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Death by AI

(davebarry.substack.com)
583 points ano-ther | 5 comments | 19 Jul 25 14:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.936s | source
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jwr ◴[19 Jul 25 21:33 UTC] No.44619638[source]▶
I'd say this isn't just an AI overview thing. It's a Google thing. Google will sometimes show inaccurate information and there is usually no way to correct it. Various "feedback" forms are mostly ignored.

I had to fight a similar battle with Google Maps, which most people believe to be a source of truth, and it took years until incorrect information was changed. I'm not even sure if it was because of all the feedback I provided.

I see Google as a firehose of information that they spit at me ("feed"), they are too big to be concerned about any inconsistencies, as these don't hurt their business model.

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muglug ◴[19 Jul 25 22:04 UTC] No.44619848[source]▶
No, this is very much an AI overview thing. In the beginning Google put the most likely-to-match-your-query result at the top, and you could click the link to see whether it answered your question.

Now, frequently, the AI summaries are on top. The AI summary LLM is clearly a very fast, very dumb LLM that’s cheap enough to run on webpage text for every search result.

That was a product decision, and a very bad one. Currently a search for "Suicide Squad" yields

> The phrase "suide side squad" appears to be a misspelling of "Suicide Squad"

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1. flomo ◴[20 Jul 25 04:54 UTC] No.44622094[source]▶
Right, the classic google search results are still there. But even before the AI Overview, Google's 'en' plan has been to put as many internal links at the top of the page as possible. I just tried this and you have to scroll way down below the fold to find Barry's homepage or substack.
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2. h2zizzle ◴[20 Jul 25 14:22 UTC] No.44625478[source]▶
No, the search queries are likely run through a similar "prompt modification" process as on many AI platforms, and the results themselves aren't ranked anything like they used to be. And, of course, Google killed the functionality of certain operators (+, "", etc.) years ago. Classic Google Search is very much dead.
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3. yonatan8070 ◴[20 Jul 25 16:58 UTC] No.44627025[source]▶
Was there ever an announcement regarding the elimination of search operators? Or does Google still claim they are real?
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4. h2zizzle ◴[20 Jul 25 21:46 UTC] No.44629621{3}[source]▶
Nothing for "" afaik. + was killed to make Google+ discoverable (or so Google claimed at the time).
5. flomo ◴[21 Jul 25 07:31 UTC] No.44632633[source]▶
At some point, Google search was so good that you didn't really need the operators, like you weren't just prodding some primitive AltaVista to give the results. So I think "almost nobody used that" came long before the en-plan of filling the top 50% with internal links.