alt Hacker NewsWhen did Google get so weird?
Comments
If tech companies are being held responsible for our feelings (Meta’s constant fines and legal trouble) then this seems much more like a legal CYA than Google trying to present itself as a friend.
I am worried the old net is slowly dying and any "before:2015" or "before:2020" search results will vanish soon.
Once a day I tell my LLM that I find it's anthropomorphic responses patronizing and offensive. It's barely a program - mostly just a big lump of data. It's not 'sorry' or capable of apology. It's just gross.
Google did crazy things to reduce the cost of delivering search results and now they have shifted to AI overviews which definitely is a costlier way to present results. What does this mean for the company in the long term?
I love that AI search feature, use it all the time. It's faster than ChatGPT/Claude for the more simple questions. Still, it can handle pretty specific stuff
The day Google realised, and it was indeed a revelation to them, that their user base was much more pervasive than hn users and bloggers who write cleverly.
I hate other things with Google. I have a feeling that we lost something. A tool for discoverability. You cannot just enter a keyword, and see billions of pages in results. You cannot explore the web anymore. If I write "artificial intelligence" in the searchbox the result wil be swamped with content farms, some pages describing what it is, but there will be no 'resources', no 'tools' to be found by it. If I put "artificial intelligence tools" it will provide me some fake pages with AI slop, not openclaw, or n8n. It gives me rank pages instead of tools.
Selection bias. Nobody blogs about and posts on Hacker News about the billions of accurate, useful, non-weird AI summaries that Google also serves every day.
https://udm14.org/ for anyone needing an AI-free version
Googles agent talking most of the top space of Google’s page is also notoriously dumber than Google’s agent talking through Gemini.google.com for some reason, making it often way less than useless
i wrote about something similar here, the AI overview are doing REAL DAMAGE.
Cory Doctorow coined the term to describe the how and why... and why it not only them...
And yes they are en$ hitificating the thing... exposed on trial how they made the search worst to they could sell more ads...
It's weird but I always some context in so I don't see these.
i.e. I would have searched for dario quote .... or dario basketball quote ....
itt: Engineers complaining that Google is going to shit and no longer for them.
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.
That's a similar experience with all chat bots, regardless of product. Amazon chat bot said to me that it heard my frustration and it sympathized with it. Doubt.
So, I tend to use Google as my calc. In the past I could just type 13555.86 and get the result.
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 used to find the weirdest stuff searching random strings on Google. Some kids in my school stumbled upon porn that way.
Who among us hasn't been spurned by a man named Dario
fwiw, I only use Google with udm=web. So for Firefox you can add the search engine with the text: ``https://google.com/search?q=%s&udm=web``. It makes Google slightly more like how it used to be.
AI has them badly shook.
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.
Dumb LLMs foisted on unwilling users have done more to damage AI’s reputation than AI’s opponents.
You guys are still using google?
If you are serious about the topic check out "Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines" by Sherry Turkle coming out tomorrow.
It's not about NVIDIA stock, it's not about your latest harness, it's not about code review on generated code, instead it's about what happens to us when something not human fakes being human and the dangers of it.
I only started reading it but if it's as fundamental as her previous "Reclaiming conversation" then I expect it to change my life for the better, even if it means fighting against the dangerous behavior of the majority of people around me.
An AI is not a person and when you elevate it to that status you lower yourself. It is very dangerous, even more so when it's done, like mobile phone and engagement more broadly before, for profit.
Protect yourself and those around you, regardless of how you like or dislike AI, and trust actual humans specializing in studying human behavior, not psychopaths craving billions.
When every interaction is valuable parasocial was been demonstrated to hook users and increase revenue.
instead of letting you search for info, now google is FEEDING you (often the wrong) info. I use Yandex, because that one still behaves like a search engine.
the internet devolves into a machine to capture human attention and monetize influence. Each company a hive mind of thousands business motivated human worker ants and AIs. The machine has determined that this pyscho-babble is the most optimal way to engage the attention of average humans to maximize its own reward function ($$$)
If you still want a "regular search engine" without GenAI/LLM answers or features, there aren't many options out there, unfortunately.
My wife and I wanted one, so we founded one and launched it earlier this year; we're currently at 350 monthly active accounts, nearing 400.
It's paid and privacy-focused so you get assigned a random account number when you signup (there's no username or email), and you can get 2h for free by solving a proof-of-work captcha.
It's https://uruky.com if you want to give it a shot. If you want some more time to try it out, send us an email and we'll offer you a voucher for a few days.
EDIT: Seems people are downvoting this a lot and potentially interpreting it as spam? Sorry, was just trying to help people who said they wanted something like this, here.
> Google, a search engine ...
Do note what you got wasn't from a search engine, but a so-called AI.
`"hes never coming over" dario` works as expected.
Waiting for all the data we give them in these chats to be sold even more.
Click to see hot new Darios in your neighborhood
I've had so many "what the fuck" moments with Google in the last couple years.
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.
Honestly, gemini is so good at being frustrating. I asked him to solve some equation to check my solution but he was proving me wrong for 10 minutes until i literally solved it for him. Imo, Google has been doing ridiculous stuff for the last 5 year
I don’t think that an AI misinterpreting your results is weird, tbh.
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.
meh, AI is a new tech, google is experimenting with it. I don't expect it will get everything right 100% of the time.
So a fake article? Right.
New iteration of Lifelog
I tried to look up a country parody song from The Daddies called "You wiped your ass with my heart" and it wanted to console me about that, too.
for what it's worth, "he's never coming over dario meme" (word "meme" added) gives perfect AI answer
With technical questions, I've gotten a lot more hallucinations from Google than from ChatGPT. It feels like they added the AI to try to stay competitive, despite them not being good at it.
This is pretty funny, thanks for making me laugh :)
Been a reasonably happy DuckDuckGo user for years. It has the SEO slop problems too, and they jumped the AI shark like everybody else, but you can turn the AI off at least and still have your search engine and chatbot be separate tools.
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.
“[but] if I scroll down a few hundred pixels below the AI slop, Google did have exactly what I was looking for”
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.
> are you ready to just walk away
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.
Google is committing seppuku out of fear to be murdered by AI
Is weird a word for evil/greedy AF?
Mm.you are right about something
The thing that pisses me off about Google recently is that they have made YouTube utterly unusable if you aren’t will to subscribe to premium. The ads are so frequent now that I’ve stopped trying to close them. You could argue well then sign up for premium but if the only benefit you’re providing on a paid tier is fewer ads you’ve run out of ideas and indeed I believe they have run out of ideas to monetize and are fleeing to the last refuge the same way meta has- by flooding everything with ads to meet earnings expectations and have enough cash flow to retain wall streets permission for capex
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.