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.
What would you rather it said?
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".
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.
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:
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
[0]: https://give.org/charity-reviews/other-charitable-organizati...
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.
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!
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 youand something like 3% of LLM userbase pays to get access to the higher tier models with actual useful thinking
And yes they are en$ hitificating the thing... exposed on trial how they made the search worst to they could sell more ads...
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.
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.
People expect certain conventions with well established products. It's not a skill issue when a product is broken.
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.
Click to see hot new Darios in your neighborhood
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.
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.
I’m not sure SV is prepared for what happens when you go down that road.
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.
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.
In one that changes.
Or is it just my bad English?
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.
I genuinely think I have not used traditional web search in months.
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.
"Want to talk about it with a real person? Click this link to schedule a free trial therapy session with {insert company here}"
> 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—
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. Most of the South is, too, as well as a surmising fraction of rural America. (Boston and Seattle are, in my experience, the worst.)
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 ..
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.
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.
You see the people who are out and about in society, not the ones holed up in their caves.
[1] https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/us-loneliness-statistics...
Wow, that's depressing...
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.
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.
I'm with you on the pub observation though
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?
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 really understand this. Someone wants an answer not a chat about how you don’t know?
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.
You don't think it'd be fun to hear everyone guess and then someone looks up the answer? Sounds like trivia to me.
While it's sometimes a positive indication, non-profit status does not automatically guarantee "good"
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.
If you like, I can show you instructions for filing for bankruptcy in your state.
- 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.
What the fuck?
Me: "You bastard."
Gemini: "Fair callout. I should have been more up front that [has no idea what the fuck it is talking about]."
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.
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.
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.
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.
One where their users don’t go off to other sites and where they can keep shoving ads in their face.
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.
As in, it probably has 90% of the market share. Possibly even 99%, going by number of prompts made.
Claude has just 11 million paying users. That's small cakes. RuneScape has more monthly active players. GTA 5 sold 220m copies.
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]
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.
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.
wisty•1h ago