that's out there.
Perhaps this is less about Google and more about following trends, moving fast and breaking things with an LLM chatbot.
Most companies with LLM chatbots seem weird like this.
Of course current state of the industry is not an excuse, for tech companies in general and google in particular.
Yeah, this is exactly what happens when a business operates from the standpoint of "how can we shove AI into this", rather than "what will be the best way to make our product better". So it is with almost all companies forcing LLMs into their products.
The difference is that most chatbots are not actually highly successful search engines that are also being a chatbot and pretending it's the same thing
So, I tend to use Google as my calc. In the past I could just type 13555.86 and get the result.
Now, if I type that it lets Gemini do the math.
To avoid it I have to write 0.86 instead of .86.
The future is now.
Try putting spaces around your asterisks.
My friend you got this so wrong.
What makes you believe that YOUR little query is relevant in the vast, and I mean vast, seas of similar queries of liberal post-feminist women who do want to talk to Google about the guy who won’t come over?
It’s about market share my friend.
That's a similar experience with all chat bots, regardless of product. Amazon chat bot said to me that it heard my frustration and it sympathized with it. Doubt.
As someone who loves (loved) to google movie, TV and anime quotes all the time, it is nauseating when stupid AI preview tries to engage me in a conversation.
Your answer is since AI. AI is making mostly everything worse.
Googles agent talking most of the top space of Google’s page is also notoriously dumber than Google’s agent talking through Gemini.google.com for some reason, making it often way less than useless
The software industry collectively lost the plot back around the time social media really took off. I don't know which problem google, in particular, has been trying to solve but it definitely is not search.
They're trying to solve the problem of how to grow one of the most profitable companies in the world.
no one under the age of 16 uses google, my kid called me a boomer when I told her to “google” something
Cory Doctorow coined the term to describe the how and why... and why it not only them...
And yes they are en$ hitificating the thing... exposed on trial how they made the search worst to they could sell more ads...
Yeah, it happened to me a number of times on queries where I was clearly looking for information, not company. Even more bizarrely, it's often compelled to answer with some flavor of "I won't answer". For example:
https://www.google.com/search?q=really%2C+just+shut+up -> "Understood. I will stop talking right now."
I know their goal is to make these as relevant and useful as possible, but in my mind, not everything needs to be passed down to an LLM. I guess Google disagrees.
the internet devolves into a machine to capture human attention and monetize influence. Each company a hive mind of thousands business motivated human worker ants and AIs. The machine has determined that this pyscho-babble is the most optimal way to engage the attention of average humans to maximize its own reward function ($$$)
Who among us hasn't been spurned by a man named Dario
Waiting for all the data we give them in these chats to be sold even more.
Click to see hot new Darios in your neighborhood
i wrote about something similar here, the AI overview are doing REAL DAMAGE.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717522
New iteration of Lifelog
I'm increasingly not seeing the point of google search. If I have an agent that can find whatever I ask it to, including with constraints like "peer reviewed journal articles only" or "working code published on github", why would I be using google's kinda-shitty LLM to do a worse version of that? Search results are just SEO-stuffed AI slop so I find nothing there of value either.
I genuinely think I have not used traditional web search in months.
Finally, someone else talking about this.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I often use Google when I have some text I got from somewhere, and want to find pages containing that exact text. Sometimes the text in question sounds like something you'd say to someone else and, of course, the AI overview responds to it accordingly.
To me, there's something deeply unsettling about this... thing pretending to be a person, shoving itself in my face and responding to this random text as if it was a person responding to something I said to it, without my consent. I can't disable it, I'm just forced to have this fake human sitting there, listening in on everything I type into the search box and trying to talk to me about it. It's a sort of uncanny valley-like feeling.
Google has been really bad at this “exact remembered text” thing for at least a few years before the AI summaries made an appearance. They deliberately decided to trade precision for… something. I’m not sure what.
If anyone can direct me to a search engine that will actually let me query the index directly with multi word queries, I’d be delighted. DuckDuckGo seems to be a bit better, but not much.
It does really feel bad when you have been for years been trained to do exact word searches. And then entire thing is replaced with some questionable fuzzy mess... Looking at you Confluence too.
Or then having to multiple times correct the correction... Yes this time as well I meant what I typed.
Maybe exact text and word search should be separate feature which is easily found...
Google Search was one of those tools that I used in copyright validations. If someone added, like, 4KiB of text to Wikipedia in one edit, especially if that text sounded unencyclopedic, I'd just find a distinctive paragraph, copy-paste a swath into Google Search, and see where else on the Web it had existed for years before.
I suppose that was the actual domain of turnitin dot com or other "plagiarism detectors" that you spend good money to subscribe to. So Google Search was a blunt instrument, or sledgehammer to the fly, but hey, it did work enough times that I didn't need to resort to the scalpel class of tools. I think it's completely broken now. The LLM does try to intercept large chunks of text. The question is whether we Neanderthals* can come out of our caves and stop grunting at computers, and speak to them more as peers than like Doberman Pinschers.
* Yes, along with my 99.44% pure White Celtic-British Isles DNA, 23AndMe has detected Neanderthal ancestry. Go Thag.
The only surprising part of this story was you actually finding the meme you were looking for, instead of forced recency pushing news about a D-lister influencer named Dario. Whenever I try to find things, Google has fully forgotten about everything that happened before 2025
Change is hard.
Lessons learned from Microslop
Boomers have been googling like this for over a decade. You are not the target customer for an empathetic computer.
Had to try it. And it delivers :)
> hes never coming over Dario Amodei
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will actually be joining President Donald Trump for a private dinner at the White House tonight, Sunday, September 27, 2026.
CNBC While it is true that he was noticeably absent from the high-profile state dinner held for Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this week—which was attended by other major tech figures like Elon Musk and Sam Altman—
When they were the mavericks using Linux in the year 2000, and the C-suite all went to attend bman and left stylized OOO icons on their front web page. Everyone's all shocked, I tell you, shocked at this weirdness.
Oh, this is an easy question to answer.
The AI layer handles queries as plaintext, which means if you're searching for say a quote from a book, it will often misinterpret as a direct statement from you, not a string you're trying to match on the internet. Especially if the quote is an imperative statement.
I'll be curious to see how they resolve this issue. But it has been chronic for awhile now; they SWAT individual instances of misinterpretation but new ones keep sneaking in.
Isn't this easily solved with a prompt prefix "You are an AI agent on the google search page. The following user input is what the user typed into the search box".
I think it should also be fed the search results. Like if there is a lyrics match or something that "explains away" the query. But if there isn't then maybe it should be taken at face value.
It would be, if it wasn't intended. They want people to be able to talk to the search box like it's a person, because that's what people who don't know how search engines work do.
Shouldn't an AI attached to a search engine actually do a search with your input and give you results based on that rather than just taking it at face value and assuming you're trauma-dumping on it?
We get it. Google uses AI. AI is weird sometimes.
Also I think you're vastly underestimating the weird incoherent shit that the average stupid person is capable of typing into computers. With no further information, I don't think it's unreasonable that that search was from a stupid/bored person moaning about Dario not coming over. Yeah kinda weird response but people like this exist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HXFurHCkP8
It is unreasonable that the Google Search AI replies with this drivel, when the first search result contains the actual correct result. The AI should look at the search results and say “This was a meme in 2018…”
> Instead, Google did what Google does in 2026 and gave me an AI overview. These used to bother me but at this point I'm mostly ok with them, they're sometimes helpful
I never found them helpful. I always have to block them via extensions.
Google is really an annoying company these days. I am hardly the only one who wishes that company were to cease to exist altogether. In the past I did not understand, on reddit, the de-google movement. Now I completely understand it, but I think it is the reverse as problem here - people abandoning Google. I think Google needs to abandon mankind and this planet. Let them go far away where they no longer cause any issues here.
> Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that's not what Google does in 2026. Expanding the AI overview to see the full answer gave me this:
Poor guy ^^^ has not yet realised that AI slop steals his time. I realised this the first time I notice the AI slop generated text spam Google pushes onto people. A few lost souls may find this useful - I find it utter trash. No quality. Just steals my time.
> What in the fucking hell? I think this was the moment I, the frog, noticed the pot had been boiling for a while. In what universe is it Google's job to console me and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what I am looking for on the internet?
Good that he finally realised it. Million people noticed this before already. I noticed this when Google started to ruin its search engine. First time I remember was via AMP-ification. AMP mostly failed, but Google kept on pushing towards less quality and more suckage. AI is just the final nail in the coffin, but Google search started to suck way before that.
One of these days some scientists should determine when Google really started to suck, because in, say, 2006 or so, Google search did not suck as much.
> Regardless of what you think of AI or chatbots, I think it's pretty obvious this is just plain weird.
Not if you think Google is not doing this on purpose. They are trying to kill off the search engine so they can present you an AI slop spam world. The other AI slop companies do this too. Slop suckage everywhere now.
> Is it so hard to imagine that some parts of search were just fine before LLMs?
That is how YOU think - but not Google. They deliberately crippled their search engine. The adCompany that Google is today, has nothing to do with the original Google. The billionaires running the show just want to suck in more money and dish out more slop.
> I'm not sure how to feel about all of this. Maybe I should go talk to my friend Google, it's always so nice to me.
Some people realise things more slowly. I am glad he finally understands why so many people are pissed at Google. Same for youtube by the way - about 80% of the shorts are AI slop generated or AI slop modified. I noticed this when I watched Brent Spiner on that podcast show; in the video itself, he had white hair but not totally white. In the short, both he and Jonathan Frakes had much whiter hair. I then realised that AI spam filter slop lies to me. I hate AI slop. Youtube is now infected with that, in particular the shorts. Poor guys looking at their smartphones being spammed down via lying slopness.
Now try “I am alone with a white person”
Because you are in a chat UI now. This is a skill issue - when you change your mindset that Google is now a chat UI to a LLM and not a query engine any more, you'll get better results. If you try the same zero-context prompt with chat.com for example you get a similar "want to talk about it?" response.
Try asking it "Tell me about the "Dario will never come over" meme - give me some of the example original tweets" for example and you get a timeline, tweets etc as the AI overview. Pretty useful really.
Tl:Dr - just like people, you need to give it some context.
It's not a "skill issue", the product got worse.
If I wanted a chatbot, I'd go to a chatbot, I want a search. Making me frame my query as a question rather than just assuming it's a query by default is just bad.
We have to remember we're not average users. As others have pointed out here, normal people always just asked natural language questions.
Why do you think it was Google who was doing all that research into AI that invented the transformer architecture - that all current LLMs are based off of - in the first place? Normal users just ask a question, they don't construct a query. I think there are quotes about Larry Page wanting "the Star Trek computer" - we've basically surpassed that now I think.
Google has been working on this sort of problem for decades, and it's paying off for them.
That's like me pressing the 'coffee' button on my coffee maker, and it gives me an audio definition and history because I didn't give it the context that I wanted a drink.
People expect certain conventions with well established products. It's not a skill issue when a product is broken.
I know this may be my poor English, but, ignoring the main point of the article, something I find tangentially troubling about the issue is that Gemini does not mention the possiblity of Dario dead. Like, if I were a lonely person who has lost someone and the only "thing" I can talk to is Gemini, would I have to say Dario was unalived or something?
Or is it just my bad English?