"Appears" to me is the key word here, how do you know that what it said was true?
It will very confidently "answer" your question in a way that is convincing but if you actually try to click through you may find that the answer is straight up wrong.
I feel like most of the time that I am looking up something that is not niche but also not a major thing it does this and at best useless at worst actually harmful since people won't click through for the real information.
The biggest problem being that these systems can be right enough times that you gradually start trusting it and stop checking. Which is what google wants, if you have to check its work in the first place why does it even exist.
Edit:
Yesterday I tried using one of these research tools because I was curious and it was low priority so figured why not. I was looking for an open source solution to a problem. I specifically mentioned one that I had seen but I was cautious because it seemed to have been abandoned so was looking for others. It confidently told me how wrong I was about thinking it was abandoned despite the last commit being in early 2024 (it even said 2024 in the report) and even before that was clearly slowing down.
Now thankfully in that case it actually told me in the report the 2024 part which clearly told me how bad the report was going to be, but that is clearly bad and tainted the entire research.
edit for comment below: Its not about laziness for me. Its the displeasure of wading through junk that internet has become. I just don't have brain capacity or the smarts to outwit the scammers .
[1] If the search takes more than a few minutes then the AI overview is almost guaranteed to be wrong or useless.
Except that these tools are being positioned as a source of reliable truth and the companies are incentivized to keep you on their system (google) instead of actually pushing you to the source (unless the source is an ad).
Any disclaimer they try to put is hidden and often lighter/smaller text.
It's the "it's wrong about the area I'm an expert in, but I feel it's correct in areas I'm not familiar with", but on Google's scale.
It's worse be cause it can be very subtly wrong.
Me latching onto the "appears" does not change anything since even with your interpretation it is wrong 50% of the time and that assumes that the 50% of the time you think it is right you actually know it is right and it is not actually wrong but you never check.
If all your content is consumed and presented via a third party - how does that change the nature of "content publishing".
It's the summarisation of Wikipedia and the like on steroids.
it actually being correct is.
google ai summaries are laughably bad and it is completely unethical that google even launched this feature in its current state.
eventually we will have to admit that next token generators are fundamentally flawed as a source of trustable information.
It still haven't index my blog but have indexed my root homepage, which has a direct link to the blog.
There was a time where I could type a loose query about anything I didn't know, and get its Wikipedia page, forums and blogs full of knowledgeable people, scientific articles and academia pages, where all knowledge was a few seconds of typing away.
Now... I don't even bother to Google things anymore. It's all SEO spam, AI slop, and ghostwritten articles whose content is secondary to the business they advertise.
AD:
BLURB TOOTHPASTE IS THE BEST PASTE FOR YOUR TEETH!!!
Open the blurb, ask it the meaning of life and get your tooth paste in 42 seconds!!
"Blurb toothpaste changed my life, no like literally. I thought I'd just always work in a dead end office job but it made me realize I should be an Instagram influencer and it's totally the vibe I was looking for. I handle my bills now by just not looking at them! Why did I never think of that? Haha"
"Blurb toothpaste really helped me with some hard to deal relationship problems when my husband didn't approve of me using and confiding in Blurb. I know it's odd to brush with a sentient toothpaste, but it's just _so good_ at cleaning your teeth! And the conversations are always nice too. Ever since my husband uses the Blurb paste too, he understands."
BLURB TOOTHPASTE, GET ON THE BLURB TRAIN BLURBADEEERRRPP!!
Buy now for only $1337.42 per tube!
Blurb Toothpaste Inc. is not liable for damage to your emotional or physical health. Read the label description for more info. Blurb toothpaste is for entertainment use only and not a professional dental product.
Gemini answer: with a toothbrush.
---
Damn...
You're right!
AI is everywhere.
(To be fair though, this whole text was my own whimsicalness, haha. It's probably spottable by some turns of phrases that Dutchies use and English native speaking people definitely don't)
It is probably the main reason why the Alphabet stock isn't performing particularly well despite the general AI gold rush and Gemini 2.5 being close to ChatGPT in performance.
... thinking ...
WOLFRAM MATHEMATICA AVAILABLE FOR ONLY $3000 a YEAR!
Oh and the answer is ...
LLMs aren't new. PPC ads are as as old as the mountains. People have been trying[1] to glue them together (with RAG), for quite some time now.
IIUC, this also happens to be the core strategy of a well known "AI" startup that made a big show about trying to buy TikTok and more recently, Chrome.
Looking back, I’m increasingly glad I became an early adopter - Kagi has proven to be as much of an improvement over Google as Google once was over its older rivals.
You could single out Google for it, as the DoJ and some other entities are doing, but even in that case someone else would take that place with the same dynamics, such as OpenAI or Perplexity.
Also, while building search is complex, it’s also not as unfathomable as it’s made out to be, see [1] where a ML engineer made a production-grade search engine in 2 months with their own ingest, indexing and storage infrastructure.
I think there is no cost to switching Search providers. Android is the one place Google has control over the OS. Two taps gets me to a list of search providers in Chrome, with 5 choices. It's not clear how to add more providers.
Recently, after they added AI-generated search responses (which seem to be wrong a considerable percentage of the time, at least for things I search for), and the inlining of ads to the search results page, I've found I have to scroll at least a full screen height to actually get to the search results a significant portion of the time.
The level of blindness to user experience at Google that has allowed the state of search to get to this level is staggering.
Offer a good free product with minimal ads, until you realise your finding mainly comes from ads, then panick and enshittify.
Oodles of cash for ai server farms needs to come from somewhere, I guess, until it doesn't.
Frankly, the AI section at the top seems like something Google would have been very reluctant to add since it saves the user from scrolling through the ad listings, and it was only added to compete with newer AI search services.
“Advertisers are the users, consumers are the product” about every Web2.0 company which are the current corporate juggernauts
So they are not blind to user experience, they are providing exactly the user experience that their company has always been providing
The sole difference is they don’t have to care about the product experience (what you see) because humans form habits and rarely change them even if the experience is “degraded.”
There are no other options if you’re organized for alienated transactions which is every service and company ever.
What exactly do you expect?
croemer•3h ago
troupo•3h ago
But I'm quite sure it's due to many other things like "we're training on your data and tracking your actions across all of our properties whether you like it or not".