When did Google get so weird?

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

Change is hard.

I feel this is a result of the "make the world a better place" narrative that Silicon Valley companies used to adorn themselves with.

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 mean at least you got some relevant links. It's becoming increasingly common, especially with some types of subjects, that all of the links are regurgitated AI slop that or indistinguishable from it.

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.

They’re trying to convince him to divulge personal information so they can sell it. They’ve always been this low. It’s their business model.

Good article. Good point, well made.

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.

Agreed 100%.

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.

The world is vomiting software

Google's AI is really intrusive. That's the only way to describe it.

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.

I mean this is really the authors fault. First of all, this huge AI overview only blocks 90% of the screen if you use google on a phone, which you should not do in the first place. Secondly, alternatives to Google exist.

Google trying to break up human relationships: "Are you ready to just walk away? Huh? Are you ready to do it? I have no idea who the guy is, but you better be walking away right now. Do you want to send one final text? Pretty pathetic if you ask me. Has his behavior changed? Just walk away."

Now imagine they did this to your home assistant devices. Oh wait. You don't need to imagine it. Already happened.

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.

Lessons learned from Microslop

I'm increasingly not seeing the point of google search. If I have an agent that can find whatever I ask it to, including with constraints like "peer reviewed journal articles only" or "working code published on github", why would I be using google's kinda-shitty LLM to do a worse version of that? Search results are just SEO-stuffed AI slop so I find nothing there of value either.

I genuinely think I have not used traditional web search in months.

Finally, someone else talking about this.

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.

Ah yes, do no evil. It takes quite a screwed up company to stuff this toxic fake friend/therapy bullshit into a frigging search engine. And to do that from the position of having some of the weaker AI model performance out there is even more galling. When somebody harms themselves after dealing with this kind of shit I hope they or their surviving family get to take Google to the cleaners.

Reading the comments and all I can think is "first world problems"

Boomers have been googling like this for over a decade. You are not the target customer for an empathetic computer.

Had to try it. And it delivers :)

> 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—

Google also has a URL filter that breaks URLs, stripping off components after the domain name, among other trasnformations, turning any response from Gemini that includes URLs into dangerous gibberish. This was reported in April and perhaps earlier, and was promptly closed.

After a while, every company has enough customers dependent enough on them that they don't need to do anything anymore.

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.

Search died, and none of us noticed. Why would Google announce it? It'd be like the Milk Processor board announcing that all dairy cattle went extinct... no, they'd just try to slip oat juice in as a substitute and hope no one notices.

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.

gemini is fucking slow. cant even do "brightness", "bluetooth" command without waiting 10 fucking seconds

Google is at that mid-1990s Microsoft point where they know what the next big thing is, but they have neither the taste not corporate flexibility to parlay that into the right fit. In 5 years someone will make a search engine that gets the AI balance just right, and Google will buy them for $900 billion or something.

The politically intriguing CEO and all the upper management that he hired need to go. Their focus is not the product but the corporate intrigue, dividing the pie and infighting, riding on semi-monopoly status.

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 start date was December 10, 2004 when google rolled out a feature called "Google Suggest", which when a person types in "men can" it displays a drop down list with ridiculous responses such as "men can get pregnant" and "men can have periods". If I had to pick a date, that was the beginning of the end for me.

They had to become rich beyond their wildest dreams before they could afford enough nightmares to go around for all internet users.

The larger a corporation, the more insane on every level. A person is smart. People are stupid.

The only surprising part of this story was you actually finding the meme you were looking for, instead of forced recency pushing news about a D-lister influencer named Dario. Whenever I try to find things, Google has fully forgotten about everything that happened before 2025

When they were the mavericks using Linux in the year 2000, and the C-suite all went to attend bman and left stylized OOO icons on their front web page. Everyone's all shocked, I tell you, shocked at this weirdness.

Oh, this is an easy question to answer.

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.

"It's not weird, it's incompetent!"

I can’t upvote this enough. This is such a terrible idea. We’re really living in a dystopian world.

I’ll have nothingburger for $100, Alex.

AI Overview patiently taught me Autodesk Fusion, designed the 3-phase wiring in my shop, pointed out scenarios where 3-HP motors would overheat, and attempted to counsel you on the sad demise of your relationship with Dario.

Welcome to the new world.

I'd like to skip to the part where AI robot will give me consoling fellatio.

Google got weird on the day Pichai sided with the ads team/division over the search team/division, resulting in the enshittification of Google Search which led to people relying on LLMs since search no longer works

> a search engine which does not have human emotions

I mean TBD, not sure how capable the model they're using for search summary is

This is what you get for only hiring leetcode bots lol

This seems like a bit of an overreaction. Everyone knows that chatbots are fucking stupid, especially when there's zero context provided. This seems less like a real issue to me, and more like just your standard "Google sucks" post that people are constantly making on HN yet nobody cares outside of it.

> Instead, Google did what Google does in 2026 and gave me an AI overview. These used to bother me but at this point I'm mostly ok with them, they're sometimes helpful

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.

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