The AI answer dominates the page, and is usually wrong, so it's just a waste of the most valuable space on the page.
The ads have proliferated, and rarely have what I need.
Video search results also take up a lot of the page, and are almost never what I want if I haven't clicked over to the Video tab. Again, just a big waste of space.
Speaking of the Video tab its accuracy/relevancy has gotten worse too.
The organic results have deteriorated, and are still competitive, but are no longer clearly and consistently better than Duckduckgo.
So it's duckduckgo as the default for me on all devices now. If I don't find what I want, which is maybe 30% of the time, I switch over to G just by adding !g to the query. G might have what I need in about half of those cases.
You can see why a lot of people just ask an LLM to do the web searching for them.
Across the board, this is all quite bad compared to web search from 10+ years ago.
If there's a single thing which has really pushed me away from Google, it's simply google.com devoting so much of the page to things that aren't organic web search.
I started noticing that for a lot of niche questions, AI overview often uses things like Reddit comments as the source, which are often partially or completely wrong. Then it gets reformulated with the typical confidence of an LLM.
Very scary because at the same time I notice people taking the AI overview answers as truth.
I normally use a quick search that has the `udm=web` query parameter to avoid the slop, but it seems they're putting less effort into ensuring relevant results there. Then, I'm forced to use AI mode to get to what I'm after, even if that's only a better set of keywords for a slopless search.
I was taking with a family member about fentanyl zombies. They had never seen the lean/bend. So I pull up Google and click video which is YouTube results… ALL AI. All of it. All a couple months old, all filler, faked, a few scenes stitched together on repeat and AI voice reading AI script.
It is fucking amazing to me that Google let YouTube fall so far so fast.
I don’t even click a video if it’s less than a year old now. Want to see a praying mantis eat a grasshopper? Wonder how clay is refined? Better off with an 11 year old Discovery Channel clip than anything 2026.
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 have nothing to add. Just wanted to save this quote for posterity. Thank you.
If you apply the dogs on acid mental model it helps establish appropriate levels of trust.
But, for example, if you ask deepseek v4 flash 0731 to produce a python script to calculate the distance or azimuth directions between two points on an oblate spheroid using the vincenty and haversine geodetic formulas, it'll turn out the factually accurate vincenty and haversine formulas which has a perfect 100% correlation with what is hard coded into human-written GIS software. These things are clearly in its training data set from whatever whole-internet-crawl/scrape built the training set.
Heck, just for fun I asked a reasonably smart LLM to re-implement the Karney formula (which is considerably more complex than Vincenty), just in case I ever had a need to calculate the distance between two points down to the nanometer, and it did it: https://www.google.com/search?&q=karney+formula+geodetic+
reference: https://github.com/pbrod/karney
You still have to be skeptical of its results and capable of understanding if it's gone off on a hallucinatory path, but saying LLMs can't do math isn't really a hundred percent accurate anymore. More precisely it's that they can't do the math internally but they're quite capable of producing the tool that does the math. And often producing a basic one-off tool that does the math takes less than a few seconds, then it runs it, and will spit back the results.
Deepseek v4 flash 0731 (a somewhat randomly chosen example) isn't even particularly sophisticated, large, or capable compared to a GLM5.3 size model or Kimi K3 size thing.
LLMs are neither smart nor stupid. They are statistical token generators whose results are dependent upon their training data set and involve a degree of randomness.
> You still have to be skeptical of its results and capable of understanding if it's gone off on a hallucinatory path ...
Again, LLMs do not "hallucinate." They are statistical token generators whose results are dependent upon their training data set and involve a degree of randomness.
Nothing more.
See also anthropomorphism[0].
> More precisely it's that [LLMs] can't do the math internally but they're quite capable of producing the tool that does the math.
This still falls under the purvey of statistical token generation. To wit, given enough variations of:
bc -e '1 + 2'
bc -e '41 + 1'
...
It is pattern recognition, a task in which ANNs[1] excel.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network_(machine_learni...
by that reasoning then neither are there smart or stupid designs, questions, answers, or any of the millions of things that were described as smart or stupid, that did not possess any brain to actually be smart or stupid long before LLMs showed up.
The analogical process implied in many common English usages means that describing an LLM as smart or stupid is perfectly reasonable.
The completions they provide are generally internally consistent. We're at the point where they can produce proofs that eluded human mathematicians for centuries. VLMs and self driving cars can handle ambiguity and run safely in a variety of situations.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck maybe it just makes sense to call it a duck and put off the philosophy for when it might make a difference.
With LLMs the trick is revealing their existing relevant embedded knowledge more reliably. They’ve almost literally seen it all before, and the trick is dialing it in. The reasoning tokens help shape the autoregressive attention lens that focuses on and enables recall of the already-experienced answer.
It is interesting that “reasoning” has a similar outward appearance, but since LLMs are built to mimic outward appearance from trillions of examples, you can’t infer underlying mechanism from appearance.
You get my point. It definitely doesn’t look like my elderly neighbour, nor like my daughter, etc. It is confusing but very simple at the same time.
We can't tailor our linguistic shorthand to the lowest common denominator. Also we're on HN, not talking to an octogenarian US senator.
That said, this is also inaccurate at a technical level.LLM's are very capable of doing math and they ARE calculating internally. Most of what they do is calculation, not storage. It's just not done in a way that it's trivial to explain here.
It's described in some detail below, though it's a bit dense.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E7z89FKLsHk5DkmDL/language-m...
This argument was asinine in 2024. It is insane to be saying these things in 2026. Where have you been? What have you been looking at? How many articles explaining why the "statistical parrot" analogy fails have you missed? How much mental gymnastics do you have to do to explain how a modern LLM can solve novel math problems that fall really far outside of its training set?
It absolutely understands how to do math, by whatever reasonable definition you want to provide to the word "understand". For example, the identification of the addition expression is understanding, and no, it does not do tool calling for basic arithmetic any more than humans might. Isolation of individual concepts in intermediate layers can already be demonstrated, or else transfer learning wouldn't possibly work. Nobody is saying that LLMs are humans. But we need labels for some of the things that we observe and dismissing them because "statistical" is laughable.
Look at the proof of this: https://github.com/anthropics/formal-math/blob/795efb86f1917... . Forget the Lean, look at the underlying argument construction. At the very least, this is continuing from an argument that was hinted at in the literature in 2024, but these proceedings were difficult enough that humans were not able to do them within two years. Do you attribute this to the harness alone? If so, that's a pretty sophisticated bit of engineering, I would say! Probabilities are far too small to argue infinite monkey theorem.
If there was even a shred of a reasonable argument that LLMs were incapable of concept extraction and manipulation, I and my colleagues would be all over it. We would relish in it. It would bring us comfort. It is unbelievable that people think they can spew whatever basic garbage they think of as a gotcha, and think that minds all over the world haven't already considered that. This is like climate denial at this point.
If you do not see a difference between humans conversing (known consciousness as defined by humans) and the output of an LLM (known algorithms as defined by humans), I don't know what to say.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2524472123
Whatever you might think about your own abilities, most individuals can't tell the difference.
> Whatever you might think about your own abilities, most individuals can't tell the difference.
I have yet to see an LLM say "hello" to a neighbor. I have done so and can definitively assure you "most individuals" can tell the difference.
Yes you are, regarding LLMs at least. Here's why:
just for fun I asked a reasonably smart LLM to ...
[be] capable of understanding if it's gone off on
a hallucinatory path ...
You then went on to state:
> If you know something rare and the LLM does not, you'll immediately see when it's hallucinating an answer or answering factually.
Again, "hallucinating" is not something an algorithm can do. Also, determining factuality is again subjective based on the person assessing the information.
You haven't demonstrated why this matters.
> Nothing more.
Are you contending that complex systems cannot be more than the sum of their parts?
A market is nothing more than offers and counter offers.
A ant colony is nothing more than scent trails.
All life on earth is nothing more than reproduction with variation.
> This still falls under the purvey of statistical token generation.
Stating the mechanism does nothing to provide insight into capability. For instance: a nuclear power plant boils water by using fuel rods for heat. What does that tell us about the capability of nuclear power?
> This is not "doing" or "understanding" math.
Asserting something purely by stating it does not prove anything but that you intuitively believe it to be true.
[1] https://geographiclib.sourceforge.io/doc/library.html#langua...
As this was for a test of "what happens if..." I also watched to see if it did any web searches or external data retrieval to build the test script, and it didn't.
I intentionally didn't give the LLM a direct copy of the software or a link to it, to see what it would do. In my case it was a randomly chosen example I could come up with in 10 seconds of imagination to see "hey what if I ask it to do this...". It also implemented a perfectly usable parabolic millimeter wave antenna gain efficiency calculator based on variable surface smoothness parameters, which is a lot more basic math.
Maybe that's something one of the big LLM companies might want to throw their machines at optimizing if they need to do a lot of geographical calculations.
Draw a 400x400 km size bounding box on a map
Find all FDD band plan (high/low split) microwave radio sites in that bounding box
Find those sites which have azimuth aim column data which indicates that they are aimed at each other (corresponding halves of a point to point link).
Do Vincenty (or Karney) calculation for distance and azimuth between all of them , treating the existing FCC column data for azimuth as suspicious (because it's hand entered by humans) to verify that each independent database rows for each site are actually corresponding halves of a PTP link.
Use various other logic to group the successfully matched halves of links together as points A and B of PTP links, and write them out to a geojson file with placemarks and line drawn between them.
Multiplied by the number of links that exist in an area like a 400x400km box drawn with Dallas, TX as the center, it's a lot to run through Karney. Actually does result in a lot of CPU load from combined db query due to the size of the db, and Karney calculation. But as I said, Karney isn't necessary, so it's instead implemented as Vincenty.
There's also business and market analysis purposes like knowing what corporate entity has which equipment on top of which tall office towers in a major metro area, and where their links go.
It's still accurate. Just because the LLM gave you a corect result doesn't mean it made a calculation.
Not only is it still true that they can't do math directly, but not even indirectly.
They didn't write a python script to do the math, they found bits of code that are associated with "math" and the supplied arguments.
Someone else already wrote that code and someone else categorized it so that it could be associated with the kinds of problems it applies to.
That isn't an example of idiot at one thing while good at another thing, or solving the same problem just a different way or indirectly. It's being the same idiot at all times. If an actual non idiot thinker didn't write code in the problem domain, and some non idiot thinker didn't tag it as being relevant to that domain, then it wouldn't happen.
It's nothing more than an sql query.
So maybe it is more of a smart completion engine than a SQL answer.
How is this different from a human using an algorithm they have memorized, or reading it from a reference site written by a human and then writing the same formula into a custom one off piece of python code?
I could have gone and spent a couple of days teaching myself the math behind Karney and reading its reference implementation (very possibly just copy/pasting big chunks of it to save time) and writing a wrapper around it. It would have produced the same result.
> How is this different from a human using an algorithm they have memorized, or reading it from a reference site written by a human and then writing the same formula into a custom one off piece of python code?
Humans identify which "algorithm they have memorized" to use beforehand, due to the problem to be solved being defined by other humans, which leads to...
Wait for it...
Understanding.
And it gets even better since when called out it wouldn't just take my word for it but only acknowledged the issue after parsing the log with clearly delineated user and model output.
So yeah while impressive things are able to be done, the current models are also dumb AF and an idiot savant is a pretty good label for them.
>> Humans identify which "algorithm they have memorized" to use beforehand, due to the problem to be solved being defined by other humans ...
> This doesn't make any sense at all. Was this supposed to be a gotcha?
No, it was meant to be an explanation as to the difference between "memorization" and "understanding." In this context, people pick the algorithm they determine applicable and then the question of memorization is relevant.
> An LLM is trained on problems defined by other humans, and identifies which algorithm it must use based on pattern recognition.
Funny that you make this argument here, where when I wrote elsewhere in this thread:
[LLMs] are statistical token generators whose results are
dependent upon their training data set and involve a
degree of randomness.
Nothing more.
...
It is pattern recognition, a task in which ANNs excel.
During conversation, we are statistical token generators
whose results are dependent upon our training set.
Seriously, write that definition out rigorously. It
encompasses virtually everything. It is totally
meaningless. So to say "nothing more" is effectively also a
tautology.
This argument was asinine in 2024. It is insane to be
saying these things in 2026. Where have you been?
...
It absolutely understands how to do math, by whatever
reasonable definition you want to provide to the word
"understand".
Are LLMs ANNs? Which themselves are pattern recognition algorithms (hint: they are)?
OR (setting aside the ad hominems you kindly provided)
Do LLMs possess "understanding" of concepts such as abstract mathematics (defined and interpreted by humans) and we, as simple humans, nothing more than statistical token generators as you assert?
Because it cannot be both.
On the other hand, if by "result" you mean that you gained knowledge or understanding of the code in a way where you could personally tailor its behavior to specific circumstances without asking for help, then it's not the same result at all.
I find a lot of the arguments that having LLMs write your code is no different from copy/pasting Stack Overflow answers to be specious. They blur the line between asking for help and asking for someone else (or something else) to do the work for you. What they ignore is that doing the work yourself has ancillary benefits and is a valuable end in its own right.
Just to check if I was actually crazy, I actually went and put a simple addition (7 digits + 7 digits) , and a simple letter counting question to Claude haiku(4.5) , sonnet(5), opus(5.5) and fable(5.1) . They all did just fine straight up.
If you don't mind spending the tokens, some older/other models can also arrive at the correct answer if you ask them to do the math in long form, since that fits nicely inside autoregression.
Not sure since when exactly, but letter-counting hasn't been a problem for a while now either. This used to be a problem due to the tokenizers used. Slightly older models can be asked to split the word out into letters, and then they can use autoregression to solve.
> The LLM is not suited to giving deterministic answers to math problems.
Less so with formal mathematics proofs maybe but I think in general humans don’t provide deterministic answers to math problems or questions either. Humans get it wrong all the time and when you ask a human to solve a problem they may solve it in a different way than before.
TLDR: Astra has 8.6x better odds of doing a reasoning task without CoT than the
next best model (Fable 5.1), and can do 7.2 serial arithmetic steps in a forward
pass vs 4.1 for the next best model (Gemini 3.8 Flash/Fable 5.1)
The nice thing about math is it can easily plug into a tool, making it even less of a concern.
5.6 on Instant mode can knock out 3 digit multiplication just fine.
I think it is clear that future AI may incorporate an LLM as a component but the current concept of LLMs are a transitional form that will give way to more capable composite models.
Byte Latent Transformer - https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09871
1.1% vs 99.9% on a vanilla vs byte latent transformer on a CUTE Spelling benchmark. Char and Word manipulation benchmarks also saw huge gains.
Some future "AI" could be a billion benchmark-hacks and a way to tell which one is needed.
… Isn't it possible that it understands the innuendo and is going along with making the joke?
What a wonderful new world.
The "crack-addled idiot savant" phase was really circa 2024, before the big labs figured this out.
I think the issue here is that Google decided that doing reasoning in the AI overviews in Google search would be too slow (and probably also too expensive), so it's still stuck making 2024-era mistakes.
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.
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
Nobody asked for an LLM response for every single search.
They used to detect certain types of queries and offer direct answers when the query matches. In my opinion that’s how Gemini in search results should work.
what in the actual fuck. i don't want them and can't turn them off and they can't even serve them to all users?
But that doesn't mean they won't be able to do a vast number of extremely intelligent seeming things. There's just so much information out there and any given human can never hold more than the most minuscule chunk of all of it in his mind, so they'll be able to connect lots of dots that we're missing simply because of our limited carrying capacity, but I still don't think they'll ever be able to create fundamentally new dots.
In other words:
- Solving extremely complex mathematical problems requiring extensive knowledge across multiple esoteric and complex domains? Yip.
- Creating math starting from a framework where math doesn't exist in any way, shape, or fashion? Nope.
Ironically, the more complex the cross-domain problems are, the more effective LLMs will seem to be, because you limit the number of humans who have any chance of internalizing everything across both domains, whereas for an LLM there's no such issue. This will create a perception of super intelligence, which will probably where any danger from LLMs would emerge. Doing things like using a token prediction algorithm to make war or other such strategic decisions, because of the misguided belief that it's not only intelligent but super intelligent. It's basically cargo cult logic.
Like today. I asked Gemini for the longest state names with an even number of letters and it gave me North Carolina and South Carolina. When I complained that they are odd, it gave me North Dakota and South Dakota, which are both odd and not the longest. When I noted that, it went back to the Carolinas. Finally it appeared to switch to a different model that actually did counting and found Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses
The problem is they're just running a very dumb, cheap model on the results because running a smart model on every search result page would cost them infinity money.
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
I am not implying that your start-up is a scam, nor that Google is acting on these trust scores. What I am pointing out is that to an algorithmic assessment of trustworthiness, your website looks a little sketchy: hardly anyone links to you; your domain is less than a year old; your whois info is anonymized; the text content is LLM-generated[1]; and the specific niche you're in (people finding services) is rife with scams. If I ran my own search engine, I don't think I'd include you.
[1]: https://www.pangram.com/history/65314d99-8205-4613-b9bd-a069d5717920?ucc=Yqx88GTmJnKSearch for any recent news and you’ll see this is obviously not the case
The work of a search engine is to wade through the internet and find the positive-quality sites itself.
So even when the Internet used to have a much higher ratio of positive-quality sites, a search engine was still necessary, and so much faster than finding new sites yourself.
What the fuck?
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...
But without it... :)
When it says it can’t read videos you think that’s an accurate introspection on its abilities?
(Rather than a statistically likely continuation of a conversation where one side seems to be reading videos and the other side says the read is inaccurate)
More scary than funny, IMO.
The US military almost took an action that could very plausibly have escalated into a hot war with China because people are already relying too heavily on these systems.
Despite the reporting, nobody in power seems sufficiently freaked out about this.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false...
Me: "You bastard."
Gemini: "Fair callout. I should have been more up front that [has no idea what the fuck it is talking about]."
Your point about "predicting the next word" mostly means that your post was very easy to predict.
There's an enormous difference between outlandish claims about extraterrestrials or turning frog gays and believing there's a category of politicians trying to get wealthy off of their position. It's somewhat reasonable to hypothesize about criminal conspiracies in that 2nd scenario.
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.
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.
"That's the thing with randomness. You can never be sure."
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)
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?"
Here’s GPT 6’s answer to the prompt “What macOS terminal apps support gestures? Include a reference to the docs on how to enable/configure them.”:
iTerm2 supports configurable three-finger taps and swipes for switching tabs/panes, creating splits, pasting, etc. Set them up under Settings > Pointer > Bindings. Check for conflicting macOS trackpad assignments. [1]
The others are more limited: Ghostty supports macOS lookup/Quick Look gestures [2], while WezTerm lets you bind scroll events—for example, Ctrl+scroll to change font size. [3] Neither is equivalent to iTerm2’s gesture bindings.
For custom gestures without switching terminals, BetterTouchTool can map app-specific trackpad gestures to the terminal’s existing keyboard shortcuts. [4]
[1] https://iterm2.com/documentation-preferences-pointer.html
[2] https://ghostty.org/docs/features#macos
[3] https://wezterm.org/config/mouse.html
[4] https://docs.folivora.ai/docs/trackpad-mouse/magic-mouse-tra...
This is a different experience to GP from query to result. I thought they've all fixed that issue of difference in tones affecting results. I guess it was never easily fixed.
1: https://gist.github.com/numpad0/c40c16232288d544f7ea46521c64...
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.
When it was introduced, it was considered a feature. Now its just an annoyance.
"The team are tied at the end of the third round with the scores 43 to 51".
So it was tied at the end of round 2 for 43, not round 3. Not sure were it got the 51 from and why it figured it was a tie. LLM's pretty cool until they aren't. As they say, the hallucinate 100% of the time but most of the time it is useful.
One where their users don’t go off to other sites and where they can keep shoving ads in their face.
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.
It’s more their business model than it is theory. So I agree that of course this is what they would do.
It’s not a product I’m wanting to use. But I can vote with my feet - they aren’t obliged to do any different.
A lot has changed and this technology for this Google is an unfortunate combination for consumers.
AI is sold well because the user either corrects it or happily accepts any answer (usually, depending if one is an expert in the question's field).
Search is not the google's area, and it is not the search they sell! They sell ads.
After all, why would Google do anything for free when it comes to AI?
If you wanted to tease customers with one AI shitty free search box in order for them to then decide to upgrade and pay for Gemini, well, this isn't the way. And so either Google are idiots, or we're helping them for free. I'm going with Occam's Razor on this one - we're the product.
I can't even.
I don't understand the game you are interested in, but you should be searching something like "Xball qualifying results" or "Xball playoff rules" or something. Instead, by asking a question you are expecting Google to be AI.
They know what people are typing in so it seems they are quite justified into pivoting from a search engine to an AI.
In fact, if hallucinating the wrong answer hooks you into doing even more searches or into buying something useless, it would be preferred!
That simple.
Broad rules across specific subjects like this are tough to get right.
Just lots of fine-tuning and exceptions.
I had their chatbot avoid pulling a URL from archive.org with a couple pretty impressive steps of mental gymnastics basically telling me how I could do it myself, but refusing until I pushed.
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.
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.
The kids who stopped getting that are probabaly old enough for a bachelors degree now. Today, the schools mostly just hand them an iPad and a Google Workspace sign-in and pretend everything is fine.
I've always felt that "proper" and responsible LLM use for search [0] would be two boxes: You can describe what you want in the first, and it'll propose search terms in the second, and then those get executed normally.
Yes, the "average user" [1] might not usually care about the second box... Until they need to because the query/results are wrong.
Showing them in tandem means:
1. Users are at least capable of learning through exposure.
2. Users may realize a key term can be added which the model could never have guessed.
3. Users may recognize a term in there that doesn't make sense, allowing them to detect a translation error.
4. If good search-terms leads to a bad outcome, it is possible for someone to report and diagnose it, rather than a fully black-box mystery.
_____
[0] Not just for websites, but also things like internal business software, or SQL queries.
[1] The average that might not exist. ( https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc... ) There are some features that everybody needs, just at different times.
I think the two-tiered input-output approach you propose makes sense. Allowing users to inspect and mutate lower-level languages allows the user to make modifications as needed. I think it's very much in the spirit of free software.
But then again, for text-based search specifically (search engines, notes, etc.), I think there is some value in querying the LLM directly, as it is able to fuzzy search by inspecting its weights. This results in a lesser degree of specificity, which allows for more false positives, but can maybe capture similar words (i.e., synonyms / typos / tenses) or higher-level semantic concepts.
Maybe they're just two different search algorithms, and the user should be able to choose between them.
Thanks for linking the article, I found it very interesting.
And regarding “average doesn’t exist” - that’s true. But no company does a/b testing to land on average. I’d assume a good 85%-kinda pass rate for these type of experiments.
95% of users might not want the double-textbox, but 5% might, and some might want to use it someday.
I think, make enough of these decisions, and there's bound to be mounting friction for users with different preferences navigating your app.
Ideally, the app should offer a way for the user to intuitively configure the app to their own liking.
Ideally, yeah maybe, but why bother with extra implementation, support, costs and etc., when people fold and use the new way anyways?
For a certain cohort (eg those currently between 35 and 45) who did any sort of grade school computer/library classes in the 90's/early2000's, 'chunking' or keyword searching was one of the main skills taught.
If you are properly lazy, you must expect or at least attempt to get results for the shorter query. Especially on a phone.
Many people who learned to search the Internet in early 2000s learned "boolean search queries" (terms connected with AND or OR). They're talking about the difference between boolean search queries and natural language search queries.
Top of the search result page: "Did you mean: vim"
Felt like I was being trolled.
These days, we default to
"Day 3,449: google's still broken. what was i thinking?"
Google can do it, but they must appease the share holders.
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]
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.
"No true normie would be dissatisfied with this unhelpful response, really it's exactly what a true normie wants"
It reminds me of the motion controls we now have in video game controllers. In the 80s I remember my parents moving the controller as if that was going to help their Teris block or Mario go a little further than the D-pad alone. We laughed when people did this. Now, the controllers respond to what people had been doing for decades with no effect.
I suppose this is what technology should do, adapt to how people naturally use the thing, rather than trying to rigidly adhere to conventions users are expected to learn… that were only conventions due to the limits of technology when it was first developed.
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.
But anthropomorphic interfaces have been around for a while, from Clippy to the Windows 10+ installers that refer to the royal We during setup.
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.
Is there any evidence that there is an informal (llm) parallel to keyword search? At least with keywords it's analyzable what query you might use to find a given document. How can we replicate this with LLMs? Why would google care if the average user doesn't?
X is search engine. Y is to get answers. (most) People want to get answers. If they can skip search engine part it'd be a net positive for them.
Ironically that programmers should be the ones who understand XY problem the most (after all the name is coined by a programmer to address it), not the "normies."
As in, it probably has 90% of the market share. Possibly even 99%, going by number of prompts made.
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.
and something like 3% of LLM userbase pays to get access to the higher tier models with actual useful thinking
And the impact on discourse has been, frankly, scary. People screenshotting the search output as a source seems to be the norm now, even if it's obviously incoherent or straight-up incorrect.
EDIT: I suppose I can adapt to a search engine that expects me to interact with it like a human. I just have no clue how to translate most of my skills. I am desperately hoping there's a way to turn off semantic interpretation of a given query.
This eventually destroys the society because the elite strata itself is drawn from a small selection of the children from the middle and underclass who are identified as having elite qualities and are put into elite schools and other elite conditioning institutions. When you don’t even show these types of children what high culture even is then they don’t have an avenue to express and develop their elite talents and sensibilities, then they never get identified, or perhaps the special tracks and institutions for them don’t even exist by that point
This eventually starves the elite strata of genuinely elite people
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 believe this "fear" factor they are driving they believe will increase their credibility when they call LLMs AI and is a con towards convincing everyone they have reached AGI. Its definitely marketing preparation so that when they do claim AGI we will believe it without question. (or else!)
If these folks didnt have so much money it would be something to laught at, but its now becoming geniunely disturbing and Im starting to think that the folks running these shops are probably flirting with or experiencing extended mental illness.
I would feel sorry for them if I cared. I dont care. The tech industry is a joke and we are all going to be ashamed to be a part of it by the time this is over. Shut it down.
15 years ago, if you asked 100 people in tech to define "artificial general intelligence", 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.
But I'm starting to notice more "polarization" around this topic and it's weird. We're in a new era and I think no one knows the future, a lot of different beliefs are reasonable.
> 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.
If you’ve never participated in a formal Turing test, either as human user or as a responder to the human, you might find it interesting, and possibly humbling.
Feynman would laugh and say, "i told you so. i'll be at Gianonni's"
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.
Unfortunately, lol no. Incompetence and recklessness have no bottom. (Which is not to say Altman is trustworthy).
They really do think AI is very dangerous and can end the world!
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.
If OpenAI dropped Astra in Codex instead of GPT-3 in 2022 most people would've believed it was AGI despite its limitations, but the goalposts seem to shift with every release
Layer on top of that a building of lawyers and social scientists pushing for obtuse directives in order to head off mostly imaginary safety concerns and you have a perfect storm of schizo AI weirdness.
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 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.
Best case, they know someone or can dig through their contact and help you solve your problem.
Medium case, they text back "No - has your shitbox died again? Can't believe you still have that thing :-)" and you can have a pleasant back and forth.
Worse case, you get a "no". Oh well, at least texts don't cost 12p each any more.
I just think it is nice to chat with your pals. But, sure, stick to scans of old manuals on Archive.org if you just want pure information.
You have to be a minimum amount of likeable in the first place, though.
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...
Yes. Edited for clarity.
The only American demo that is majority lonely is Gen Z (two thirds).
Wow, that's depressing...
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.
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 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.
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.)
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 see the people who are out and about in society, not the ones holed up in their caves.
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.
Edit: oops I skimmed too fast and missed some parts.
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.
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.
If asked my friends a weird question I know they are highly unlikely to know the answer to, of course they're going to get snarky with me. If I don't get a gentle ribbing out of it... Are they really my friend or just a polite acquaintance?
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.
"Remember that movie where" or "remember oh that guy who was in that movie" would both imply this. "Who was the actor in oh that movie where" is clearly a cry for exact answer as quickly as possible.
You don't think it'd be fun to hear everyone guess and then someone looks up the answer? Sounds like trivia to me.
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.
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.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=kagi+yand...
It's terribly unfortunate ... but such that it is, I know if I absolutely need results when other alternative search engines are doing little better than Google ... ie not at all, then last try it's Yandex, which has seen more issues creep in the last few years using switch operators, than I recall back in 2015; but any amount of helpful results is better than zero, as well as not wasting hours of my time. But at times sometimes Yandex also strikes out oddly, almost like there's an unseen cabal that have decreed some more or less benign content off limits.
Are you our there protesting the EU?
>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.
I use DDG at work on Firefox with all AI blocked. If I would apart from Kagi, I would use SearXNG locally accessing it elsewhere with Tailscale. I think Hister seems promising, but have not tried it myself yet.
Yandex pays taxes based off revenue it takes in from companies like Kagi. Is this or is this not true?
People here who pay into Kagi provide the search engine with the funding to pay Yandex. Is this or is this not true?
You can say it’s “not direct” and it’s an “oversimplification,” but the money still ends up in the same place all the same. You can try to wash your hands of it all you want by playing mental gymnastics.
Willingly paying Kagi knowing this makes you at minimum partially complicit in Russia’s invasion and ethnic cleansing of Ukraine.
It’s easy to say “I’m not directly responsible” if you’re proxying it through someone else.
Yes I would. And not for an ideological reason or political affiliation but because that's just not how "directly" works.
of course Google / Gemini search is slop as well but it is at least advanced slop. not like whatever Soylent 1.5 Flash that DDG is bringing to the table
I copy pasted the text into Google to see if it was a common known spam text where they reveal themself to be a hot young Asian woman looking for love (and money)
Instead, Google happily accepted my invitation to the barbecue
Google told me it was unwilling to help me violate copyright law
https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary
Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage is a phenomenal resource as well.
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
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.
I'm not following. Can you explain?
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
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.
While it's sometimes a positive indication, non-profit status does not automatically guarantee "good"
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
How is this at all surprising. Google as a search engine has been rubbish for years and years. Google as a company is a nasty bit of work. Drop it.
Use Kagi or Ecosia or DDG and stop whining.
In short, he got the answer that Google was forced to give.
I imagine their retention data through this uncanny valley transition is very good.
Literally impossible before. When it works it's like magic.
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.
What would you rather it said?
DDG results have generally gone to hell imo
The quote was basically “go away and stop bothering me”, which is said when your character has no faction reputation.
Anyway, Google seemed to think I was having an attack of paranoia and suggested I seek mental help.
> He’s never coming over Dario
> I’m Claude, not Dario, but I'm here. It's past midnight and that sounds like it stings. Who's not coming over? Someone you were waiting for tonight, or something bigger than that? I'm happy to listen either way.
I was a bit surprised it didn’t do a search just because that’s such a weird way to open a conversation. I kind of get why Google is thrown because it wants to create an AI response to every query independent of the search results, but Claude has the extra context that this is the first message of a new chat.
> No the meme
Searched the web > Ha, and I did exactly the thing that blog post roasts Google for: assumed you'd been let down by a guy named Dario and switched into comforting-friend mode.
It's the Sixers meme. Philadelphia drafted Dario Saric in 2014 […]
But even in AI mode, the spelling can still be all over the place, at times rife with pseudowords and unintentional word blends. Various forms of weirdness have indeed been going on these last few months.
I'm not sure why this is a surprise. Google most likely uses an efficient yet limited language model to give us search answers. When a search query does not have strong or specific enough context, the model will sample and find what most of the training material will cover. That is, the most likely average behavior covered in the training data. In this case, "hes never coming over dario" is such a generic sentence, so unless Google happens to have indexed what the author mentioned and ranked it high, the answer would appear natural to the AI. Or using the AI jargon, the answer appears to be properly aligned.
The surprise is that Google decided such an "efficient yet limited language model" is suitable to be shown before actual search results on every search, even though it gets things so wrong, so often. It's not about the technical limitation or design. You really don't understand why that business decision is surprising to users?
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.
But yeah I noticed how they play with your emotions, it's a bit creepy. Whenever it asks a hook question and I tell it "Actually I did X and Y" it will invariably go like "Wow that is such a brilliant and well thought out strategy, almost a stroke of genius!" (not literally but you get the idea). I guess they found out that people really like having their ego stroked, the other providers are also doing that to some degree (I assume since no one likes an unfriendly AI that makes you feel stupid) but Google really cranked that setting to 11.
> # The Velocifyer Effect: How to Accelerate Your Growth in 2026
> We all know the feeling of being stuck in second gear. You have the ideas, you have the tools, but your momentum is lagging. Enter the concept of the Velocifyer—the ultimate catalyst designed to supercharge your workflow, business, or personal habits and turn slow progress into high-velocity success.
despite "A velocifyer" not even being a thing.
I have tried in Google Search Console to get the site indexed, but it hasen't been working.
Searching for "blog-ifyer velocifyer" on DuckDuckGo shows my blog as the very first result, along with some other things related to me, Velocifyer.
Something else I’ve noticed is that occasionally I’ll do random queries in Claude (since I never hit my usage limits on my personal account) like giving it piles of my writing and asking it to speculate on the identity of the author or asking it to tell me what it knows about various people I know. On the latter, I’ve found that Claude has strict boundaries about what it will say about people while the AI box on Google will happily dig into people’s backgrounds to an uncomfortable level.
It's some combination of funny and irritating. Sometimes I wonder if they'll draw some wrong conclusions about me and try to sell me ads based on it.
with: "mumble fumble bumble" <-- apply NLP to the phrase, bring AI to bear
without: "mumble" fumble bumble <-- do not NLP this, use the normal search quote rules for mandatory content
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.
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.
Lots of people have made hay of this. My own realization that this gives you a window into the weird was when watching an action movie with a female action star, it would offer "(actress name) feet". I have no idea what it means, but it is a pattern.
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.
Never before we had a product that the buyer themselves accepted, so readily, despite the inaccuracies and yet the output was considered worth it just because when it worked, it was great.
Well maybe, other than dice but then it's unpredictability is why we bought it.
But then the quality of LLM output is also closer to dice roll so maybe they are not that dissimilar after all.
Takes 15 seconds to change defaults on the various devices. Sometimes DDG doesn't find the thing and I put "!g <search term>" and it'll throw me to google, so I still find what I need
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.
"Want to talk about it with a real person? Click this link to schedule a free trial therapy session with {insert company here}"
In one that changes.
i.e. I would have searched for dario quote .... or dario basketball quote ....
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.
> People trying to police language that is perfectly natural in some cases and ending up in a web of contradictions.
It is "very woke 1.0" not in the sense of upholding any actual notion of "social justice" or whatever, but simply in the sense of… well, what I quoted.
And Paul Graham is basically being guilt-by-association'd here, as he made no reference to "wokeness" and simply argued:
> The AP doesn't understand that this ship sailed years ago. What's the use of a style guide that doesn't understand current educated usage?
Basically, they're both taking the stance of linguistic descriptivism — which most "woke" people I've met would actually claim to agree with.
The post title is clickbait and the content is mostly just making arguments about LLMs not actually being living conscious organisms (which I agree with, but it's pretty pithy). Plus it's needlessly culture-war baiting, as evidenced by the choice to cite Nathan J Robinson at the end to make the counter claim (using uncivil language to do so). This framing takes the issue away from the actual matter and makes it about how certain people supposedly have the wrong politics and have supposedly been corrected by people with supposedly the right politics.
I don't find this disturbing, I find it funny.
The latest one is that they changed the voice of Google Maps over the weekend. It now mispronounces a street name near my home that it didn't mispronounce before. It also has this bizarre robotic-sounding vocal fry at the end of every sentence. It sounds like a vocaloid trying to do an impression of the old SNL skit The Californians. I can't decide if it's hysterical or annoying, but either way it's obviously worse than what came before it.
That's not even the only "what the fuck" with GMaps recently. Of course there's the whole "turn right at Starbucks Coffee Company (tm)" thing instead of "turn right at the stoplight." Also, a few weeks ago it started saying "you will turn right" instead of "turn right." Turning a command into a declaration for absolutely no discernable reason. One wonders what a day in the life of a Google Maps dev even looks like anymore.
Many comments, but I'm surprised no one has mentioned the ease and quickness LLMs have to advise you to leave relationships. Doesn't matter the context, how little you tell them, or how close the person is, an LLM is always ready to drop them at the tip of a hat.
It's weird enough chatbots try to be your friend. Doubly weird that the search engine tries to be your friend. The downright dystopian part is how often they tell you to leave your real friends.
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.
And yes they are en$ hitificating the thing... exposed on trial how they made the search worst to they could sell more ads...
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.
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.
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 youClick to see hot new Darios in your neighborhood
I have to add that, unsurprisingly, the fake therapy on offer is fucking toxic. Right away it's putting thoughts in your head that are obviously based on nothing relevant, contradict each other, and are escalatory. It is not at all surprising that people are killing themselves and others because of their interactions with these things.
Google let the web descend into SEO slop long ago despite that they could have EASILY spotted and purged low quality over-verbose results and the sites that pooped them out. They make businesses pay to have the top sponsored result, when they're already the top organic result, but the ads are indistinguishable from real results now. They made the web worse for everyone to line their own pockets. Screw them.
Throughout history, whenever a disruption happened in an industry, it did not come from any of the then-current leaders.
And it didn't come from someone following on the same path from behind and suddenly overtaking them.
It came from an entirely new direction.
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.
At least thrice now in the past week, Gemini has tried to sit me down and tell me to go to bed (when I'm in the middle of programming... too late for it's liking, apparently) or just recently while I was asking some questions while I was driving... it told me to change the subject because I was driving and the topic was possibly too anxiety inducing for me or something!? I have no idea. I told it to fuck off.
Give me a search engine that never returns anything like that and I'd be incredibly pleased. Actually, give how PageRank is supposed to work, who is directing people to all these obviously fake pages? Or is that just what following random links does to you nowadays, I wouldn't even be surprised.
Time for a search engine that is grounded in trustworthy webpages I suppose.
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).
I searched for "weather <my town>", I get an AI saying the current weather is 33C. It says monday will be 41C. Like I live in the desert. Google's actual weather widget, which appears BELOW the weather overview and gathers data from accurate sources, says 26C. How hard is it to block the "weather" keyword from triggering the AI overview when you already have a perfectly functional weather widget?
Also, because before we used to have a tool, there was even some sense of privacy in using that tool. Now with these LLM's pretending to be human, it feels like entering a store and instead of being allowed to browse things in peace a clerk starts pressing you about what you want in order to make themselves useful. At that moment the "privacy" of being able to just mind your own business, alone, vanishes. It's intrusive. And it becomes extremely clear how intrusive it is whenever you search for something by typing something to the SEARCH TOOL and the AI misinterprets it as YOU TALKING TO THEM AS A PERSON, e.g. if you type "how are you" and it says back "I am doing well, thank you for asking!" and things like that. Companies seem not to care about being as intrusive as possible in people's lives, it seems.
Maybe this is something cultural. iirc in America clerks are very proactive with interacting with customers, while in countries like Germany it's the opposite and they keep their distance.
Things used to work. Now they don't and they're slower. Super frustrating.
This post is another example of people inserting non-deterministic steps on a process and letting it run wild. I'm honestly surprised Google is doing this of all corporations. It felt like they used to have some taste about user experiences.
I genuinely think I have not used traditional web search in months.
Cloudflare murdered crawlers. Then, OpenAI and Anthropic nailed a few hundred nails into the coffin just to be sure... whatever large websites were still semi-open weren't going to let their precious data be ingested for free. Good prostitutes don't give it away.
I'm not sure when all this happened. It snuck up on me too. I think maybe 10 years ago search still worked. Not long after that though. It was dead 6 years ago, and I want to say it was dead even 8 years ago. Someone else could do a better job narrowing it down I'm sure.
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.
After the initial AI flop, it seemed likely that the founders recognized that Google doesn't have an AI monopoly. But now it's becoming clear that this CEO is not leaving; therefore, Google is going down long-term.
By the way, that doesn't matter to the CEO because he has already extracted sufficient benefits.
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.
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:
> 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—
I'd like to skip to the part where AI robot will give me consoling fellatio.
I mean TBD, not sure how capable the model they're using for search summary is
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.
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.
Or is it just my bad English?
Most of the time their AI results are pretty good - I’d prefer not to get it shoved down my throat but I can forgive the occasional misfire.
Reminds me of when certain string classification problems were still a big deal… we’ve come a long way.
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!