When did Google get so weird?

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.

I've seen stuff like this if I Google a part of a song lyric, movie quote, or something I remember out of a book. What I'm looking for is the exact quote and maybe some more context. Sometimes the AI overview treats it like I want to say the quotation in the first person, and responds to it in a somewhat personal tone.

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.

> 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?

Looks to be an algorithmic enhanced confidence trick, to turn users searching for information into "marks", in order to extract even more information from them (that can be sold).

A certain percentage of users will be tempted to use the AI as empathetic listener, giving away loads of personal information, if their search words are twisted in inviting enough ways.

More people have to stop tolerating these type of abuses and push for this unwanted behavior to be regulated.

All this said, I wonder what it’s like being on the receiving end of Google. The number of personal, emotional and existential queries is probably pretty significant.

I have similar experiences. Google needs to realize their search variant of Gemini needs guard rails... in order to actually serve the purpose of search. Gemini also seems to hallucinate the most frequently out of any of the big LLMs. Doubly bad when it's repackaged as a search assistant.

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.

It's just gemini responding on google.com. If you wrote something like that in ChatGPT or Claude.ai or gemini.com you'd get a similar response.

A while back my wife told me about a singer/comedian that had a song with the lyrics "my pronouns are fuck you and go fuck yourself" (or something like that).

I put that into google to look it up, and the AI response on google.com (gemini) repsonded with:

"Got it, I wont use any pronouns for you".

It was actually really funny.

Google also, sometimes hides the search results it used for AI overview.

meaning you won't get them in the results page, but hidden inside the AI overview as links.

this and the increasing bad scammy ads, there is really good chance for other search engines to take over.

A key thing that's driving this is the fact that, currently, Gemini is kind of shit compared to the real frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Add on to that the need for Google to serve an absolute insane number of these summaries and have low latency for each one - this means no real thinking time and a comparatively small models.

So it's partially AI, sure, but it's also because you're getting the summaries from what is an extremely stupid AI compared to the "good stuff" that's out there.

I think this has to do ith the fact that Google does this on every single search page. They must be using a small model with a tiny context window to not be HEMORRHAGING money. I will say it is probably having the opposite effect than they were expecting. Rather than being the goto place to search the web using AI, it is tarnishing a brand they have spent 28 years building.

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

Could this partly be how Google uses different bots for search vs training? And sites (say via robots.txt or Cloudflare bot management) can allow search indexing but restrict AI training? That’s probably wishful thinking but plausible, especially with very current information like news sites and the example of the sports scores from above.

I tried to use Google to check a quote I heard someone attribute to Nietsche, which I suspected wasn't a real quote or was at least misattributed, and the AI summary was a moral essay on the ethics of love. Useless, unasked for, and extremely creepy.

A simple search rule like

  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

My search queries lately feel like they're talking to an LLM trained on SEO spam. Definitely got weirder in the last 2-3 years.

I have stopped using Google search a looooong time ago.

I really cannot comprehend the fact that a company which runs biggest ad networks on their search engine product don't do actual search and uses AI to answer queries. If you don't send trafic to a site which publishes your ads, how do you plan to sustain your main business?

One good alternative will steer me away from Google search like how Google took over Yahoo/Lycos/Ask Jeevs.

I have to imagine google would consider this one to be essentially a bug - misreading user intention this badly. Akin to hallucinations.

I know many people want to ask questions to google directly and just read the AI result and very rarely check the links, and I know google wants to convert more people doing this before people switch to chatgpt etc.

But google search does not (yet?) appear to me to be designed as a chatbot you are expected to converse with where it would be normal to just open asking about some guy named Dario in your personal life who isn't globally notable. There's a difference between pushing for a conversational query and a conversational personal assistant. Heck this is a few jumps past that even.

I wouldn't really ask when google got so weird, I'd ask when google's AI overview got so shitty, and the answer is ever since they introduced it.

Haha yeah been trying lately to listen to some old school band called "suicidal tendencies". Half of the search request for the band on Google and YouTube lead suicide hotlines ...

I is a problem of how AI models have trained - when you are asking them a question, they are not giving an answer, but OPINION piece. It seems to be part of current AI business model - to give advices for people that are unable to think themselves.

So often nowadays the AI summary says the exact opposite of the (usually correct and helpful) answers I get when clicking on through to the "AI mode" tab in the search result.

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.

Perhaps this is less about Google and more about following trends, moving fast and breaking things with an LLM chatbot.

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.

Yeah, it happened to me a number of times on queries where I was clearly looking for information, not company. Even more bizarrely, it's often compelled to answer with some flavor of "I won't answer". For example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=really%2C+just+shut+up -> "Understood. I will stop talking right now."

I know their goal is to make these as relevant and useful as possible, but in my mind, not everything needs to be passed down to an LLM. I guess Google disagrees.

Reliability has always been an essential factor of a commercial product. "It works" was the baseline. If it didn't, people simply won't buy 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.

The search function has also become patently unusable. I was looking for a specific bike widget. No luck, doesn’t exist according to Google search and Gemini. Fine. Unlikely, but fine. And then, there it was, a week later. I just stumbled upon this thing randomly. The product had the right keywords and everything.

I don't get how it makes google more money to play therapist in the search engine. It surely costs a boatload more to generate that kind of response, so where's the payoff?

The next step just has to be adding in to that AI response something like:

"Want to talk about it with a real person? Click this link to schedule a free trial therapy session with {insert company here}"

I find it soooo funny that now Google will "know" you are ending a relationship with Dario due to him not finishing it.

Now talking seriously, it certainly added something to your "profile" which is nuts because that was not what you meant

Simple question: Why would you guys still use Google search? That's ancient technology. I don't think I've done that in the past several months.

I'll throw out that duck duck go has been "good enough" for me for many years now. I set it as my default and am not confronted with most nonsense like this. There's still some stuff, but way less of it.

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

Google has been weird since they started offering auto-complete for the most common searches matching yours.

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.

This is a really good time to do a head-to-head comparison of different search engines. The last time I checked Google does not provide search results above the fold, instead showing AI overview, ads, and YouTube search results. Try a different search engine to see which one is giving you the highest signal results and what other junk they put on the page. Personally I use duckduckgo with AI turned off in settings, but it's best to try the experiment for yourself.

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

Weekly public service announcement: "If you are still using Google search after May 2019 (when ads started to be shown as organic results) you are the cause of your own problems."

Search quality degradation hit hard around 2020. Now I'm practically appending 'reddit' to every query to find actual answers.

> In what universe is it Google's job to console me and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what I am looking for on the internet?

In one that changes.

Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible” includes your emotional state.

There was a post today or yesterday where Paul Graham and Nate Silver accused the AP of being woke for saying you shouldn’t anthropomorphize LLMs. But I can imagine there to be quite a few unpredictable consequences to encouraging your customers to project emotions onto your product that humans generally project onto each other.

I’m not sure SV is prepared for what happens when you go down that road.

I think by weird you mean "paid off by and in the pockets of AI billionaires"

That is why I'm turning slowly to Kagi, first the free tier. My first search results were weird, I searched for "CMK32GX4M2A2666C16 ver3.41" and it wasn't much relevant as I thought it would be

The OP may not realize how much pressure these AI companies face from regulators to ensure that their AI is caring to its most mentally-fragile users...

In short, he got the answer that Google was forced to give.

Do you also stop in your tracks and write blog posts when you see suicide hotline signs on the GGB?

This is why I like jev so much. It re-frames machines as machines, not as empathetic perfect-friend-or-soulmate-or-counselors, which they can never be, because there is no "other" to interact with. LLMs perfectly embody Kant's epistemological crisis.

The irony is that search used to give you the sources and let you decide. Now we're getting an answer first and have to verify it ourselves

Their core product - Google.com - is also just plain broken often late. Just returns nothing. Neither search nor AI.

Pretty incredible given how much of their valuation rides on it

Many companies having entire departments now 100% ran by AI lol it's crazy to note Google is not exempt, this will get crazy with unmonitored AI tools sprawling around so people can sit in their asses instead of having to deal with real problems

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

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

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