←back to thread

Death by AI

(davebarry.substack.com)
583 points ano-ther | 4 comments | 19 Jul 25 14:35 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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.

replies(8): >>44619848 #>>44619963 #>>44620197 #>>44620958 #>>44620991 #>>44621577 #>>44622598 #>>44628583 #
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"

replies(2): >>44621904 #>>44622094 #
weatherlite ◴[20 Jul 25 04:13 UTC] No.44621904[source]▶
> That was a product decision, and a very bad one.

I don't know that it's a bad decision, time will judge it. Also, we can expect the quality of the results to improve over time. I think Google saw a real threat to their search business and had to respond.

replies(3): >>44622089 #>>44622096 #>>44639106 #
gambiting ◴[20 Jul 25 04:53 UTC] No.44622089[source]▶
The threat to their search business had nothing to do with AI but with the insane amount of SEO-ing they allowed to rake in cash. Their results have been garbage for years, even for tech stuff where they traditionally excelled - searching for "what does class X do in .NET" yields several results for paid programming courses rather than the actual answer, and that's not an AI problem.
replies(1): >>44622132 #
bee_rider ◴[20 Jul 25 05:04 UTC] No.44622132[source]▶
SEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have more sympathy for Google. They are just… losing at the cat-and-mouse game. They are playing cat against a whole world of mice, I don’t think anyone other than pre-decline Google could win it.
replies(6): >>44622282 #>>44624595 #>>44625499 #>>44627835 #>>44629397 #>>44633660 #
1. lelanthran ◴[20 Jul 25 21:18 UTC] No.44629397{5}[source]▶
> SEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have more sympathy for Google. They are just… losing at the cat-and-mouse game.

I don't think they are; they have realised (quite accurately, IMO) that users would still use them even if they boosted their customers' rankings in the results.

They could, right now, switch to a model that penalises pages for each ad. They don't. They could, right now, penalise highly monetised "content" like courses and crap. They don't do that either.[1]

If Kagi can get better results with a fraction of the resources, there is no argument to be made that Google is playing a losing game.

--------------------------------------

[1] All the SEO stuff is damn easy to pick out; any page that is heavily monetised (by ads, or similar commercial offering) is very very easy to bin. A simple "don't show courses unless search query contains the word courses" type of rule is nowhere near computationally expensive. Recording the number of ads on a page when crawling is equally cheap.

replies(2): >>44630709 #>>44639123 #
2. thfuran ◴[21 Jul 25 00:30 UTC] No.44630709[source]▶
>A simple "don't show courses unless search query contains the word courses" type of rule is nowhere near computationally expensive

It’s nowhere near good either. What about the searches for cuorses or classes or training?

replies(1): >>44632468 #
3. lelanthran ◴[21 Jul 25 06:59 UTC] No.44632468[source]▶
Their current search already recognises mispellings and synonyms.

Why would they drop that? It's not as if they have to throw away all the preprocessing they do on the search query.

They can continue preprocessing exactly like they do it now.

4. Miraste ◴[21 Jul 25 19:08 UTC] No.44639123[source]▶
> If Kagi can get better results with a fraction of the resources, there is no argument to be made that Google is playing a losing game.

Google's algorithm is the target for every SEO firm in the world. No one is targeting Kagi. Therefore, Kagi can use techniques that would not work at Google.