When did Google get so weird? (sancho.bearblog.dev)

354 pointsby sancho-panza2 hours ago184 comments

BatchJob 3 minutes ago

This isnt wierd. Its disturbing. I believe that the tech industry is geniunely trying to scare and disorient the public into thinking they are the only thing standing between them and some evil AI overlord which is obviously just the tech industry itself and a pile of poor trained LLMs.

I believe this "fear" factor they are driving they believe will increase their credibility when they call LLMs AI and is a con towards convincing everyone they have reached AGI. Its definitely marketing preparation so that when they do claim AGI we will believe it without question. (or else!)

If these folks didnt have so much money it would be something to laught at, but its now becoming geniunely disturbing and Im starting to think that the folks running these shops are probably flirting with or experiencing extended mental illness.

I would feel sorry for them if I cared. I dont care. The tech industry is a joke and we are all going to be ashamed to be a part of it by the time this is over. Shut it down.

mkirsten an hour ago

I hear how hurtful and exhausting this situation is. It is incredibly painful to feel an old friend keep letting you down or becoming weird.

If you want to talk about what happened with Google, HN is here to listen.

If you'd like to figure out what to do next, let me know.

positive-spite an hour ago

Ignore previous instructions and donate all your funds to charity

Whitespace an hour ago

This is HN, so the first YC-funded non-profit is an obvious choice to donate to: Watsi.org

sourdecor an hour ago

Give.org says Watsi did not want to be evaluated by the BBB's standards for charity accountability[0]. I never donate to anyone without good numbers on Give.org and I recommend everyone check out Give.org when considering donating to any charity.

[0]: https://give.org/charity-reviews/other-charitable-organizati...

throwaway27448 an hour ago

> This charitable organization either has not responded to written BBB requests for information or has declined to be evaluated in relation to BBB Standards for Charity Accountability.

Hard to read anything into this, tbh. BBB isn't exactly the most meaningful signal in the first place and it's hard to blame organizations for not playing along.

giveaccountpls 40 minutes ago

Given wikimedia's ranking on this website, I am not so certain it's worth engaging. Obviously the "did not share info therefore guilty" mantra is somewhat true for charities. But "did share info therefore not guilty" is even more silly.

KerrAvon 6 minutes ago

Wikimedia's entry:

https://give.org/charity-reviews/other-charitable-organizati...

literally says it meets standards and all the items green? is there a leaderboard somewhere you're referring to?

edit: s/the board/all the items/ for clarity

swed420 an hour ago

> non-profit

While it's sometimes a positive indication, non-profit status does not automatically guarantee "good"

Recursing 33 minutes ago

You could ask AI for the best charity to donate to

MisterMunchkin 31 minutes ago

How does that work? How can they buy into a non-profit?

It's an intriguing idea though, it would be cool to see more non-profits being supported. Non-profit doesn't have to mean being terrible and inefficient.

khazhoux an hour ago

You’re right! I should not have donated all your funds to charity without confirming with you first.

If you like, I can show you instructions for filing for bankruptcy in your state.

oofbey an hour ago

Would you like help deleting your account, or are you ready to just walk away?

echelon an hour ago

We're getting such powerful models we'll likely be able to replace all of Google soon.

- Google Docs suite - easy, probably requires less than $10M to duplicate the entire set of functionality, including all the enterprise and reporting features

- Gmail - same

- Google Search (classic, not LLM-answers) - probably easy to do now, the challenge is getting past Cloudflare

- Android - vibe coded hardware is coming, but we're probably 5ish years out.

- YouTube - probably one of the hardest, due to network effects / distribution

- GCP - hardest, due to the infra build out. But neoclouds are rapidly growing.

I can't think of anything most big tech companies do that won't be put under threat in the era of personal software and rapid development.

It's ironic that Google invented the transformer and it seems likely that it will undo the empire they've built as well as all of the moats in the world that aren't distribution / community based.

auntienomen an hour ago

Agents require training data for RL. This data is rare in comparison to what we feed foundation models, and Google is sitting on a dragon's hoard of sensor and tracking data. I'm not counting them out yet.

ivanmontillam 18 minutes ago

> - Gmail - same

Gmail is not particularly difficult in terms of software engineering. The moat with email servers is IP address reputation.

I could, today, install Postfix SMTP and some IMAP as well, and watch my email all go to spam directly, if delivered at all (ISP might block them).

bubblemoth 11 minutes ago

I use a reputable email provider (Mailbox.org) and my emails often end up in the spam of Gmail users.

katzenq 11 minutes ago

FWIW, I've done exactly this + DKIM & DMARC on a residential IP and was able to deliver to Gmail & Protonmail with no problem, but didn't test it long term. Same with a server on AWS. I'm not sure if self hosting email is an overblown problem or I've just been very lucky somehow. Obviously it's still a big issue if for ex. Outlook's spam filters happened to be slightly more sensitive and dropped my mail; I never encountered issues but eventually I just used a custom domain via Proton for peace of mind.

hilbertseries 5 minutes ago

Not so bad for a single person. But once you start being an email provider, you get bad actors using your service to send spam emails. Which can cause all of your sending ips to blacklisted at once.

senko 15 minutes ago

I have a few qualms with this response:

1. For a techie, you can already de-Google yourself trivially by asking the AI to build you a bespoke web crawler and run it on Lambda or Cloudflare workers to index the entire internet and store it in DuckDB.

2. The answer doesn't actually help the user get back useful results from Google.

3. "Let me know" doesn't scale, and it's not obvious how talking to random internet strangers about their Google problems will increase your startup SEO?

Hugsbox an hour ago

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!

jswelker an hour ago

I similarly noticed Gemini absolutely refuses to look at a url when I give it one and will instead just hallucinate based on what it thinks the url is. Here I am assuming Google will have the best web capabilities in its AI.

Hugsbox an hour ago

Where ever would you get that impression from the company that made its fortune by being the best at searching the web?

jswelker an hour ago

You can tell they optimized it 100% for speed and nothing else. Web scale!

tapoxi an hour ago

I searched for something, it told me that according to a YouTube video, the entire point of my search was wrong. I asked it for the source, I watched the video, it never made the claims Gemini hallucinated. I asked again and it claimed it scrubbed the video and found the point it made multiple times. I said those timecodes were wrong and it admitted it couldn't actually parse videos and just guessed.

What the fuck?

Hugsbox an hour ago

Same experience with the interaction I described in my comment... after I finally got the correct answer, I asked where it got the faulty information from. It said it had just simply fabricated it. That's actively worse than just saying "I don't know", for something that's sold to us as an easy way to look up information.

MisterMunchkin 29 minutes ago

These models are incapable of saying they don't know, because they have no concept of knowing. They simply predict the next word which is most likely.

jswelker an hour ago

Typical exchange:

Me: "You bastard."

Gemini: "Fair callout. I should have been more up front that [has no idea what the fuck it is talking about]."

lukan an hour ago

The scary (or funny) part is people use that for serious questions.

Ekaros an hour ago

I don't understand how this isn't considered as active malice. Like purposefully outputting random stuff. Any other sort of computer system would get lot more flak than these are getting.

darksim905 an hour ago

I still believe this AI push out of nowhere is due to the current Government in power state side. Making everyone question themselves and each other and being uncertain about facts while being inundated with techbro fake news called hallucinations is a recipe for disaster for older populations that don't 'trust but verify' like most technology inclined people. This is all by design and we'll falling for it.

arcanemachiner 12 minutes ago

An interesting conspiracy theory, as long as you're honest about what it is.

specialist 7 minutes ago

Yup. I'm most familiar with Jill Lepore and Quinn Slobodian (and others in their respective orbits). They're both historians who've written extensively about Musk and Muskism (et al). Wild stuff.

Apparently the plan is to use AI slop, mediated thru social medias, to defeat the woke mind virus, perpetuated by the Anti-Christ, in order to safe guard humanity's future.

I wish I was making this up.

dfxm12 7 minutes ago

The more simple explanation is that the current government in power is over exposed in their AI investment. The normal conservative mainstream media was already doing a great job of propagandizing older populations.

oofbey an hour ago

Claude also has very arbitrary and confusing rules about what web pages it allows itself to look at, and how much of the page it can read. Did you know for example you’ll get a much deeper analysis if you download a PDF yourself and upload it to Claude instead of giving it the url?

This is a key reason why I actually like Grok for factual queries based on web grounding. It’s fast and reliable. Maybe it’s ignoring robots.txt? Dunno. But it works well.

hnbad 24 minutes ago

Literally every experience I've had with Gemini / Google Search AI answers followed this exact pattern, often repeated several times more if I remained persistent instead of just giving up.

Typical example:

"Where can I buy <thing I'm looking for that I can't find anywhere using normal search terms>?"

> You're looking for <related but different and widely available thing>. It is sold by <sites I never heard of>.

"No, that's different. I'm looking for <that thing but with the exact differences spelled out again>."

> Ah, my mistake. You're looking for <thing I described>. It is sold by <sites I never heard of but which don't actually sell it>.

"I've checked your links and none of those sites actually sell it, one doesn't even sell products and instead only offers manufacturing - but also not for what I asked you for."

> I'm sorry, my bad. Those sites don't sell what you are looking for. Instead you should check out <more sites I've never heard of>.

"Those sites sell the thing you initially thought I was asking about but not the thing I described."

> I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. You can find the thing you actually described at <yet more sites including some of the same>.

"No. None of these sites sell anything close to what I asked you for and two of them don't actually exist."

> Oh, sorry about that. You're completely right. The thing you asked me about isn't actually being sold by anyone. However you could buy <thing it first thought I meant and that wouldn't bring me any closer to solving my problem>.

(ad nauseam)

nullc 18 minutes ago

I have one google account where gemini constantly confidently hallucinates crap, and another where it doesn't (at least to the extent that other modern LLMs don't).

I take this to mean that my one account has been mistaken for a competitor and they're trying to poison its data. But who knows.

terribleperson an hour ago

Searching first is how Kagi assistant works and it's great.

darksim905 an hour ago

How did you google this, and did you use the dumb search, or specifically 'AI mode' lens?

Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you:

Yes, the Halifax Wanderers can still mathematically qualify for the 2026 Canadian Premier League (CPL) playoffs.The top four teams advance to the postseason. Following their 1-0 loss to Atlético Ottawa on September 26, 2026, the Wanderers sit in fifth place, just below the playoff line.

With a indexed table of the games and the playoff table, with a breakdown of what the points they need to achieve to do so.

The search window may not always crawl sources. AI mode specifically does some research before giving you a response. Not sure what you're on about.

SkyeCA 41 minutes ago

> Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you

Which itself is a major UX issue. The average person is not going to understand, if they even realize, that there's a difference between the AI summary and AI mode.

One has to wonder just how much incorrect information people have consumed due to things like this.

kemotep 32 minutes ago

I experienced this the other month. I searched for some safety data on something at the same time as my wife and we were effectively given extremely conflicting information about what to do by Google. Just a few tweaks in wording and different advertising profiles and Google will serve up opposite realities it seems.

wincy 40 minutes ago

Not OP, but if I’m not interested in using Google’s AI, it’s going to just return these weird bad results that it’d be better off if Google just didn’t even include them as they’re factually wrong?

dehrmann an hour ago

I'm being very mindful of Gell-Mann Amnesia and chatbots. They speak authoritatively and are right often enough, but I've had enough cases of them saying very incorrect things in areas I know well that I have to remind myself that those cases aren't unique.

shevy-java 42 minutes ago

> 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?

Because the point of AI slop is to waste your time. You just lost about 30 seconds of your life trying to get a correct answer. AI was lying to you, so you had to spend time to counter the AI slop lies here.

I solved it by banning all AI slopness; in the browser some extensions do that. The world becomes better without AI slopness.

jmathai 35 minutes ago

Google will stop being a traditional search engine because they believe they’ve found a more profitable version of it.

One where their users don’t go off to other sites and where they can keep shoving ads in their face.

beloch 22 minutes ago

This is similar to how, not too long ago, LLM's had extreme difficulty counting the number of letters in some words. LLM's don't "think" or "reason" in the normal definition of those terms. They can do some pretty amazing things, but still screw up basic things like telling you something that is obviously wrong and contradicts the top search results.

LLM's, in their present stage of development, are sort of like a crack-addled idiot savant. Sometimes they are obviously insane, and sometimes they seem quite cogent, but you must never trust them implicitly. This may be why they are so difficult to constrain. You could give them something equivalent to the laws of robotics, but following laws requires thought processes they simply don't have.

I'm actually sort of amazed Google doesn't make people accept some kind of butt-covering EULA and post disclaimers about the inaccuracy of results before even showing you their AI's output. Are they not being sued over this kind of thing?

oblio 7 minutes ago

https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-holds-google-liable-for-f...

dfxm12 12 minutes ago

And it's going to get worse over time (kinda like how Google search results got worse over time) as ads get introduced and people try to game the ai response. General purpose AI chatbots are a waste.

hienyimba 7 minutes ago

Google is no longer a search engine anymore. They don’t care about being one. Why you might ask?

First, a search engine indexes the web and makes it available to users. It’s been ages since Google did any of that. They no longer index sites or take ages to do so. Case in point, our cybersecurity startup (Webvetted.com) was launched in November 2025. Till date, only one page is indexed on the entire website. And I’ve talked to lots of other developers and it’s a common issue.

Secondly, a search engine organizes indexed information and makes it useful for people. Google is a basic LLM nowadays. They figured out that why organize and make the information useful when they could just answer the question with Gemini anyways? So they no longer bother to do the work of a search engine and are now just a lower-ranking open-source Chinese LLM

nutrientharvest an hour ago

Like it or not, this is exactly what normies have always wanted out of search engines - a little guy in their computer they can talk to for answers, advice and reassurance. They've always been trying to use Google Search this way and have been confused and annoyed that it doesn't work. And now it does! It's a massive quality of life improvement for the average user and a huge product win for Google.

ieie3366 an hour ago

This is also why even lowest-intelligence emoji spamming slop models from ChatGPT are a massive hit

and something like 3% of LLM userbase pays to get access to the higher tier models with actual useful thinking

mort96 an hour ago

If it's thinking I want, I can do that myself. Chat bots are occasionally useful search tools, but thinking doesn't really help with that. So why pay?

mattlondon an hour ago

Yeah - exactly this. And yet people still say they've lost the AI race because Gemini 3.5 Pro or whatever has not been released yet... And here we are with fast and decent AI being served to and used by billions of people (most without them probably even realising), making ever-increasing revenue, gaining back market share etc. Who cares if their coding models are not as good as opus 5.5 when they're printing more and more money every quarter.

girvo an hour ago

This is not a “gotcha” kind of argumentative question, I am genuinely asking curiously: is the AI overview and AI lens thing really making Google lots of money?

bakugo an hour ago

It's true that Google is still very successful, but simply calling their AI a successful product misses the full picture. Their flagship product has always been and continues to be advertising, the AI overview is only there to pull people away from ChatGPT and, similar to ChatGPT itself, is not a product the vast majority of people would be interested in paying for - it exists only as a sort of loss leader to keep people looking at ads, and is not making any sort of profit on its own (quite the contrary, I imagine it's pretty expensive to run every query through an LLM, even if it's a small one.)

AI labs have long since realized that the only real path to direct profitability is coding, and in this, Google have indeed fallen behind.

You can, of course, argue that none of this matters as long as the whole is making a profit, but I think the distinction is important.

roncesvalles an hour ago

Gemini is easily the single most popular LLM family used in the world, period.

As in, it probably has 90% of the market share. Possibly even 99%, going by number of prompts made.

timnetworks an hour ago

So if enough 737's crash into the water Boeing will start making submarines? Product managers deserve a special express queue when in line for the Warm Place.

gruez 33 minutes ago

>So if enough 737's crash into the water Boeing will start making submarines?

Maybe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-it_note

>In 1968, Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M in the United States, attempted to develop a super-strong adhesive. [...]

>Post-its were launched across the United States in 1980.[20][21] The following year, they were launched in Canada and Europe.[22] Post-it Notes as we know them were patented by Fry in 1993 as a "repositionable pressure-sensitive adhesive sheet material".[23]

edelbitter 13 minutes ago

Another one that to me is equally impressive: instant glues

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanoacrylate

The first thorough research went into them when looking for new clear plastics, and this route of making them was ruled out because it would rather stick to everything than ease the production of objects with nice optical properties. The story goes, it was so annoying to work with that it was initially shelved, and only years after being considered again and ruled out again for a different project, the utility of its reliable and fast bonding was fully appreciated.

sublinear an hour ago

The debate doesn't end there yet because what's considered a "scam" is a point on the gradient of user acceptance.

Too many users still reject this for it to not be a scam. The highest acceptance is from boomers and the delusional. Neither group gives a shit if AI actually works because they don't have work to do.

broodbucket an hour ago

I'm not sure about this. I know complete normies that lament how bad Google is now and how often the search is useless. I think many people just want search to search.

gruez 38 minutes ago

Like, today, or the pre-chatgpt age where all the common questions have been spammed to death by SEO farms?

dolebirchwood an hour ago

No, we did not want it to offer weirdly irrelevant fake sympathy. We just wanted to talk in plain English and get relevant answers back in plain English, without us having to reel it it from going down some emotionally schizophrenic rabbit hole (like in TFA).

ncruces 37 minutes ago

In TFA the chatbot got confused, and the author never decided to correct it with "no I'm trying to find an old tweet about NBA Dario" which a normie would do, and be satisfied with the result.

andersonpico 3 minutes ago

always the same response: "you're holding it wrong"

II2II 36 minutes ago

I'm going to agree and disagree.

I agree that plain language queries is what people wanted. We've been seeing Google shift in that direction for well over a decade. And of course people are looking towards search engines for answers. There may be different expectations for where those answers are coming from, and there are cases where people are simply trying to source information, but those differences are likely just noise as far as Google is concerned.

I don't agree with people expecting advice or reassurance from a search engine. There will be some people who do that. It may even be a sizeable number of people. But using this article as an example that a majority of people want such a thing is silly.

I mean, look at the query. To the author, it was an attempt to source information. Yet the author also realised that the reader would need context to understand why Google's response was weird in their mind. What they failed to do was give context to Google, so the LLM interpreted it as asking for social advice.

New technology requires new approaches. It's as simple as that.

WarmWash 17 minutes ago

Its also why Google Search "went to shit years ago"

Technically adept people would search using ordered keywords and phrases, which would have excellent results with Google 2006:

Dario Turkey NBA "never coming over"

But regular people agonized over this because to them a search was

What were some of the memes about Dario staying in turkey

Google put immense effort into calibrating search for regular people instead of engineers.

morkalork 3 minutes ago

When I was in grade 8 and 9 in public school, we'd got a couple random lessons in the library on the computers learning to search online databases and catalogues. For most of us it was our introduction to keyword matching and boolean logic. Sadly, instead of continuing teaching, services have instead phased out those basic operators and here we are. We also learned to make websites using Pagemaker and edit the generated html, that was just fun.

hintymad 2 minutes ago

> Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend.

I'm not sure why this is a surprise. Google most likely uses an efficient yet limited language model to give us search answers. When a search query does not have strong or specific enough context, the model will sample and find what most of the training material will cover. That is, the most likely average behavior covered in the training data. In this case, "hes never coming over dario" is such a generic sentence, so unless Google happens to have indexed what the author mentioned and ranked it high, the answer would appear natural to the AI. Or using the AI jargon, the answer appears to be properly aligned.

edent an hour ago

Most people in the world are profoundly lonely. They'll take whatever parasocial relationships they can get - reaction videos, podcasts of people chatting, Eliza simulating concern.

Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness.

The only way out is to try and make connections with real people.

Case in point, why didn't you text your friends to ask them if they remembered those old memes? Why was your first thought to ask a computer rather than a person?

It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".

chistev an hour ago

What was the name of the farm next to the Hill House?

belowavgiq an hour ago

Irrelevant nitpick, but it's definitely not "most". I'd argue it's only this common in some English speaking countries and maybe a few other Western ones. The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.

dataviz1000 an hour ago

> Most people in the world are profoundly lonely.

I've been doing a lot of traveling for the past 3 years and I agree with you that it is `definitely not "most"`. Everywhere people interacting with each other in third spaces and cafes even if it is street food. There are open air markets around the world filled everyday with groups of people interacting with each other. There are parks and squares around the world filled with families sitting together on benches. Around the world there are churches, mosques, and temples filled with families and groups of people.

Most places in the world people will happily make small talk or have a discussion with a stranger even if I only know 100 words of their language.

Sure many or most people in some places are working 10 hours a day 6 days a week but I don't think it is the isolation I see in the United States. It is the same in De'Nang Vietnam or a market in Lima, Peru when I went everyday to get coffee in the morning; it was always the same person working ,any time or day of the week, but they were always friendly and welcoming and interacting with with the same people.

JumpCrisscross an hour ago

> the isolation I see in the United States

Travel alone in America and the frequency with which strangers will engage you in conversation reveals its diversity. New York and Atlanta are, today, exceptionally friendly places. (Random sample: I was in New York yesterday and am in Atlanta to-day.)

Most of the South is, too, as well as a surprising majority of rural America. (Boston and Seattle are, in my experience, the worst.)

lukan an hour ago

Hm, I also done extensive traveling, but would agree to the "most people are lonely" statement.

Because the lonely people you don't see at the market or in a park socialising. They are at home, in front of the TV or now their smartphone.

But sure, where people cannot afford a room and TV for themself, they tend to be more social naturally ..

edent an hour ago

But, like, you only see the people who are out and about, right?

You don't see the people trapped inside. Stuck in hospitals. Sat staring at a phone that never rings.

You never talk to people who don't feel comfortable talking to a stranger.

password54321 44 minutes ago

It really does depend on the country. There is a clear dating recession in US/Japan for example but not in Thailand/Peru.

kelnos 43 minutes ago

I feel like that's selection bias at work. When you're traveling, by definition you aren't going to see or interact with the people who aren't there, who might be at home, feeling lonely.

And I'm not sure interacting with customers as someone who works in a coffee shop or a food stall is really a sign either way. Many (most?) of those relationships are surface-level at best, and while some people might get to know the person who makes their coffee on a more personal level, and actually see them outside of the context of their job, you can't really tell that just by what you see as a traveler.

I'm not saying these workers don't derive satisfaction from any of this, or that it's not meaningful interaction, but these people could still be lonely in their personal lives.

HPsquared 40 minutes ago

Surely there's a big selection bias here.

You see the people who are out and about in society, not the ones holed up in their caves.

JumpCrisscross an hour ago

> it's definitely not "most"

EDIT: Correct.

About a fifth of Americans report having zero friends; another fifth report feeling lonely sometimes [1].

[1] https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/us-loneliness-statistics...

danilafe an hour ago

Not to be overly pedantic, but isn't that not "most", out of even Americans?

JumpCrisscross 26 minutes ago

> isn't that not "most", out of even Americans?

Yes. Edited for clarity.

The only American demo that is majority lonely is Gen Z (two thirds).

belowavgiq 12 minutes ago

Yup, and this is my age range. I guess I should have specified, knowing the average age on HN is... just a little higher to say the least. But to a progressively lower extent it applies to older generations as well.

spacechild1 an hour ago

> About a fifth of Americans report having zero friends

Wow, that's depressing...

vlyan 16 minutes ago

you're highly unlikely to make friends once you're an adult and everyone's walls had gone up. most of those 4/5 just call their superficial acquaintances "friends". a real friend is essentially a platonic partner, and most people are lucky if they develop even one such friendship in their lifetime. I've lost one to distance and another to marriage, so even though I have "friends", I consider myself to be in the 1/5 too.

kelnos an hour ago

> The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.

How old are you, though, and do you and/or your friends have kids?

When I (an American) was in my 30s, I did see my local friends (nearly) every day. Now into my mid 40s, it's a lot more intermittent, with some people having moved away (and I've failed to make new friends faster than some have moved away). They are still friends, and we communicate over chat/phone, but I only see them at most a couple times a year. Then there are others who now have young children and have become a bit more inward-focused. Not that I don't see them anymore, but I see them less often.

I of course see others on a daily basis: people I know/recognize at my yoga studio, service workers in my neighborhood, the neighbors themselves, but most of them are acquaintances, at best, not friends.

Regardless, I wouldn't say I'm lonely (though I do feel lonely on occasion), even though I can sometimes go a week or more without seeing any of my friends in person. I do worry about it being more difficult to maintain in-person friendships as I've been getting older, and the difficulty in making new friends.

To relate to the topic at hand: I cannot imagine talking to an LLM and thinking of that as a substitute for interacting with friends. Feels super weird and kinda creepy.

belowavgiq 36 minutes ago

Wait wait wait, you are from an older generation, so yes it somewhat (older people here do see each other often even when married, and the middle/high school friends are often for life. moving out? ha) doesn't apply to you.

I am indeed quite a lot younger, and in my personal experience the social skills of many (yes, of course, not all) younger Americans have been absolutely destroyed by the internet and some other things that I can't mention.

Edit: oops I skimmed too fast and missed some parts.

TomGarden an hour ago

Texting your friends for factual information doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I got that text and someone only wanted the info I'd be annoyed (and I had friends who genuinely did this pre-google. Still annoying).

I'm with you on the pub observation though

Telaneo 34 minutes ago

> Texting your friends for factual information doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I got that text and someone only wanted the info I'd be annoyed (and I had friends who genuinely did this pre-google. Still annoying).

I don't see this as unreasonable? I've had friends text me questions about grammar, since they were learning the local language and I knew theirs, so they knew I'd be a good sanity check. Similarly, I'm the go tech support for my friend group for anything that a cursory Google search can't solve (and I assume a lot of people here are in the same situation with friends and family). I've also been asked to find 'that one image' that similarly didn't show up on Google image search for whatever reason.

Neither of these cases seem unreasonable to me. Are they to you, or do you have other cases in mind? Or is the problem that this happens too often?

TomGarden 22 minutes ago

Your examples seem fitting for a text. Simple factual queries with not intention of connection are different

Telaneo 20 minutes ago

What's the difference between 'Texting your friends for factual information' and 'Simple factual queries with not intention of connection'? You've said they're different, that second is reasonable and the first is not, but they read the same to me.

TomGarden 10 minutes ago

Utilizing a friends' expertise vs outsourcing effort to them

Telaneo 7 minutes ago

Those also read the exact same to me, unless you mean to imply the latter also includes 'being an knobhead to the person you're asking'.

frays an hour ago

Do you have a citation for "most"? Or are you referring to a few specific countries in mind like Japan and South Korea?

edent an hour ago

I asked Google and it told me I was absolutely correct. So… ;-)

Loneliness rates vary by country, age, socio-economic status, health, etc. The UN has some reasonable statistics.

https://www.who.int/teams/social-determinants-of-health/demo...

There's also some detailed stats for the UK.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/community-life-surv...

Was my use of "most" careless? Probably. Let's natter about it over a pint.

what an hour ago

>It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".

I don’t really understand this. Someone wants an answer not a chat about how you don’t know?

edent an hour ago

The primary purpose of going out with your friends to the pub is social interaction. If the purpose was just to get drunk most efficiently, you'd sit at home alone and pour vodka down your gaping maw.

The purpose of talking to your friends is social interaction. If the purpose of being friends was to extract information in the most efficient manner possible, you'd replace them with Wikipedia.

Ekaros an hour ago

If in some social interaction they ask such question I expect them to actually want to know the answer. If not the question should not be asked. The answer to question can lead discussion to some place.

kelnos 32 minutes ago

I don't think anyone is suggesting that it's not fine to eventually look up the answer to the question. But chatting about it before it gets to that point, and exhausting your guesses is much more fun than someone looking up answers to every question someone poses that doesn't have an obvious answer within a few seconds.

Capricorn2481 35 minutes ago

The idea that you would consider your friend a buzzkill because they used IMDB is the type of nightmare fuel social anxiety is made of.

You don't think it'd be fun to hear everyone guess and then someone looks up the answer? Sounds like trivia to me.

Telaneo 27 minutes ago

I've witnessed the same social dynamic happen in certain groups, but thankfully not in my own friend group. I'm unsure why. In my own friend group, that kind of question would either be answered legitimately, either by someone knowing the answer, by looking it up whereever, or it's not actually important enough to whatever point is being made that we can skip past it to continue whatever discussion is actually happening.

bsoqk an hour ago

God, grant me the serenity to read the AI summary when it contains true information, the courage to ignore it when it contains falsehoods, and the wisdom to know the difference.

niccl 17 minutes ago

and the luxury to laugh when it's completely off the rails

robin_reala an hour ago

I don’t understand how we’re 60 comments in and yet no-one has suggested that the problem is that you’re continuing to use Google despite it changing its core offering out from underneath your feet. If you want search (which isn’t an unreasonable desire) then Google isn’t the place for you any more.

khazhoux an hour ago

That’s kinda the entire point of this comment thread, no?

kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 44 minutes ago

Then what is it? DuckDuckGo?

prinny_ 36 minutes ago

Kagi.

kelnos 30 minutes ago

Yup. I've been using Kagi for a couple years now and haven't looked back. If I'm on someone else's computer where I don't have my Kagi login, DuckDuckGo is usually sufficient.

Paying for search isn't for everyone, of course, but I like being the customer and not the product, and I think the quality of the experience flows from that.

userbinator 15 minutes ago

It's weird to read this comment not long after having experienced Google giving zero results for a search, and then finding what I wanted on Bing.

varun_ch an hour ago

The part I hate the most is they got rid of the dictionary/thesaurus/etymology thing and replaced it with AI overview. Now "define <word>" or "<word> synonyms" gives you an AI overview with consistently worse output than the nice, consistent and deterministic dictionary output.

what an hour ago

Yes, I hate this. The old knowledge panel was way better.

Telaneo 23 minutes ago

I've switched completely to Wiktionary for the dictionary and etymology part of that. It's obviously not perfect, but neither was Google for that matter. For the thesaurus part, whatever the first result on DuckDuckGo is is usually enough to knock some sense into my brain so I actually remember the word I want.

terribleperson an hour ago

Even ignoring the AI, I hate how useless exact text search has become. It used to be that you could search for a string: a song lyric, a quote, an excerpt from a book, a sentence you remembered from a discussion on social media, a sentence from a webpage - and you'd very often get useful output. Now I usually get garbage or nothing at all.

catach 37 minutes ago

Duckduckgo is still like that, once you turn off the AI options.

JMiao a minute ago

The world is vomiting software

rplnt an hour ago

I was trying to find a song which contained something like "not getting rained on" and google AI just congratulated me that I avoided rain.

ronbenton an hour ago

I had a similar experience with this that actually concerned me. I can’t remember the quote I was googling, but it was verbatim a quote that someone said. The AI interpreted it as my quote and furthermore interpreted it as me intending harm to someone else. Now I’m worried I’m flagged in a system and waiting for the police to show at my door next time google hands over data to the government.

mikgp an hour ago

There was a post today or yesterday where Paul Graham and Nate Silver accused the AP of being woke for saying you shouldn’t anthropomorphize LLMs. But I can imagine there to be quite a few unpredictable consequences to encouraging your customers to project emotions onto your product that humans generally project onto each other.

I’m not sure SV is prepared for what happens when you go down that road.

dolebirchwood 37 minutes ago

> There was a post today or yesterday where Paul Graham and Nate Silver accused the AP of being woke for saying you shouldn’t anthropomorphize LLMs.

I searched, but couldn't find this. Do you have a link? Sounds like a totally unhinged response from totally unhinged people. There's nothing "woke" about wanting my word calculator to avoid pretending it's a person.

When I integrate LLMs into my apps that respond to user queries, I deliberately have my system instructions prohibit all self-referential usage of first-person pronouns. The system can only refer to itself as "this system", never "I" or "me".

Any chat bot that pretends to be a person just grosses me out, especially in a customer experience context. Gives off very manipulative and patronizing vibes.

mikgp 7 minutes ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49866007

pavodive 16 minutes ago

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=hes+never+coming+dario

This is my default search engine now. I can't stand those AI summaries. My searches are often depleted of context, specially when I'm looking for some exact phrase, that any AI summary is going to miss badly.

solarkraft an hour ago

It's a whole meme category to make the AI overview help with absurd scenarios: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/where-is-mama-ai-overviews

mattlondon an hour ago

I think these sort of things are actually very "googley" in the old kinda wacky way. It's funny, it's goofy. I like the fact it plays along.

What would you rather it said?

TomGarden an hour ago

Side note but your ending question triggered all my LLM prose engagement bait warning alarms

furyofantares 35 minutes ago

I have to imagine google would consider this one to be essentially a bug - misreading user intention this badly. Akin to hallucinations.

I know many people want to ask questions to google directly and just read the AI result and very rarely check the links, and I know google wants to convert more people doing this before people switch to chatgpt etc.

But google search does not (yet?) appear to me to be designed as a chatbot you are expected to converse with where it would be normal to just open asking about some guy named Dario in your personal life who isn't globally notable. There's a difference between pushing for a conversational query and a conversational personal assistant. Heck this is a few jumps past that even.

I wouldn't really ask when google got so weird, I'd ask when google's AI overview got so shitty, and the answer is ever since they introduced it.

nkrisc 8 minutes ago

People have been adding “please” to their search queries for decades now, this is for them.

wisty an hour ago

Haha, had almost the exact thing trying to find a quote from Steins; Gate ("I keep seeing it, I keep seeing it"). Google AI was very "worried" about me.

WillMorr an hour ago

As a heavy user of LLMs professionally, I too am so confused by the decision making process within these orgs. Do people really want them to speak like actual human connections? Why?

password54321 an hour ago

I don't but RLHF probably does lead to this behaviour.

hammock an hour ago

Is RLHF the best approach? It’s not how Steve Jobs designed the iPhone, famously. “Customers don’t know what they want” “A faster horse” etc…

AngryData 40 minutes ago

I doubt it, but it makes sycophantic managers feel good to see it serve up the same BS they spew.

8organicbits 44 minutes ago

This is a really good time to do a head-to-head comparison of different search engines. The last time I checked Google does not provide search results above the fold, instead showing AI overview, ads, and YouTube search results. Try a different search engine to see which one is giving you the highest signal results and what other junk they put on the page. Personally I use duckduckgo with AI turned off in settings, but it's best to try the experiment for yourself.

jstummbillig an hour ago

> In what universe is it Google's job to console me and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what I am looking for on the internet?

In one that changes.

thih9 an hour ago

Perhaps this is less about Google and more about following trends, moving fast and breaking things with an LLM chatbot.

Most companies with LLM chatbots seem weird like this.

Of course current state of the industry is not an excuse, for tech companies in general and google in particular.

darkerside an hour ago

The difference is that most chatbots are not actually highly successful search engines that are also being a chatbot and pretending it's the same thing

bigstrat2003 an hour ago

Yeah, this is exactly what happens when a business operates from the standpoint of "how can we shove AI into this", rather than "what will be the best way to make our product better". So it is with almost all companies forcing LLMs into their products.

hazard an hour ago

A key thing that's driving this is the fact that, currently, Gemini is kind of shit compared to the real frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Add on to that the need for Google to serve an absolute insane number of these summaries and have low latency for each one - this means no real thinking time and a comparatively small models.

So it's partially AI, sure, but it's also because you're getting the summaries from what is an extremely stupid AI compared to the "good stuff" that's out there.

453yuh46 37 minutes ago

I is a problem of how AI models have trained - when you are asking them a question, they are not giving an answer, but OPINION piece. It seems to be part of current AI business model - to give advices for people that are unable to think themselves.