The AI Overviews outrage is only the beginning. It has been 11 days since they made it public in the US, and it had been in experimentation for over a year before that.
Already now, a lot of users will associate Google AI Overviews with nonsense; eat rocks, cook spaghetti with gasoline. Google also showed how easily these AI Overviews can be manipulated, since they use RAG.
I think the Slopception is only going to get worse. Slop in. Slop out.
And also, Google Research just happened to be sitting on AGREE[0]:
> a learning-based framework that enables LLMs to provide accurate citations in their responses, making them more reliable and increasing user trust
Which was published yesterday.
I tried to submit it[1] but it didn’t get much love.
> Already now, a lot of users will associate Google AI Overviews with nonsense
A lot of tech-minded folks who actively follow this stuff on Twitter et al make this association, but the average person was already defaulting to reading the first (likely incorrect) hit on Google and moving on with their day. I'm not sure they'll notice a dip in quality until it directly contradicts something they know about confidently.
Google AI was so much better when they used it to do useful things like create the best starcraft player in the world. Imagine if strategy game companies could license/extend DeepMind game AI.
We are in the rough and tumble time of new tech. As an analogy, trains didn't always have the distance between their tracks as uniform (called gauge). It strikes me that we are in a similar time of invention. If you have ever read old patents (my experience being older pop book like "Strange Stories, Amazing Facts" and random blogposts) you'll see the truly bizzare.
I agree "Companies need to move really fast, even if that includes skipping a few steps along the way. The user experience will just have to catch up." is insane. There's a difference between a bad "user experience" and "harmful with no value" (the latter being unacceptable). The mentality that we must cut as close to the latter at the altar of market share is why we're in this state and why it's going to get much, much worse before anything gets better.
Matt Stoller’s theory is that Google at this point is like Boeing was maybe a decade ago — an incredible product company that has already been taken over by finance types, and on the way to irreversible crash.
I was born in the same year that Google Search launched. Half-decent search has been here my whole life. When someone asks me "how did you learn X", the answer usually starts with "I googled it".
I've never looked something up in an encyclopedia. I've never visited a library in pursuit of a research goal. There's no "going back to how things were before" for me - there was no "before"!
Life will go on, but the demise of search engines is quite a terrifying prospect for me. Generative AI is a search engine killer but not in any positive sense.
As if those services are the only options. No they are not.
The world isn't one dimensional nor binary. Everything is a multidimensional spectrum.
I don't use Google search and I don't have to. There are reasonable alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Brave Search. They aren't as good as Google was in the past, but there is also Wikipedia, Reddit, GitHub, Phind, StackExchange, Discord, IRC, forums, newsgroups, Claude, ChatGPT, LLama, and what not.
Sure, it would be awesome to get all the answers from a single input field, but honestly, even though Google was better in the past, this has never been the case for any sufficiently complex question.
> I've never looked something up in an encyclopedia
Does that include Wikipedia? I mean, the problem with encyclopedias is that they were small (despite physically taking up entire bookcases). I didn't use them much either, even back in prehistoric times when the internet wasn't invented. They tended to disappoint by giving a crappy, superficial overview of something that was only vaguely similar to the thing you wanted to know about.
But I use wikipedia instead of doing an internet search a lot of the time. Or sometimes archive.org, for things probably in books. Cut out the middleman, go directly to where you know the information is.
I'd like to recommend that you start using libraries. You'll find that they often contain vastly more information than you'll find through web search, and you're already paying for them.
> There's no "going back to how things were before" for me - there was no "before"! (...) Life will go on, but the demise of search engines is quite a terrifying prospect for me.
Speaking as someone who was born long before the public Internet: you can never go back to how things were before. Similarly, you can never really stay with the way things are now. The world changes. Even if you stick to the ways of your lifetime, or go back to the ways prior to your lifetime, the ways have change simply because the context has changed.
I'm not saying that we should jump the AI bandwagon. I'm just saying that we need to recognize the world is in constant flux.
This is so interesting. I have learned more from a years’s use of chatGPT than from two decades of googling. Yeah, AI has drawbacks. But AI has never displayed an ad to me and only once displayed a cookie banner, and that’s worth quite a bit to me
Google search quality has been decreasing not because of a lack of AI, but because of AI itself. LLM spamming and a decade of SEO maxxing has made pagerank completely obsolete. No one has a personal site anymore, backlinks don't mean anything now.
Maybe we need a need a new paradigm for search ranking. Voting, experts, introduce organic feedback back into the loop ?
Gotta imagine that Conde Nast, Hearst etc are not going to take these changes lying down and the last ten years of SEOmaxxing have given them literally all the money, power etc in the web scene. They will be able to clone any in-depth "expert" site with their firepower and then come in with backlinks, socials etc and we're back to the status quo ante.
With the March updates I thought there was a chance that Google could pull it off, but now I am leaning towards it's all doomed. Personally I wish I never got into building websites when I have to compete with ugly wordpresses from SEO companies in India taking my #1 spot for English content.
I wish I could get angry about the forbes articles in my niches but at least that's written ostensibly by a professional-- when you start getting beaten by center-aligned text from South Asia you know there was -never- a chance for quality to win.
Google shot their own foot. Starting with discontinuing Google Reader, the biggest ecosystem of blogs at the time. Could have evolved into a moat against social media walled garden.
Google thinks they're untouchable. That's why they serve up so many ads that most adblockers can't keep up. That's why they've done very little to combat bad actors who manipulate google search results. That's why they think they can toss half-baked AI out there.
AI could be something that helps prevent google bombing. AI could be something that lets them serve up one or two ads per page and get a similar number of click-throughs.
Google's lunch is spread out on a picnic blanket, just waiting for someone to come along and eat it.
Any competent ad blocker keeps up fine. Give uBlock Origin a try, for example, rather than the ad blockers that take cash to let shit slip through and you won't see ad blockers failing to keep up with Google or YouTube.
Google is in a tough position, but the track they’re on isn’t helping. People are already publishing massive amounts of meaningless AI generated content which is making results poor. So they short-circuit the madness by introducing their own poor result content, it’s bad but at least they control it.
The big question is: can it get better fast enough to save search? I think the era of search is ending, and it doesn’t look like LLMs are a good replacement.
I agree that trust is eroding with a certain user demographic. As time moves on, they are competing to win trust with the next generations. Does anyone remember going to a library? Used to be the place to get info. Same thing.
Google's market share was suffering because they have been using their dominance to force everyone to participate in the "game the search engine" scam that Google was selling, which exists only to cheat the Google search engine.
Once enough of us realized that Google search results are usually just paid ads, what's the point anymore?
It's insane, and "AI" isn't going to fix any of it.
It feels like at some point their goal reversed. From “be the tool that shows the user what they’re looking for as accurately and efficiently as possible” to “be the tool that has them clicking between Google search results and maybe relevant pages showing Google ads”
Google is fighting for it's life. I'm not saying that excuses things but it puts them in context. IIRC, 60% of google's profit is ads on search. Chat GPT like results remove much of the need for "search". I find myself more and more trying to find an answer on Google, not finding it, asking ChatGPT, getting an answer. And I'm NOT suggesting Google search sucks. It might but that's not my point.
I recently need to find some details of hardware implementations for a feature. I used Google to find specs for this hardware. The specs were hard to read or didn't explain things as I needed. So I asked ChatGPT and it gave me what I needed. It first regurgitated info from the specs but I was able to ask it to explain pieces in more detail and it was great! At what point do I just stop using Google search to find an answer?
Or course AI answers have their issues. ATM I wouldn't search for reviews of some new video game or movie on ChatGPT. I also wouldn't search for product reviews. Even though it will happily spew out recommendations they'll be old at best. Maybe that will get fixed but it will have all the same issues as search and more. People will write their SEO type techniques to try to get the AI to surface their product just like they try to get them to the top of search results. I guess we'll need a new name. ARO (AI Results Optimization). Searching for products at least I get the illusion of lots of various opinions. With ChatGPT I just get the bot's one opinion.
Anyway, the point is, Google has to do something. Too late and everyone will switch. Which pushes them into too soon and hence the issues we're seeing.
I hope either the information you needed was just personal curiosity or that you verified with sources what ChatGPT was reporting. The hallucination problem is still terrible with no real solutions from OpenAI apart from "we're working on it."
IMHO, fully cosigning that google search has gotten worse and the AI shit is only going to make that even worse, using ChatGPT as a replacement feels crazy to me. Like yeah, Google gets it wrong sometimes, sure, but ChatGPT just makes shit up. Is a dumbass better or worse than a confident liar? Guess that's up to the user to decide.
> I recently need to find some details of hardware implementations for a feature. I used Google to find specs for this hardware. The specs were hard to read or didn't explain things as I needed. So I asked ChatGPT and it gave me what I needed. It first regurgitated info from the specs but I was able to ask it to explain pieces in more detail and it was great! At what point do I just stop using Google search to find an answer?
But was it accurate ? Chat GPT just provided you with the statistically most likely specs. If the actual doc for this hardware is lacking, this is 100% hallucinations.
My experience is that ChatGPT is simply bullshitting you (sometime accurately), Google is drowning the info in 20 links (where they try to make you buy "Hardware you're searching for"), and you have to go to DuckDuckGo to find the thing you're actually searching for.
I wonder how much of that pattern (Google won't give me shit, better ask GPT) is Google's own fault. Their search engine has been degraded so much that, if their LLM results are based on its search, it won't match the specificity of GPT's results. They seem to have pushed people into ChatGPT's arms. If they had consistent search services, I think less people would flock to GPT, which would give them more room to develop their own LLMs properly instead of just rushing crap like Bard or Gemini's inconsistent stuff. The gamble to rush things means you run the risk of shooting yourself in the foot and letting the other runners catch up
Honestly I see a ton more ads on YouTube than search as I use Kagi but I can't avoid YouTube. I'm sure they have other future revenue streams for ad placement.
I wonder what Gruber will be saying when his beloved Apple inevitably steps on the same rake. Somehow I think his human slop will be markedly more exculpatory
> The trust Google has built with users over the last 25 years is the most valuable asset the company owns.
That gave me a laugh. I don't trust Google. Their entire purpose for many years now has been simply to enable SEO trash in such a way that users see as many ads as possible while providing a minimum amount of useful information so that users are not totally frustrated.
If Google could legally sell your organs, they would. They are that nefarious, and deserve all the hate they get. AI is just the next step. Frankly, if Google went bankrupt today, I think civilization would benefit immensely.
I’ve been using the AI Overviews in Google Search for months now and overall find more utility in them.
I’ve developed an instinct for when to ignore them. Typically it is when “edge information” is involved: facts / data that are only very sparsely published in time / web space, perhaps by only one or a few web authors, perhaps only very recently.
As an AI developer for over a decade, I feel like if we’re calling this “slop”, I fear what these authors think of human error. I’m also doubtful that these people who are damning this project have ever in fact innovated or developed anything significant from scratch themselves.
From my perspective, the issue isn't with AI but with UI - Google is promoting these as "answers", pushing them to the top of their results and giving no indication that the results might ever be inaccurate.
Google has been pushing to "answer questions" over return web sources since at least 2010 (when their public messaging changed), so that is nothing new. But it is a seismic, human difference between aggregated results from trusted web sources and reformatted comments from Reddit posts.
AI is great for targetted tasks and even for general web usage, with caveats. I would love to see something like an accuracy/trust score associated with the results or at a minimum a beta flag with a "hide results like this" option.
These are all basic UI procedures any reasonable person would make, but Google has been riding high on hubris for a while now (zero human support, just see the Google Cloud issue on the frontpage...) and this won't change until the stock starts getting slammed, which seems imminent.
If a human offered to confidently answer every question you asked without regard to whether it is true or correct, you wouldn't say they're merely mistaken when they tell you falsehoods. You would call them a bullshitter or a charlatan.
Calling it slop at least acknowledges that the AI isn't trying to lie to you. It's not merely making a error, either. It just doesn't care either way.
I don't think you ever have to have innovated or developed anything significant to take issue with a major consumer product losing some utility - I don't know if you used Twitter ten years ago, but it was pretty sad to see the site slowly downgrade year by year, every new feature making it less functional and more addictive, fueling toxicity, becoming a black hole of individuals' attention. It makes you wonder what would have happened if the people put up more of a fight whenever some new stupid feature was rolled out, or a useful feature taken away to make the whole thing just a little more like a slot machine. (Hmmm... maybe Elon Musk should buy Google, so people will finally start complaining en Masse.)
As a defender of the new LLM-thingies, do you think they're doing a reasonable job of promoting AI-output literacy? I think it's their job to do so when they are the ones generating the content, whereas general media-literacy was not really their problem when Google was just a directory for the web.
[+] [-] skilled|1 year ago|reply
Already now, a lot of users will associate Google AI Overviews with nonsense; eat rocks, cook spaghetti with gasoline. Google also showed how easily these AI Overviews can be manipulated, since they use RAG.
I think the Slopception is only going to get worse. Slop in. Slop out.
And also, Google Research just happened to be sitting on AGREE[0]:
> a learning-based framework that enables LLMs to provide accurate citations in their responses, making them more reliable and increasing user trust
Which was published yesterday.
I tried to submit it[1] but it didn’t get much love.
[0]: https://research.google/blog/effective-large-language-model-...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40469518
[+] [-] raydev|1 year ago|reply
A lot of tech-minded folks who actively follow this stuff on Twitter et al make this association, but the average person was already defaulting to reading the first (likely incorrect) hit on Google and moving on with their day. I'm not sure they'll notice a dip in quality until it directly contradicts something they know about confidently.
[+] [-] viking123|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] polski-g|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tomrod|1 year ago|reply
We are in the rough and tumble time of new tech. As an analogy, trains didn't always have the distance between their tracks as uniform (called gauge). It strikes me that we are in a similar time of invention. If you have ever read old patents (my experience being older pop book like "Strange Stories, Amazing Facts" and random blogposts) you'll see the truly bizzare.
[+] [-] adolph|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] drpossum|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] CPLX|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Retr0id|1 year ago|reply
I've never looked something up in an encyclopedia. I've never visited a library in pursuit of a research goal. There's no "going back to how things were before" for me - there was no "before"!
Life will go on, but the demise of search engines is quite a terrifying prospect for me. Generative AI is a search engine killer but not in any positive sense.
[+] [-] k__|1 year ago|reply
Google, WhatsApp, Facebook, Tinder.
As if those services are the only options. No they are not.
The world isn't one dimensional nor binary. Everything is a multidimensional spectrum.
I don't use Google search and I don't have to. There are reasonable alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Brave Search. They aren't as good as Google was in the past, but there is also Wikipedia, Reddit, GitHub, Phind, StackExchange, Discord, IRC, forums, newsgroups, Claude, ChatGPT, LLama, and what not.
Sure, it would be awesome to get all the answers from a single input field, but honestly, even though Google was better in the past, this has never been the case for any sufficiently complex question.
[+] [-] card_zero|1 year ago|reply
Does that include Wikipedia? I mean, the problem with encyclopedias is that they were small (despite physically taking up entire bookcases). I didn't use them much either, even back in prehistoric times when the internet wasn't invented. They tended to disappoint by giving a crappy, superficial overview of something that was only vaguely similar to the thing you wanted to know about.
But I use wikipedia instead of doing an internet search a lot of the time. Or sometimes archive.org, for things probably in books. Cut out the middleman, go directly to where you know the information is.
[+] [-] cess11|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] II2II|1 year ago|reply
Speaking as someone who was born long before the public Internet: you can never go back to how things were before. Similarly, you can never really stay with the way things are now. The world changes. Even if you stick to the ways of your lifetime, or go back to the ways prior to your lifetime, the ways have change simply because the context has changed.
I'm not saying that we should jump the AI bandwagon. I'm just saying that we need to recognize the world is in constant flux.
[+] [-] lionkor|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bigallen|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] arnaudsm|1 year ago|reply
Maybe we need a need a new paradigm for search ranking. Voting, experts, introduce organic feedback back into the loop ?
[+] [-] p3rls|1 year ago|reply
With the March updates I thought there was a chance that Google could pull it off, but now I am leaning towards it's all doomed. Personally I wish I never got into building websites when I have to compete with ugly wordpresses from SEO companies in India taking my #1 spot for English content.
I wish I could get angry about the forbes articles in my niches but at least that's written ostensibly by a professional-- when you start getting beaten by center-aligned text from South Asia you know there was -never- a chance for quality to win.
[+] [-] meiraleal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] beloch|1 year ago|reply
AI could be something that helps prevent google bombing. AI could be something that lets them serve up one or two ads per page and get a similar number of click-throughs.
Google's lunch is spread out on a picnic blanket, just waiting for someone to come along and eat it.
[+] [-] asadotzler|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] joe8756438|1 year ago|reply
The big question is: can it get better fast enough to save search? I think the era of search is ending, and it doesn’t look like LLMs are a good replacement.
[+] [-] Havoc|1 year ago|reply
I've stopped using google search entirely in favour of Phind and OpenAI.
>There’s no reason Google had to enable this feature now.
Given that Bing beat them to the punch I'd say they're already late
[+] [-] llm_trw|1 year ago|reply
If google had any sense they'd just buy them and use them as their new front end.
[+] [-] meiraleal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] insin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] squigglydonut|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sunir|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] uptownJimmy|1 year ago|reply
Once enough of us realized that Google search results are usually just paid ads, what's the point anymore?
It's insane, and "AI" isn't going to fix any of it.
The rot in our tech economy is astonishing.
[+] [-] transcriptase|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nox101|1 year ago|reply
I recently need to find some details of hardware implementations for a feature. I used Google to find specs for this hardware. The specs were hard to read or didn't explain things as I needed. So I asked ChatGPT and it gave me what I needed. It first regurgitated info from the specs but I was able to ask it to explain pieces in more detail and it was great! At what point do I just stop using Google search to find an answer?
Or course AI answers have their issues. ATM I wouldn't search for reviews of some new video game or movie on ChatGPT. I also wouldn't search for product reviews. Even though it will happily spew out recommendations they'll be old at best. Maybe that will get fixed but it will have all the same issues as search and more. People will write their SEO type techniques to try to get the AI to surface their product just like they try to get them to the top of search results. I guess we'll need a new name. ARO (AI Results Optimization). Searching for products at least I get the illusion of lots of various opinions. With ChatGPT I just get the bot's one opinion.
Anyway, the point is, Google has to do something. Too late and everyone will switch. Which pushes them into too soon and hence the issues we're seeing.
[+] [-] ToucanLoucan|1 year ago|reply
IMHO, fully cosigning that google search has gotten worse and the AI shit is only going to make that even worse, using ChatGPT as a replacement feels crazy to me. Like yeah, Google gets it wrong sometimes, sure, but ChatGPT just makes shit up. Is a dumbass better or worse than a confident liar? Guess that's up to the user to decide.
[+] [-] drpossum|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mezyt|1 year ago|reply
But was it accurate ? Chat GPT just provided you with the statistically most likely specs. If the actual doc for this hardware is lacking, this is 100% hallucinations.
My experience is that ChatGPT is simply bullshitting you (sometime accurately), Google is drowning the info in 20 links (where they try to make you buy "Hardware you're searching for"), and you have to go to DuckDuckGo to find the thing you're actually searching for.
[+] [-] Nutcase5753|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] telesilla|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ein0p|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mcphage|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mediumsmart|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vouaobrasil|1 year ago|reply
That gave me a laugh. I don't trust Google. Their entire purpose for many years now has been simply to enable SEO trash in such a way that users see as many ads as possible while providing a minimum amount of useful information so that users are not totally frustrated.
If Google could legally sell your organs, they would. They are that nefarious, and deserve all the hate they get. AI is just the next step. Frankly, if Google went bankrupt today, I think civilization would benefit immensely.
[+] [-] acheron|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] legel|1 year ago|reply
I’ve developed an instinct for when to ignore them. Typically it is when “edge information” is involved: facts / data that are only very sparsely published in time / web space, perhaps by only one or a few web authors, perhaps only very recently.
As an AI developer for over a decade, I feel like if we’re calling this “slop”, I fear what these authors think of human error. I’m also doubtful that these people who are damning this project have ever in fact innovated or developed anything significant from scratch themselves.
Makes me want to start a company called Slop.
[+] [-] lubujackson|1 year ago|reply
Google has been pushing to "answer questions" over return web sources since at least 2010 (when their public messaging changed), so that is nothing new. But it is a seismic, human difference between aggregated results from trusted web sources and reformatted comments from Reddit posts.
AI is great for targetted tasks and even for general web usage, with caveats. I would love to see something like an accuracy/trust score associated with the results or at a minimum a beta flag with a "hide results like this" option.
These are all basic UI procedures any reasonable person would make, but Google has been riding high on hubris for a while now (zero human support, just see the Google Cloud issue on the frontpage...) and this won't change until the stock starts getting slammed, which seems imminent.
[+] [-] throwup238|1 year ago|reply
There is precedent. You can start a modern lifestyle brand like Goop.
[+] [-] dialup_sounds|1 year ago|reply
Calling it slop at least acknowledges that the AI isn't trying to lie to you. It's not merely making a error, either. It just doesn't care either way.
[+] [-] rickdicker|1 year ago|reply
As a defender of the new LLM-thingies, do you think they're doing a reasonable job of promoting AI-output literacy? I think it's their job to do so when they are the ones generating the content, whereas general media-literacy was not really their problem when Google was just a directory for the web.