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cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information.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!
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.
The AI answer dominates the page, and is usually wrong, so it's just a waste of the most valuable space on the page.
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'm in several facebook groups for cars and bikes, and holy smokes, someone asks a question and usually the top response is someone literally pasting in a screenshot of a google AI generated response....which is wrong like, solid 50% of the time. And then you point it out and people get aggro on you. I hate it.
This phenomenon is so widespread and I can't see it as anything other than serious AI psychosis.
I think people want to feel useful and helpful in general, and now a lot of people are getting this feeling by using AI to answer questions. And it's like you said they get so mad when you point out that their AI screenshot is wrong or, even more obviously, that the person who asked could also just read the google gemini blurb. They get mad because you're invalidating their feeling of being helpful.
Last year someone went missing on the water in my area. There was a lot of talk on facebook during the search, and a coordinated facebook group. And every post would have people posting their chats with ChatGPT, or saying they used AI to analyze the weather and currents on the day he went missing to figure out he probably landed on this or that shore (he didn't). These posts are equivalent to the mediums and psychics who also come in with these unhelpful advice posts.
I think fundamentally it's the same as how AI is giving some people an extremely strong feeling of being an expert, and how their psyche seems to lash out to protect that feeling when it's threatened.
Another facebook anecdote, I recently saw someone post in a local genealogy and history group some pure AI slop infographics. When people called him out he said that it's AI but he carefully vets all the information and that they need to stop being luddites or they'll be stuck in the past blah blah devolving into calling them liberals and the like. But his infographics were all incredibly obviously wrong, to anyone who had ever seen a map it's obvious that the coastlines were incredibly wrong, and the city weren't in the correct locations at all. So what can you even do with someone like that? They're just going to retreat into the safety of the chatbot to continue their "research".
Whatever the tool, the problem is that it’s wrong, not that it’s done by AI. Like, why are we conflating the two - is it because it’s now easier for someone to produce a wrong artifact that visually looks ok and therefore tricks our brains? And people get upset because a prior quality heuristic is now obviously broken?
Hugsbox · · focus · HN ↗
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!
safety1st · · focus · HN ↗
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.
microtonal · · focus · HN ↗
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.
gambiting · · focus · HN ↗
JDups · · focus · HN ↗
I think people want to feel useful and helpful in general, and now a lot of people are getting this feeling by using AI to answer questions. And it's like you said they get so mad when you point out that their AI screenshot is wrong or, even more obviously, that the person who asked could also just read the google gemini blurb. They get mad because you're invalidating their feeling of being helpful.
Last year someone went missing on the water in my area. There was a lot of talk on facebook during the search, and a coordinated facebook group. And every post would have people posting their chats with ChatGPT, or saying they used AI to analyze the weather and currents on the day he went missing to figure out he probably landed on this or that shore (he didn't). These posts are equivalent to the mediums and psychics who also come in with these unhelpful advice posts.
I think fundamentally it's the same as how AI is giving some people an extremely strong feeling of being an expert, and how their psyche seems to lash out to protect that feeling when it's threatened.
Another facebook anecdote, I recently saw someone post in a local genealogy and history group some pure AI slop infographics. When people called him out he said that it's AI but he carefully vets all the information and that they need to stop being luddites or they'll be stuck in the past blah blah devolving into calling them liberals and the like. But his infographics were all incredibly obviously wrong, to anyone who had ever seen a map it's obvious that the coastlines were incredibly wrong, and the city weren't in the correct locations at all. So what can you even do with someone like that? They're just going to retreat into the safety of the chatbot to continue their "research".
edmundsauto · · focus · HN ↗
deaton · · focus · HN ↗