Google is losing it

I spent most of today looking at places to rent in Denver and I come home to Google having killed it's fucking search engine. What the hell is going on
- That's what you get for trying to have a real life.
  
  How does je dare to.
- Google decided that the entirety of reddit is perfect for training data in their AI LLM. People's shitposts from 10 years ago have now been given the spotlight at the top of google searches.

Google has been bad for a long time, but they've shut the bed so hard lately. Seriously, look at this:
I actually run out of screenshot space before I can get to an actual regular search result!
- Search done from Germany.
  The mobile search doesnt look much different. The order on mobile is as follows:
  A snippet from glogs.wordlbank.org
  People also ask
  Forbes article (see screenshot above)
  www.epa.gov article
  Both are Firefox Desktop (Win) and Mobile (Android) running Consent-O-Matic and ublock Origin
  
  Similar results from Spain. Not sure why it thinks I'm in Michigan.
  
  It shows the exact same results in Brazil
- Bing has a similar problem where it just repeats the results, some pages are only 1 result so you just keep clicking next
- Unusable.

So weird, that's not what I see.
- On the one hand, generative AI doesn't have to give deterministic answers i.e. it won't necessarily generate the same answer even when asked the same question in the same way.
  But on the other hand, editing the HTML of any page to say whatever you want and then taking a screenshot of it is very easy.
  
  It could also be A/B testing, so not everyone will have the AI running in general
  
  Technically, generative AI will always give the same answer when given the same input. But, what happens is a "seed" is mixed in to help randomize things, that way it can give different answers every time even if you ask it the same question.
  
  That seems like a Wikipedia capture for the wrong page instead of AI.
  
  There are actually a bunch of these. Adding glue to pizza sauce (scraped from an old reddit post), replacing Blinker Fluid every two years, etc.
  https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/googles-ai-overview-can-give-false-misleading-and-dangerous-answers/
  
  I too am skeptical, but there have been so many of these the last few days... is it just a new meme?
  
  When you do this query, won't you get the same?
- There for me
  
  Yup me too 🫡
  
  Me too. But a different person on my same network got a clean result.
- A/B testing moment
- Works on my machine.
  
  Oh perfect. We'll just point production to your machine.
- I see it.
  
  Same
- But the real question is, is the colour blue that you see, the colour blue that I see?
- filter bubble
- It’s, uh, not what I remember.
  old

AI and its consequences have been a disaster for Google.
- ... a disaster for ~~Google~~ humanity.
  
  I don't get the doom but idk I have been watching this stuff closely for over a decade. I think it's exciting and people are having All these strange expectations out of these systems all the sudden just because they're smart. Well they were smart before any of this generative AI stuff. Also scientific breakthroughs in medicine, blind people have something that can assist them. As someone with some disabilities, and knowing a lot of people who also have disabilities, it seems to be the privilege of the healthy and comfortable to keep the status quo.
  Also if we want to play that game we were so fucked by climate change already that I had no hope. Now I have a little. It's not going away so let's push for open open open free software. (And model weights)

Well, we know Google won't get rid of this.
They'll only cancel it after it actually works and becomes useful

We really need a whole community just for the very funny AI errors like this. I could spend all day reading about leaving a dog in a hot car, jumping off a bridge and eating at least one rock a day.
- And I'd be thrilled if that material were quarantined somewhere 😅
  
  Why? this is great content.

Did somebody say enshittification?
- Everyone, constantly.

I asked Google for the release date of the new Final Fantasy XIV expansion today, which comes out June 28th. It told me March 26th
- I'm pretty sure March 26 is the day the pre-order started, so that one at least kind of makes sense.
  
  But not from a knowledge engine. It makes sense if some rando just spouted off a date from the top of their head but this is the former world leader in knowledge capture and search.

What the hell is going on with Google search? Has it completely shit itself after the AI implementation? I know its been bad for a while but this is another level.
- Short answer, yes. The ratio of LLM generated noise to actual content is increasing exponentially as we speak. To us it seems overnight because the increase is so steep but it's been happening for several years. And it's going to get a lot worse.
  Honestly, I think we'll have to go back to 90s methods like web rings and human curated link directories.
  
  I do random hobby tinkering and search results have become so useless that I'm having to read a lot more books. Everything takes longer this way.
  
  I remember having to buy a book. A book with URLs. Before search engines existed.
  Good times.
  On Google: I'll never forgive them for getting rid of their pseudo secret government search google.com/unclesam where I found a lot of .mil docs I probably shouldn't have been able to.
  
  This is why I love Duckduckgo, I can turn off AI and ads.

Will, it's not wrong. Welcome to the AI powered world of tomorrow.
- the free version is stuck with an IQ of 53.
  
  That's low end of average for a human. A particularly dim human admittedly, but we've all met them.

I stopped using Google years ago. I started using Bing but had to stop that as it would divert me to MSN to sign in when clicking a link for a news article. Like a news article for The Independent or The Times or any other.
I then started using DuckDuckGo which is powered by Bing, but found it wasn’t great at many searches.
I now use Arc Search most of the time and click browse for me to get the information I want without the bullshit. Search is essentially dead due to greed.
- I'm finding SearXNG to be very good. It operates like dogpile used to but is actually functional and it pretty much entirely squelches product placement results. I actually have to manually go to google if I want to get product listings for something.
- Startpage and Qwant are the best alternatives IMO.
  https://www.qwant.com/
  https://www.startpage.com/
  
  I used Qwant for a few days and then it popped up a modal dialog asking me to turn off my ad-blocker. Never used it again after that.
  
  qwant uses bing and is mostly a proxy for it. Startpage is a proxy for google. the only thing they really do is protect your privacy, they don't give you better search results.
  
  Thanks. I’ll check these out.
  What do you prefer about each of them?
  
  Tried start page after DDG outage on Thursday and I'm liking it a lot
- this is the first i hear of Arc, is it available as an iOS app only?
  
  Seems to only have an iOS app right now. There is a desktop version for Windows and MacOS Here.
  It is annoying that it wants to send you the download link by email though.
  Edit: Here is an example of how the results look when asking for opening times of a book store in my city.

how do you guys get these things? I never see any summaries like that. I wonder if one of my adblockers is killing google AI lmao. Do you have to be logged into your google account? I never log into google any more.
- It’s probably fake
  
  I just searched the same words and got the same text.
  
  I just got the same result
  
  not fake.
  
  I just Googled "Fall Guy" and the AI response doesn't match the OP. I was shown a summary of the movie.

It's time to return to human curated directories.
- Do you know if there are any active ones? Hopefully categorized according to genre, geography, language etc?
  
  Nope, been thinking about what it would take to make one though.

Behold the wonders of AI! Now, we don't have to pay human beings to edit webpages for us! Thanks to AI, you can just sit back and watch the money roll in!

They lost it a long time ago

Can't recreate this. Or any of the other AI flops people keep posting
- Thats because LLMs have a certain level of randomisation built in. You wont always get the same result for any given inquiry
  
  I literally don't see any AI blurbs at all in my searches. I wonder if one of my 4 ad blockers is killing the javascript element.
- I got exactly the same. Firefox on android and in the UK. Perhaps it's regional.
- I read somewhere they rolled it out to the US only and more countries are for now on the yet-to-do list aka soon™
  
  I'm in Sweden and didn't opt-in for anything.
  
  I'm in the US and opted into the beta for the AI stuff, but so far my experience has been generally positive.

lmao not prepared for this comedy from google

I like to use the Void from r/place as a metaphor for the Internet's gremlins. Google has called to the void, didn't bother to filter it and isn't happy with what it found. To me that signals that Google no longer understands internet culture.
- Nepo babies don't understand anything.

Nobody mentioned udm14.com ?
- ooo! I knew about having to select the 'Web' option but this saves that step! Thank you!

This is amazing

what the heck's the second picture
- The Fall Guy tv show from the 80's.
- The first picture shows Fall, the second shows Guy.
- The lady? She was in the original series. My brother loved that show so I had to watch it if I was watching tv at that time
- Guy

Google: "You wanted words? Here are some words!"
- Maybe they know something we don't know? What if: It will be a crime series following the "Fall guy" case, man who was a Boeing whistleblower and got sucked out of the fuselage mid flight. Was it the usual door falling off, or was it a murder? Maybe it is being filmed right now and Google leaked the information?

yo, did you modify the html page to make this meme ?
- Nope. Google trained the model it's using for search results off of Reddit, etc. junk data and expected it to be coherent.
  
  I wonder if they considered reddit votes to try to give more weight to high quality answers but also high quality jokes.
  But without votes pure nonsense becomes equal to truth.
  Humans could use reddit because we understand the site enough to be able to filter the valuable from the bad.
  I feel like the answer would be in between ai specifically to be such a filter.
  Every such post of google failing i have screen capped and then asked chatgpt for a more detailed explanation to do what google suggests i do. Everytime it managed to call out the issues. So just allowing an ai to proofread its response in context of the question could stop a lot of hallucinations.
  But its at least 3 times as slow and expensive if it needs to change its first response.
  But i guess doing things properly isnt profitable , better to just rush tech and kill your most famous product.

I kinda like the new google. It's strong and wrong and doesn't afraid of anything.

Google had a stroke

It's right in German. English version has more problems i guess

Hilarious

More like theyre throwing it away.

The reason they don't have it any more is cuz they sold it. Or fired it..

"Take a look at yourself cause that is what you need to do, 'cause the only problem in this room is about you, 'cause you're a liar"
-Silia Kapsis, 2024

As a long time google despiser and someone who almost puked when I was involuntarily subjected to the trailer for that terrible looking movie, this is fantastic.
Edit: forgot to mention a further box is ticked as someone fascinated but horrified with the corporate failures of Boeing.
- The fall guy is pretty damn good. Great actual stunts in it too.
  
  They fooled me into thinking it was likely to be terrible with their ad / trailer in that case. I’ll give it a go sometime when time. Or were you sent by google to make up for their bad AI ? ;) are you good AI guy ?