I've been on DDG on all my devices for a few years. I used to use !g somewhat regularly but these days it's extremely rare. I realized that I would just search DDG with my first stab at a query and then revise the query when using !g and I'd get the result I wanted. So I just stopped using !g and just revised my query on DDG and then I basically never had to use Google Search.

The AI answer dominates the page, and is usually wrong, so it's just a waste of the most valuable space on the page.

I started noticing that for a lot of niche questions, AI overview often uses things like Reddit comments as the source, which are often partially or completely wrong. Then it gets reformulated with the typical confidence of an LLM.

Very scary because at the same time I notice people taking the AI overview answers as truth.

It’s the wrongness that bothers me. I wish Google would just link sources where it thinks the answer is, but don’t bother trying to answer directly if it’s wrong 10% of the time.

While shitting on YouTube and video…

I was taking with a family member about fentanyl zombies. They had never seen the lean/bend. So I pull up Google and click video which is YouTube results… ALL AI. All of it. All a couple months old, all filler, faked, a few scenes stitched together on repeat and AI voice reading AI script.

It is fucking amazing to me that Google let YouTube fall so far so fast.

I don’t even click a video if it’s less than a year old now. Want to see a praying mantis eat a grasshopper? Wonder how clay is refined? Better off with an 11 year old Discovery Channel clip than anything 2026.

> not too long ago

Like today. I asked Gemini for the longest state names with an even number of letters and it gave me North Carolina and South Carolina. When I complained that they are odd, it gave me North Dakota and South Dakota, which are both odd and not the longest. When I noted that, it went back to the Carolinas. Finally it appeared to switch to a different model that actually did counting and found Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

> 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.

I have nothing to add. Just wanted to save this quote for posterity. Thank you.

LLMs still can't do math nor count letters in words. Nothing has changed there.

ChatGPT live mode still hallucinates letters in words like this. HuskIRL and FatherPhi on youtube have done some hilarious videos with it in the last couple of weeks. Beyond miscounting the Rs in strawberry, ChatGPT will say there are two Ds in "your mom" and one D in "uranus" . I tried it myself to check that the videos weren't fake and sure enough it still has this failure mode.

LLMs might not reason exactly like humans, but they do produce much better results if you turn reasoning on.

The "crack-addled idiot savant" phase was really circa 2024, before the big labs figured this out.

I think the issue here is that Google decided that doing reasoning in the AI overviews in Google search would be too slow (and probably also too expensive), so it's still stuck making 2024-era mistakes.

>Are they not being sued over this kind of thing?

Maybe but you have to have deep pockets just to get to the starting line. And then you need standing, and some injury to argue.

Corporations have been remarkably successful at arguing they are operating within the bounds of free speech, whether or not what is said is factual, and whether or not any fact checking has been done.

Yip, I've gradually become quite optimistic about the future of LLMs, but the fact that they remain [very] glorified token probability prediction algorithms means that they will probably never be able to achieve meaningful 'intelligence.'

But that doesn't mean they won't be able to do a vast number of extremely intelligent seeming things. There's just so much information out there and any given human can never hold more than the most minuscule chunk of all of it in his mind, so they'll be able to connect lots of dots that we're missing simply because of our limited carrying capacity, but I still don't think they'll ever be able to create fundamentally new dots.

In other words:

- Solving extremely complex mathematical problems requiring extensive knowledge across multiple esoteric and complex domains? Yip.

- Creating math starting from a framework where math doesn't exist in any way, shape, or fashion? Nope.

Ironically, the more complex the cross-domain problems are, the more effective LLMs will seem to be, because you limit the number of humans who have any chance of internalizing everything across both domains, whereas for an LLM there's no such issue. This will create a perception of super intelligence, which will probably where any danger from LLMs would emerge. Doing things like using a token prediction algorithm to make war or other such strategic decisions, because of the misguided belief that it's not only intelligent but super intelligent. It's basically cargo cult logic.

They were sued over it in Germany and lost, which makes it all the more surprising they keep it up everywhere else tbh

> This is similar to how, not too long ago, LLM's had extreme difficulty counting the number of letters in some words.

The specific issue of Google is that they are using an underpowered model, not fit to task, and much prone to hallucination than either OpenAI or Anthropic free tier offerings.

Google should at least match the frontier labs at the free tier (with some limit; after that, degrade quality), ffs

LLMs are fundamentally predicting the next word to make coherent text. If you've ever played with a Markov chain text generator you've done this with a fairly dumb predictor that maintains coherence over a very short distance. Deep transformer neutral networks can do it with a much longer coherence distance but they are fundamentally performing the same operation. After "Question: Did the team make the playoffs? Answer:" a reasonable completion is "yes, the team made the playoffs". An early demonstration of GPT-2 was a fake news article about scientists discovering unicorns in Antarctica - the model doesn't "know" whether or not unicorns exist in Antarctica, but it's able to complete "Breaking news! Scientists have discovered a colony of English-speaking unicorns in Antarctica." by adding "The unicorns have a developed society with running water and electricity." because that's a sensible next sentence. (I didn't look up the actual text it wrote)

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

It says this this at the bottom of every one of the dumb responses that Google's trash-tier bot puts above the (deliberately awful, these days) search results:

AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses

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This is the key part I think most “normies” miss, and it drives me absolutely mad. People take the “first thing on the SERP” as absolute gospel, always have. It went from being a reputable site (Wikipedia was generally top for a long time) to being an extracted verbatim answer (probably from either Wikipedia, IMDB, etc.) to “AI Overview” - the dumbest model ever trained. And people treat its answers as ground truth. I want to tell them “Look, I know it’s rough out there on the net and a lot of the search results are spammy, barely-coherent AI slop anyway. It’s okay if you want to ask AI for an answer instead. So do that! Please ask ChatGPT or Gemini (and ask it to cite the source for its results so you can verify). It will always do better than AI Overviews will. Don’t even use Google Search at this point unless you have to, and if you do, scroll past that slop.”

Your trust score on ScamAdvisor is 26/100 ("likely unsafe"); https://www.scam-detector.com/ gives you a trust score of 38.6 ("questionable").

I am not implying that your start-up is a scam, nor that Google is acting on these trust scores. What I am pointing out is that to an algorithmic assessment of trustworthiness, your website looks a little sketchy: hardly anyone links to you; your domain is less than a year old; your whois info is anonymized; the text content is LLM-generated[1]; and the specific niche you're in (people finding services) is rife with scams. If I ran my own search engine, I don't think I'd include you.

  [1]: https://www.pangram.com/history/65314d99-8205-4613-b9bd-a069d5717920?ucc=Yqx88GTmJnK

This sounds more like the page appears broken for the google crawler. I set up a new page about two weeks ago, cared about strong static HTML output, structured data and a sitemap and have 200 of 600 pages indexed today. Feels a bit slow to me but it definitely works.

For myself at least, a couple times Google has promoted in search results scam sites that front run legitimate sites that sell event tickets. I haven't seen this for a while now but trust in Google as a search engine is gone.

> They no longer index sites or take ages to do so

Search for any recent news and you’ll see this is obviously not the case

Additionally the concept of a search engine only works when the internet is full of positive-quality sites.

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?

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.

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

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)

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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.

> 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.

I typed it in my address bar and hit ENTER. It goes to Google, and the AI result is at the top above the regular search results. Don't know what to tell you brother, but as another commenter noted you don't always get the same results out of the same search terms. I've searched for CPL standings other times and gotten results exactly as you've explained, so maybe my experience yesterday was an anomaly.

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?

LLM results are nondeterministic, you can ask it 10 times and get 10 different answers. But also it uses your specific profile, location, tracking cookies, etc which changes the model input and thus results. Even the time of day changes the results.

The days of search for untrusted sources were numbered even without LLMs. LLMs are simply accelerating the process. Why would Google simultaneously watch one of its core products fail and fail to invest in what is likely to replace it?

I don't really buy into this theory that they want to keep all of their users on their site due to advertising revenues. The effectiveness of search engines has been degraded for decades due to SEO, and it seems as though search engines have been having an increasingly difficult time managing it in recent years. AI on the backend may help them contain it, but it comes at considerable expense. While it may help them grow their market share, it won't help them grow the market and it is a market where people expect the service for free. On the flip side, companies are already starting to sell AI services, so it can generate revenue even before advertising is factored into the picture.

I thought Google's original goal for a search engine was exactly this, answer any question whatsoever.

DuckDuckGo does the same but has higher limits