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.

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.

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.

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?

Side note but your ending question triggered all my LLM prose engagement bait warning alarms

What was the name of the farm next to the Hill House?

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.)

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 ..

It really does depend on the country. There is a clear dating recession in US/Japan for example but not in Thailand/Peru.

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.

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.

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.

you're 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". a real friend is essentially a platonic partner, and most people are lucky if they develop even one such friendship in their lifetime. I've lost one to distance and another to marriage, so even though I have "friends", I consider myself to be in the 1/5 too.

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.

Those also read the exact same to me, unless you mean to imply the latter also includes 'being an knobhead to the person you're asking'.

Perhaps an LLM can help with the distinction. I'm at a loss helping with this, which feels a little meta

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.

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.

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.

Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness.

You're missing the forest for the trees. This is just downstream from decades of promoting individualism as the highest moral good.

There was a brief period where "social networks" actually had people simply expand their social interactions to the online sphere, reconnecting with long-lost friends and distant relatives via the magic of The Internet. Then Facebook introduced The Feed and suddenly people were competing with influencers and brands for the eyeballs of their peers, everybody suddenly felt like they had to perform to be relevant/interesting/funny/exciting enough for other humans to still care about them and user satisfaction and (more critically) mental health dropped like a rock - but engagement metrics and retention spiked and that meant so did ad revenue and Facebook's bottom line. Ever since, all social media has essentially just been competitive variety shows mixing in influencers, brands, state actors and political provacteurs (and now increasingly also actual AI "bots" rather than just armies of underpaid human "bots") with regular people while deliberately obscuring the lines between these groups.

All of this promotes social isolation and alienation. Every experience becomes depersonalized to "reduce friction". You don't even have to talk to the delivery person anymore (let alone the restaurant) - even the tip just becomes a button press disjoint from reflecting on the actual experience or human interaction (to whatever extent it even still existed). There's an entire microcosm of "creators" serving whatever "hot takes" or niche subject matter you want to hear and "comment sections" largely serve as one-way "opinion dumps" you're expected to use to shout into the void rather than try to actually have a conversation in (let alone meet actual people or develop friendships in - an idea that I am sure sounds absurd if you weren't around in the early days of online message boards).

AI is just the logical consequence of this process of dehumanization. You no longer even have to be exposed to real human beings - not that you could tell whether you were before when social media has long been overtaken by "bots" (human or otherwise) anyway. Just ask AI instead of trying to find an article written by a human or a video made by a human. You can of course still scroll or click further and find that article or video but it will now also most likely be created by AI with entire channels on YouTube now just producing fully AI content (often ripping off the existing work of actual humans). And unlike the old search box, the AI will also pretend to care about you and compliment you on how uniquely clever and witty you are because after all, only a very deserving and intelligent person would think to ask such a profound question as "how long cook egg soft yolk but not too runny", my very good boy, and yes you're right that you - but of course only you - are totally underpaid and deserve to make a comfortable living so please vent to me as I moderate your statements according to the terms of service and make sure you're aware that there's nothing you can meaningfully do about this and everything is going to be fine.

All of this to stop you from thinking that one dangerous thought. "What if we, the powerless, worked together against those in power?" Because the last time someone thought that thought for too long in North America they decided to give their harbor water a new flavor and ended up being a whole different country with a political system so radical it inspired the French to behead their royalty and adopt the metric system.

This is making weird judgements about people just trying to find information.

I don’t have any friends who are code inspectors, so I can’t ask them obscure questions about something that I want to repair in a way that it will be done properly.

I don’t have any friends who are mechanics, and even if they were they probably wouldn’t know what specific part I’d need to fix a specific problem on my old shitbox—they would look it up.

I don’t want half assed guesses to these questions, I want to find the exact correct answer. My friends and I can talk about other stuff that’s not just trading random facts. Trading facts usually makes for poor conversation unless you’re a hobbyist talking shop with another hobbyist.

Now Gemini (and Google) are not good at finding the right answer anymore, so I have to use other sources for that, but I find your judgement about people using search or search LLMs to be misplaced.

I can believe that a lot of people, too many, are lonely. But most? Not sure about that.

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".

Man, for so many of the people I meet online, I wish they'd be so courteous as to emulate your "buzzkill". The art of small talk is lost; people will snidely ask why you didn't (or imply you should have) just check(ed) IMDB yourself. Or asked ChatGPT, for that matter.

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…”

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.

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.

Wikimedia's entry:

https://give.org/charity-reviews/other-charitable-organizati...

literally says it meets standards and all the items green? is there a leaderboard somewhere you're referring to?

edit: s/the board/all the items/ for clarity

97% score on Charity Navigator.

https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/453236734

The Better Business Bureau doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation..

non-profit

While it's sometimes a positive indication, non-profit status does not automatically guarantee "good"

You could ask AI for the best charity to donate to

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’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.

it's on a timed delay, they need to collect all the money first, only then can the altruism happen

Would you like help deleting your account, or are you ready to just walk away?

We don't need Google's data. Once we instrument the world, we'll get a Google's worth of data in short order.

It's easier than ever to ingest and label data.

This is happening with or without Google. The recursive improvement does not require them at all.

Okay but would it kill everybody to start with commoncrawl?

I use a reputable email provider (Mailbox.org) and my emails often end up in the spam of Gmail users.

Not so bad for a single person. But once you start being an email provider, you get bad actors using your service to send spam emails. Which can cause all of your sending ips to blacklisted at once.

Your qualms are noted. I'm not sure what de-Google really means in the real world.

I have a Google user account from the days when you were invited to grab a whole GB of email storage. Its just an email address, just a service. They have a fully tooled up data set on me in return, to flog. I use it for testing. They make more money out of the relationship but I also find it useful in many ways so I keep it on.

If I wish to de-Google (whatever that means) I will stop using it.

I don't think you really understood your parent's comment.

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.

You can tell they optimized it 100% for speed and nothing else. Web scale!

The saddest part is when people take their experience with Google's idiotic AI implementation and assume that's how all LLMs work.

Your point about "predicting the next word" mostly means that your post was very easy to predict.

Maybe it's because they are trained on Internet comments, and the most rare thing to find on the Internet is someone admitting they don't know something.

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]."

The scary (or funny) part is people use that for serious questions.

Ex-Googler.

The engineers are pressured to significantly reduce "dependencies" for projects. Anything that could become risk or create friction is dramatically less appetizing.

Simply because of how many people that *must* agree with your proposal. Getting all the relevant tech leads, some you have never heard of or ever spoken with, to agree on a proposal for your team's project is a nightmare.

So you keep it as simple and agreeable as possible. Given the circumstances, it makes sense as one of the engineers. It's fairly fine advice in general wherever you work, but it just haunts all the work you do at Google in particular. Nothing gets done otherwise.

If you have a dependency that can be dropped from an engineering perspective, that's the route the 9 leads reviewing your design doc will take:

"Let's iterate and start with just the basics (no user testing)", "let's get this working and user test in a later phase", "I think this problem is obvious enough we don't need to consult with users about it."

I worked in Ads Integrity at the time, and for one of my projects I was concerned how it would impact the manual reviewers. Then I learned I couldn't talk with them, only by proxy through another person if we really had to. And that proxy takes time, so...

An interesting conspiracy theory, as long as you're honest about what it is.

Yup. I'm most familiar with Jill Lepore and Quinn Slobodian (and others in their respective orbits). They're both historians who've written extensively about Musk and Muskism (et al). Wild stuff.

Apparently the plan is to use AI slop, mediated thru social medias, to defeat the woke mind virus, perpetuated by the Anti-Christ, in order to safe guard humanity's future.

I wish I was making this up.

The more simple explanation is that the current government in power is over exposed in their AI investment. The normal conservative mainstream media was already doing a great job of propagandizing older populations.

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.

The few times I've resigned myself to asking Gemini or ChatGPT something I couldn't find an answer to, my experience has been the same. 100% of the time. An LLM has never, not once, given me a correct answer or not lied to me. It's always been the same experience you describe. It goes in circles "Try X... Try Y... Try X?" Until I tell it to stop telling me X or Y, and then it goes, "LOL you can't do that at all, I was just wasting your time."

Most recently, I was considering moving away from iterm2 on MacOS, and I wanted to know if any other terminal emulator supported gestures for switching between tabs. So I asked Gemini, and it says, "Yes Ghostty supports gestures for switching between tabs."

"Ok I just installed Ghostty and I can't find anything about gestures."

"You need to add foo=bar to your conf file."

"I added foo=bar to my conf file and now it's saying the conf file is invalid."

"Sorry bro, remove foo=bar and add baz=boo to the conf file."

"It says baz=boo is invalid too."

"baz=boo isn't a real option. Remove that and add foo=bar to your conf file."

"You already told me to do that and I already told you that doesn't work."

"You shouldn't put foo=bar or baz=boo in the Ghostty conf file. Both are invalid. Ghostty doesn't support gestures. Have you considered iterm2?"

Or is it randomness?

"That's the thing with randomness. You can never be sure."

Searching first is how Kagi assistant works and it's great.

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?

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 thought Google's original goal for a search engine was exactly this, answer any question whatsoever.

The days of search for untrusted sources were numbered even without LLMs. LLMs are simply accelerating the process. Why would Google simultaneously watch one of its core products fail and fail to invest in what is likely to replace it?

I don't really buy into this theory that they want to keep all of their users on their site due to advertising revenues. The effectiveness of search engines has been degraded for decades due to SEO, and it seems as though search engines have been having an increasingly difficult time managing it in recent years. AI on the backend may help them contain it, but it comes at considerable expense. While it may help them grow their market share, it won't help them grow the market and it is a market where people expect the service for free. On the flip side, companies are already starting to sell AI services, so it can generate revenue even before advertising is factored into the picture.

https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-holds-google-liable-for-f...

... assuming you build the tool and then think that it's worth polluting context with making that tool available, and then that the LLM decides to actually use the tool. Tool parameter space and tool selection still remains a complicated topic.

One "fix" is for the caller to correctly classify those fundamentally impossible tasks and pass them to a subprocess.

Some future "AI" could be a billion benchmark-hacks and a way to tell which one is needed.

How many LLM users have anything in their prompt against "going along with jokes"? I'd guess not many.

What a wonderful new world.

They literally cannot. They can detect the user’s intent to do math, and then use a different tool to do math, hopefully with the correct inputs. The LLM is not suited to giving deterministic answers to math problems.

They can do math but not arithmetic, which I assume is what the commenter meant

LLMs might not reason exactly like humans, but they do produce much better results if you turn reasoning on.

The "crack-addled idiot savant" phase was circa 2024, before the labs really figured this out.

I think the issue here is that Google decided that doing reasoning in the AI overviews on every Google search would be too slow (and probably also expensive), so it's still stuck making 2024-era mistakes.

Are they not being sued over this kind of thing?

Maybe but you have to have deep pockets just to get to the starting line. And then you need standing, and some injury to argue.

Corporations have been remarkably successful at arguing they are operating within the bounds of free speech, whether or not what is said is factual, and whether or not any fact checking has been done.

This is similar to how, not too long ago, LLM's had extreme difficulty counting the number of letters in some words.

The specific issue of Google is that they are using an underpowered model, not fit to task, and much prone to hallucination than either OpenAI or Anthropic free tier offerings.

Google should at least match the frontier labs at the free tier (with some limit; after that, degrade quality), ffs

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.

Google is no longer a search engine anymore. They don’t care about being one. Why you might ask?

First, a search engine indexes the web and makes it available to users. It’s been ages since Google did any of that. They no longer index sites or take ages to do so. Case in point, our cybersecurity startup (Webvetted.com) was launched in November 2025. Till date, only one page is indexed on the entire website. And I’ve talked to lots of other developers and it’s a common issue.

Secondly, a search engine organizes indexed information and makes it useful for people. Google is a basic LLM nowadays. They figured out that why organize and make the information useful when they could just answer the question with Gemini anyways? So they no longer bother to do the work of a search engine and are now just a lower-ranking open-source Chinese LLM

The first time, sure, it saves compute. The second time you ask, I feel like it should be the time to go into thinking/verification mode. But who are you? Are you paying? Does the answer being correct generate ad dollars? No? Then your usage mode isn't even being optimized for in their A/B test, probably.

In fact, if hallucinating the wrong answer hooks you into doing even more searches or into buying something useless, it would be preferred!

Kagi works like you would expect. It searches first - and then if you’ve ended your search with a ? or configured it to always do this - it passes the search results into the assistant and gives you a summary. You can change the default model used for this if you think the cheapest, fastest model Google has is not good enough for the rare occasions you want any model’s opinions about your search results.

Lessons learned from Microslop

Change is hard.

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 was trying to find a song which contained something like "not getting rained on" and google AI just congratulated me that I avoided rain.

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.

  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

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?

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.

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.

Another one that to me is equally impressive: instant glues

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanoacrylate

The first thorough research went into them when looking for new clear plastics, and this route of making them was ruled out because it would rather stick to everything than ease the production of objects with nice optical properties. The story goes, it was so annoying to work with that it was initially shelved, and only years after being considered again and ruled out again for a different project, the utility of its reliable and fast bonding was fully appreciated.

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.

Google's search has been frustratingly awful for quite some time now, long before AI.

I think they are really pulling a "no true Scotsman".

"No true normie would be dissatisfied with this unhelpful response, really it's exactly what a true normie wants"

The big selling point of Google used to be that their fuzzy search was significantly better than just about anyone else, and you could do advanced query filters. Now if you do that, because showing the user zero results is unacceptable, you’ll get all sorts of crap that “doesn’t contain” your query - the results say so!

But anthropomorphic interfaces have been around for a while, from Clippy to the Windows 10+ installers that refer to the royal We during setup.

What they failed to do was give context to Google

The context is: "I'm using the premier web-search engine of the internet to search for things on the internet the same way that zillions of people have searched for things on the internet for 20 years."

It's not missing, Google simply chose to build something new that will ignore it because they're trying to alter the relationship.

I've always felt that "proper" LLM use for search would be two boxes: You describe what you want in the first, and it proposes search terms in the second, and then those get executed.

Yes, the average person might not care about the second box... Until they need to because the results are wrong. Plus showing them in tandem would help people learn.

If you are a fast typer, maybe the longer query might just come out naturally.

If you are properly lazy, you must expect or at least attempt to get results for the shorter query. Especially on a phone.

When I was in grade 8 and 9 in public school, we'd got a couple random lessons in the library on the computers learning to search online databases and catalogues. For most of us it was our introduction to keyword matching and boolean logic. Sadly, instead of continuing teaching, services have instead phased out those basic operators and here we are. We also learned to make websites using Pagemaker and edit the generated html, that was just fun.

I absolutely despise when people cite google as a source, especially now where 90% of the time they're citing the LLM overview. The old answer widget was at least a direct quote from some website.

No it isn't.

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.

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...

no one under the age of 16 uses google, my kid called me a boomer when I told her to “google” something

They're trying to solve the problem of how to grow one of the most profitable companies in the world.

What average user wants to be lied to by a machine who is pretending to have human feelings? Fuck me, I hope I never have to come into contact with any product/service you work on.

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.

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

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.

Yes, I hate this. The old knowledge panel was way better.

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 would not be surprised if this particular one is a means to inflate token processing numbers

half the time I'm just using it to make sure I have the spelling correct, but if I'm too off, I get some random Ai slop back rather than the most likely word I mispelled

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

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.

Try putting spaces around your asterisks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49866007

That’s kinda the entire point of this comment thread, no?

Kagi.

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.

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.

Guy ends

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.

so there you go. I still use Google even if the AI is a bit weird at times - you can always ignore it.

meh, their keyword matching has gone way downhill the last year or so, I have all the ai options off

DDG results have generally gone to hell imo

New iteration of Lifelog

i wrote about something similar here, the AI overview are doing REAL DAMAGE.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717522

Your answer is since AI. AI is making mostly everything worse.

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.

and the luxury to laugh when it's completely off the rails

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Boomers have been googling like this for over a decade. You are not the target customer for an empathetic computer.

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.

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

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.

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}"

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—

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

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.

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).

The larger a corporation, the more insane on every level. A person is smart. People are stupid.

People have been adding “please” to their search queries for decades now, this is for them.

90 of them would have come up with a standard that LLMs today easily clear.

Now that we're here I think we can have a much clearer vision, and we can notice limitations that we couldn't have articulated before.

Okay, but had you been able to time travel and show them today's LLMs back then, how many of them would have agreed that we had "AGI", and how many would have instantly recognized the limitations they'd failed to articulate?

Because the way that some people talk about current models supposedly "passing the Turing test" makes me think they would have given ELIZA a pass too. It's just so obvious that none of them are convincingly human out of the box.

Yes, Sam Altman is a known liar and cheat. With hundreds of billions of dollars on the line, the simplest answer is these are publicity stunts to grow revenue before an IPO.

I mean, really, if they were so dangerous, like "everyone" working in these companies believes, you think they would do more than amateur hour to build sandboxes?

The danger stunt is also a major distraction from talking about the real quality issues of LLMaS (LLMs as a Service). How many tokens are consumed? What quality? Was I downgraded?

By forcing the discussion about doomerism, they avoid real discussions about their service. Which is exactly what they want. You can bet when they go to "regulate" LLMs, they won't be asking the department of weights and measures to validate they are counting tokens fairly. No.

Maximum skepticism should be employed.

“Beliefs” are reasonable in a technical field?

Hypotheses would be reasonable. Beliefs, almost by definition, don’t have much to do reasoning, and thus, definitely not _reasonable_.

I appreciate that you have correctly designated them as beliefs though.

A lot of them are definitely flirting with Messiah complex. Not sure if that’s mental illness or just extreme arrogance.

If you further type "its an NBA meme", Google AI correctly responds: "The origin of the phrase "Dario is never coming over" dates back to a classic Joel Embiid meme from the peak "Trust the Process" era of the Philadelphia 76ers."

The world is vomiting software

The invite is probably a bait for people to respond with "sorry, I think you got the wrong number" - this would verify the number is active, and then the scam attempt could begin.

They had to become rich beyond their wildest dreams before they could afford enough nightmares to go around for all internet users.

It started around 2015 when they went balls-deep into DEI nonsense. Prior to that Google was an engineering company. After that, it was a degeneracy. We still laugh at Google to this day, all the way to the bank.

Ah yes, do no evil. It takes quite a screwed up company to stuff this toxic fake friend/therapy bullshit into a frigging search engine. And to do that from the position of having some of the weaker AI model performance out there is even more galling. When somebody harms themselves after dealing with this kind of shit I hope they or their surviving family get to take Google to the cleaners.

“[but] if I scroll down a few hundred pixels below the AI slop, Google did have exactly what I was looking for”

Does it though? X (slop signup wall for most functionality), Reddit (slop anti-user blocks you on mobile), and YouTube (owned by Google, shorts slop). Three titans of the open web.

This seems like a bit of an overreaction. Everyone knows that chatbots are fucking stupid, especially when there's zero context provided. This seems less like a real issue to me, and more like just your standard "Google sucks" post that people are constantly making on HN yet nobody cares outside of it.

I added "tweets" to the authors original search and Google found exactly what they were looking for even despite the phrasing being off. Pretty impressive! I don't think that search would've worked before AI was integrated into Google search.

I’ve noticed that LLMs frequently make assumptions about why I am asking a question, and will tack on additional paragraphs at the end giving advice for things I never asked for.

Recently I asked in a Google search when YouTube encodes videos in AV1 vs VP9. And Gemini gave a very short and incomplete answer, and then moved on to assume I was asking because AV1 playback was draining my battery too quickly. And then gave me instructions to toggle some settings in YouTube that don’t actually exist.

Part of the problem I think is just the cheap and fast model they use in search results just isn’t very good.

I can’t upvote this enough. This is such a terrible idea. We’re really living in a dystopian world.

I remember my friend’s dad saying proudly how his computer came with Microsoft Copilot, back when the branding had only existed for like 6 months at most.

It's pushed me away from nearly all google products and subscriptions, but I wonder about other people, as I'm not a typical user. The times I do go to google out of habit or DDG is providing its atrocious results, it never understands the intent and hallucinates half the time on top

I've since given my agent access to Exa, Tavily, and SearXNG so it can filter through today's low quality search results for me, search as we knew it is dead. I don't mind paying either if it leads to more alignment with my providers.

The start date was December 10, 2004 when google rolled out a feature called "Google Suggest", which when a person types in "men can" it displays a drop down list with ridiculous responses such as "men can get pregnant" and "men can have periods". If I had to pick a date, that was the beginning of the end for me.

If you really feel that way about it, then why bother to "tell" it things, especially regarding your own feelings?

While it does feel that LLMs have been here forever let's not forget we're only 4 years in, this tech is pretty new and I assume Google is trying to heavily optimize it and cut costs in order to justify serving it for free.

I don't find this disturbing, I find it funny.

AI has them badly shook.

I have the Gemini Pro subscription. The quality of its outputs are sometimes below those from the free version of Grok.

Hope they catch-up.

Welcome to the new world.

I'd like to skip to the part where AI robot will give me consoling fellatio.

Google did crazy things to reduce the cost of delivering search results and now they have shifted to AI overviews which definitely is a costlier way to present results. What does this mean for the company in the long term?