alt Hacker NewsWhen did Google get so weird?
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Yesterday I tried to google "can the Halifax Wanderers still make the CPL playoffs?"
So obviously what appears right at the top is the AI summary, which told me "they've already secured their #4 position and made the playoffs". I knew this wasn't true, and I guess I could have just scrolled down a bit further and found my answer but now I was curious.
So I said "that's not true, they're still #5, what I want to know is _could they still make the playoffs_"
It says they've got an upcoming game against Ottawa, and if they win their chances are good. That game has already taken place, so I correct it again and finally I get a reasonable answer.
My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering? Like, I can't wrap my head around that. The answer is on the same page as its hallucination. It could have done a cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information. It's meant to be A SEARCH ENGINE!
This isnt wierd. Its disturbing. I believe that the tech industry is geniunely trying to scare and disorient the public into thinking they are the only thing standing between them and some evil AI overlord which is obviously just the tech industry itself and a pile of poor trained LLMs.
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.
I don’t understand how we’re 60 comments in and yet no-one has suggested that the problem is that you’re continuing to use Google despite it changing its core offering out from underneath your feet. If you want search (which isn’t an unreasonable desire) then Google isn’t the place for you any more.
Like it or not, this is exactly what normies have always wanted out of search engines - a little guy in their computer they can talk to for answers, advice and reassurance. They've always been trying to use Google Search this way and have been confused and annoyed that it doesn't work. And now it does! It's a massive quality of life improvement for the average user and a huge product win for Google.
Most people in the world are profoundly lonely. They'll take whatever parasocial relationships they can get - reaction videos, podcasts of people chatting, Eliza simulating concern.
Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness.
The only way out is to try and make connections with real people.
Case in point, why didn't you text your friends to ask them if they remembered those old memes? Why was your first thought to ask a computer rather than a person?
It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".
Google's AI Mode = ELIZA 2026.
It's not a person, not even close to one in most ways, but it wants to pass itself off as one.
Here'a a clue Google: If I want an LLM response, I'll go to gemini.google.com, but if I go to google.com I'm hoping for a search result.
ELIZA = shitty 1966 chatbot, a couple hundred lines of code, that tried to pass itself off as a psychiatrist.
God, grant me the serenity to read the AI summary when it contains true information, the courage to ignore it when it contains falsehoods, and the wisdom to know the difference.
A while back I got a strange text message from an unknown number that seemed to be inviting me over for a barbecue
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
The part I hate the most is they got rid of the dictionary/thesaurus/etymology thing and replaced it with AI overview. Now "define <word>" or "<word> synonyms" gives you an AI overview with consistently worse output than the nice, consistent and deterministic dictionary output.
I miss the old Google Translate. I use it for learning languages (translating little snippets, lyrics etc.) and these days it "interprets" way too much, confabulating like an LLM and inserting stuff that's way beyond what's in the text. I have to remove words and rewrite and look for other sources to be sure it's actually translating what I'm inputting and not something it just made up to make it sound good.
Search in general, not only Google, has gotten too eager to come up with some results, and with assuming that the user is an idiot. For example, if I search on German Amazon for a box for index cards (German word: Karteikasten), Amazon assumes that I made a typo and changes my input to index cards (sans the box - German word: Karteikarten) . If I search my work chat program for a specific phrase (because I am looking for a specific chat with that phrase in it), it also searches for things which are synonymous to that phrase. If I look for results of the most recent marathon in my city it shows me results from last year, so I have to invest work in finding out if this year's results are simply not yet published, or if they are buried somewhere in the results.
The worst part is that there is no way to identify which results are for my original query, and which are because someone somewhere rewrote my query in the background. You know, the good old "did you mean...?" - that's what's missing.
Folks who work on any kind of search engines: "No results" should be a valid outcome to any search query!
It still makes me feel odd when ChatGPT says something like "I feel the same way", "I love xyz", "I think ...", exactly because it can't really feel anything. It defends this behaviour as an abstraction to make the conversation more natural, but that makes it easy to forget that there is no feeling or opinion - only the inputs/outputs resembling one.
I hear how hurtful and exhausting this situation is. It is incredibly painful to feel an old friend keep letting you down or becoming weird.
If you want to talk about what happened with Google, HN is here to listen.
If you'd like to figure out what to do next, let me know.
My father is 75. He often says with a smile, “Let’s just Google AI it.” The smile is because he thinks he’s cutting edge. He hasn’t been cutting edge for 30 years, but Google has made AI so accessible through his existing search habit.
I imagine their retention data through this uncanny valley transition is very good.
> In 2014 the Philadelphia 76ers drafted Dario Saric, who was playing basketball professionally in Turkey at the time. He announced his intention to finish out his contract in Turkey, meaning he wouldn't come to the USA join the Sixers for a couple of years.
Trivia: Dario Saric returned to Turkey this year after spending 9 years in the NBA.
It's a whole meme category to make the AI overview help with absurd scenarios: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/where-is-mama-ai-overviews
Once I tried looking up whether you can configure GitHub’s merge queue to skip MQ checks for PRs that have already completed CI against the latest main commit. I knew from how MQ works internally that this wasn’t possible, but I wanted to confirm. The AI overview on the page said “yes, GitHub has this feature,” and that answer raised my eyebrows. My mind instantly spun up 10 threads thinking through how it could be possible. I typed out how in the AI chat, and the next message said “No, it’s not available". I don't trust AI overview since then, but since its positioning makes it hard to overlook.
I was trying to find a song which contained something like "not getting rained on" and google AI just congratulated me that I avoided rain.
Even ignoring the AI, I hate how useless exact text search has become. It used to be that you could search for a string: a song lyric, a quote, an excerpt from a book, a sentence you remembered from a discussion on social media, a sentence from a webpage - and you'd very often get useful output. Now I usually get garbage or nothing at all.
Sometime last year I googled for a comparison between two rockets, one of which is nicknamed "Escorpio", to which Google's AI overview assumed I wanted a comparison between a space rocket and a small arthropod, complete with detailed stats about max speeds (thousands of km/h vs. a few meters/h), cost (several millions of dollars vs. a few dollars at a pet shop), etc.
When searching "blog-ifyer velocifyer" on Google (as an attempt to go to https://blog.velocifyer.com ), I don't get my blog at all, but I do get Ai saying
> # 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.
I used to be able to type, e.g., “days since 24 June 2024” into a browser window and get an answer. At some point, Duck Duck Go stopped giving a response, so I turned that into “days since 24 June 2024 !g” to get it from Google. In the last couple-three weeks, Google now gives me an AI-generated answer that is wrong as often as not.
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.
I’ve noticed that LLMs frequently make assumptions about why I am asking a question, and will tack on additional paragraphs at the end giving advice for things I never asked for.
Recently I asked in a Google search when YouTube encodes videos in AV1 vs VP9. And Gemini gave a very short and incomplete answer, and then moved on to assume I was asking because AV1 playback was draining my battery too quickly. And then gave me instructions to toggle some settings in YouTube that don’t actually exist.
Part of the problem I think is just the cheap and fast model they use in search results just isn’t very good.
A few weeks ago, I was googling a quote from morrowind because so many NPCs were saying it at the beginning of the game that my thought was either I was running into a mod induced bug with voice line selection or else this quote must have been memed to hell.
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.
Moved to https://search.brave.com years ago because that's what works/worked the best for me but I'm about to move again I think to https://noai.duckduckgo.com because of that annoying Leo AI that's always wrong.
I'd love to move away from Google entirely but it's a long process, years of business on Google Workspace etc. I hate to be tied to companies like this, when I started I never thought Google would end up like Microsoft.
Google's AI mode is extremely hit or miss. At it's best it's a more flexible version of their old pagerank "I'm feeling lucky" button, where the LLM does return an appropriate response ...
However AI mode seems to be largely RAG, so it's supposedly authoritative answer is often just some online forum comment it picked up, such as a couple days ago when it fed me back something I had just posted myself 30 min earlier!
It does at least dump you into Gemini chat, so when the initial answer is obviously wrong you can try to drill down to get something better, but presumably many people are taking the initial answer as some sort of "AI truth" when it is far from it.
AI has become the new RegEx, being used where a string search would have done fine.
I won’t go into too much details (it’s a product I have to evaluate at work so it’s not really my story to tell) but vendor x has put OpenAI in to search metadata when really all I want is a keyword search… maybe with some fancy operators “blue” and DateTime > “2026-09-27 14:00”
Not “the blue thing yesterday” which also allows me to search for words that are slanderous that the AI hallucinates results for.
A search through metadata without AI is fine.
It's not "weird" if you consider google "just" added a Gemini widget to their search results, which you don't need to interact with. Click on the "web" tab or set your search engine to that to go back to an old fashioned version of Google.
That said, this (and other anecdotes in this thread) are an example of mismatched expectations; the expectation is that the AI overview is an addition or expansion of search, or something that summarizes multiple search results, or something that helps you find something. But clearly it's not / it's something too generic still.
I tried with Claude
> 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 […]
> 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.
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.
I had a similar experience with this that actually concerned me. I can’t remember the quote I was googling, but it was verbatim a quote that someone said. The AI interpreted it as my quote and furthermore interpreted it as me intending harm to someone else. Now I’m worried I’m flagged in a system and waiting for the police to show at my door next time google hands over data to the government.
Some google representative once said something like "any search result requiring users to go beyond the first page is considered a failure". I think this is where it went downhill. And now AI answers try to condense the handful remaining results into a single answer. But search actually has two purposes, searching for something specific (where above statement might make sense) and exploring something, where you WANT to see more than just a handful of results. Imagine trying to do a literature review with a search where you only get a few results, how could this ever be exhaustive.
The software industry collectively lost the plot back around the time social media really took off. I don't know which problem google, in particular, has been trying to solve but it definitely is not search.
This article nails it: Google is not the place for AI summaries.
It undermines the utility of search—and also Adwords? The benefit of Google to the world is to funnel people to the right websites. Not to summarize the website's content.
Oftentimes the AI is presenting a summary of 2 dudes on Reddit discussing something as if it is universal fact.
I'm not anti-AI by any means——but Google has lost the plot on why people go there.
What search is better? I use DDG, and I also know search has been broken for years because of attention and surveillance economy.
I'd say around 2016. Sundar just became CEO, the new CFO started gutting projects and teams. Ads in search results were no longer easy to identify by being highlighted. Free fall since then. Total betrayal. Won't ever go back.
Haha, had almost the exact thing trying to find a quote from Steins; Gate ("I keep seeing it, I keep seeing it"). Google AI was very "worried" about me.
For shopping and basic research it's very good. It's not nearly at Astra or Fable level and sometimes it gets facts wrong, but it's super fast and it has the whole web available through some vector search facility I assume. I can just give it a product name or number or throw a whole bunch of items from my shopping cart at it and then discuss what I need e.g. for a heating installation in my house, it's obviously not an expert but it always finds stuff that I overlooked or that can be improved.
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.
This isn't even its final form.
Try this in a language that has fewer than 100 million native speakers and/or is generally regarded as difficult/unnecessary to learn and you'll find the same, but with spelling/grammar errors, some of them reminiscent of how a five year old would speak.
I actually like the AI overview because most of the time it answers my question perfectly and I don’t need to click through multiple results (because they kinda suck now). I started treating the search more as a once off ai prompt rather than searching for keywords etc. I tried Kagi but it also kinda sucked and I was underwhelmed. Sue me.
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=hes+never+coming+dario
This is my default search engine now. I can't stand those AI summaries. My searches are often depleted of context, specially when I'm looking for some exact phrase, that any AI summary is going to miss badly.
interestingly enough, i had a mildly similar experience--also basketball related--this morning. I was looking for the fan's response to Draymond's engagement bait, "What's worse than a bad thanksgiving meal?" ( i searched whats worse than a bad thanksgiving meal draymond) to which google's AI said "No meal". i had to stop using it because it threw me off so bad.
For those curious the engagement went like this:
Draymond Green via threads: What's worse than a bad thanksgiving meal?
Fan: when a veteran leader punches his Youngblood teammate and instantly ends the dynasty
Draymond Green: Damn
for context, Draymond punched Jordan Poole on Oct 5, 2022 the season after Poole shone for the golden state for their 4th dynasty championship ring. Poole had shown some potential for being a great shooter.
As a heavy user of LLMs professionally, I too am so confused by the decision making process within these orgs. Do people really want them to speak like actual human connections? Why?
I recently Googled "Are you not enteretained?" I wanted to see the movie clip. Instead I got "I am thoroughly entertained!" from the AI. Some weird blurb like that. It did have the clip and even mentioned it in the AI summary, but it was still jarring. They have since fixed it, I think, to say "You must be talking about such and such movie quote", so it feels like they are trying to improve it, but it was jarring at the time.
As someone who loves (loved) to google movie, TV and anime quotes all the time, it is nauseating when stupid AI preview tries to engage me in a conversation.
It seems silly for Google to throw away its competitive advantage and essentially turn itself into another conversational LLM. It's basically just a worse chatgpt at this point.
It doesn't matter what you think of the google search results page. It doesn't matter whether you even find anything or not.
What matters is that token usage goes up and that pleases the shareholders. That's it. That's the only thing that matters today.
Instead of internally testing their AI until it was ready for primetime Google made everyone on planet earth eat their dogfood.
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.
Like everything else the moment Google had to optimize for shareholders thats what it started doing. Everything you see now is part of the quest for ever growing profits and ever climbing share prices.
This is the craziest example of dead internet I've ever seen. Look what happens now when you type this into Google...
query: "What were some of the memes about Dario staying in turkey" AI answer: There are actually no real memes about "Dario staying in Turkey."This specific phrase is a famous example of a "natural language search query" used to describe how everyday people try to search the internet.A recent discussion on Hacker News highlighted this exact phrase to contrast how human search behavior has changed:"
THEN IT LINKS TO THIS THREAD?!
I need to go take a walk.