Google AI Overview is just affiliate marketing spam now

Google has been literally unusable for search for years.
- It's been worse and worse over time for whatever reasons, but the AI summary at the top now can be way off. I had a result the other day where a quick glance (all that I give it as I scroll down to any results) I laughed because I could tell it was totally wrong, and couldn't even figure out where it got that result from. It wasn't in the results I found.
  
  My favourite (inconsequential, but incredibly stupid) automatic AI question/answer from Google :
  I was looking for German playwright Brecht's first name. The answer was Bertolt. It's a pretty simple question, so that at least was correct.
  However, among the initial "frequently asked questions", one was "What is the name of the Armored Titan?"
  Somehow Google decided it would randomly answer a question about manga/anime Attack on Titan in there. The only link between that question and my query is the answer, Bertolt (so of course, it wasn't in my query). Because there's a guy called Bertolt too in that story.
  By the way, Attack on Titan's Bertolt is not the armoured titan.
  
  for whatever reasons
  Until recently, one man, who ran from the sinking ship of Yahoo search into Google's marketing/ads group. He bullied the former head of search out when they refused to make search worse in order to boost the ad click through rates. He then became head of search himself until fairly recently.
  In depth writeup here, and there's a link to the same story as a podcast at the top.

Or if you are set on using AI Overviews to research products, then be intentional about asking for negatives and always fact-check the output as it is likely to include hallucinations.
If it is necessary to fact check something every single time you use it, what benefit does it give?
- None. None at all.
- None. It's made with the clear intention of substituting itself to actual search results.
  If you don't fact-check it, it's dangerous and/or a thinly disguised ad. If you do fact-check it, it brings absolutely nothing that you couldn't find on your own.
  Well, except hallucinations, of course.
- That is my entire problem with llms and llm based tools. I get especially salty when someone sends me output from one and I confirm it's lying in 2 minutes.
  
  "Thank you for wasting my time."
- It hasn't stopped anyone from using ChatGPT, which has become their biggest competitor since the inception of web search.
  So yes, it's dumb, but they kind of have to do it at this point. And they need everyone to know it's available from the site they're already using, so they push it on everyone.
  
  No, they don't have to use defective technology just becsuse everyone else is.
- It might be able to give you tables or otherwise collated sets of information about multiple products etc.
  I don't know if Google does, but LLMs can. Also do unit conversions. You probably still want to check the critical ones. It's a bit like using an encyclopedia or a catalog except more convenient and even less reliable.
  
  Google had a feature for converting units way before the AI boom and there are multiple websites that do conversions and calculations with real logic instead of LLM approximation.
  It is more like asking a random person who will answer whether they know the right answer or not. An encyclopedia or catalog at least have some time of a time frame context of when they were published.
  Putting the data into tables and other formats isn't helpful if the data is wrong!
  
  You can do unit conversions with powertoys on windows, spotlight on mac and whatever they call the nifty search bar on various Linux desktop environments without even hitting the internet with exactly the same convenience as an llm. Doing discrete things like that with an llm inference is the most inefficient and stupid way to do them.

I am seeing more and more people trusting that "zero-click search" result without looking for any kind of source or discussion around their information. Honestly, it's scary.
- Yeah the article is important. Not for the likes of us, but most people around us. I hope they do read it or the info somehow trickles through.

Don’t bother asking Google if a product is worth it; it will likely recommend buying whatever you show interest in—even if the product doesn’t exist.
This seems like a general problem with these LLMs. Sometimes when I'm programming I ask the AI what it thinks about how I propose to approach some design issue or problem. It pretty much always encourages me to do what I proposed to do, and tells me it's a good approach. So I'm using it less and less because it seems the LLMs are encouraged to agree with the user and sound positive all the time. I'm fairly sure my ideas aren't always good. In the end I'll be discovering the pitfalls for myself with or without time wasted asking the LLM.
The same thing seems to happen when people try to use an LLM as a therapist. The LLM is overly encouraging and agreeable, and it sends people down deep rabbit holes of delusion.
- I have only tried a few of these. ChatGPT, Le Chat and then maybe a couple of days with Copilot and hours with Gemini.
  Unfortunately, Le Chat is a bit on the weaker side though I would prefer its success to others.
  Copilot sucked at everything including microsoft specific stuff like excel formulas and actually editing a sheet when it asked I upload it and then made insane changes that made no sense and presented it as accurate.
  Gemini, I dont like google and just avoided it straight away.
  ChatGPT is my go to, free only as I generally only use it as a sounding board or for broad simple research such as listing family events in my area, you know put together lists.
  What you say is my gripe with it too, I have told gpt to be concise, direct and critical and it improved but it needs reminding every few days not to run off into "great idea, heres why would you like more of ehy its great ad how to do it?"

oh no who would have thought it would come to this

Didn't take as long as I expected, but I expected it (which is why I didn't bother to read, even if it's not all the way there, it's coming).
Seriously, advertising (or propaganda to use the older name favoured by Goebbels) really needs to be seen as a much more serious enemy than most do. Propaganda for capitalists is super effective at sucking up peoples mental bandwidth, they've been selecting for it going on a century now and they're depressingly good at it, if you don't actively counter it, straight to the subconscious, along with all the background crap in it. /rant, but seriously...

Google is shitty
LLMs are shitty
Combine the 2:

The part about Reddit communities being built now that contain only Ai questions, Ai answers, and links to products is what I figured Spez wanted when he ipo’d. And with Ai writing convincing text, it’s so easy!
- The Reddit team is developing a bot that can post “this”.
  They’re building a datacenter full of nvidia hardware for it.

Working as designed.

This ia crazy. It means Google and Reddit are shifting content from other web sites to Reddit, under corporate control. It seems like Google has firmly entered the unsustainable profit maximization step where they're now increasing the share of profit they take from their content sources by redirecting less and less traffic to them, while showing that content to Google users.

oh I know this site! they also had an other rant earlier about google's fucked up site ranking, from before AI was forced into it

I’m low key pretty certain one of their long-term plans for the “AI” overview integration is to slowly sub in straight up ad content

An advertising company are advertising at you? Whatever next?

garbage in, garbage out.
- Spam in, spam out, profit in the middle.

Was trying to find info about a certain domain the other day - damn near impossible just cause all the results I could find was the same type of AI slop.

This isn't much of a change. Before AI it was SEO slop. Search for product reviews and you get a bunch of pages "reviewing" products by copying the amazon description and images.
- There are interesting numbers in the article that you may not have looked at.

seems usefull until you notice it's just copied from wikipedia

Yes it sucks. And it’s not the only one. I’ve recently been seeing scam ‘official site’ of a real site. Then in another occasion it was looking for a product. I couldn’t remember if it was just .com or .net. The product was not even within the first two pages of results.
I also tried DuckDuckGo.
Meanwhile I tried Kagi, first result for both, each time. I was swapping to Linux and didn’t have my Kagi login handy at the time. Anyway
It’s a HUGE difference today in search. To find what you need through all this other extra shit. Good Search is more important now than ever imho.

Not surprising

We've come full circle