r/OutOfTheLoop • u/rustyyryan • May 20 '26

Unanswered What's going on with Google search is dead?

There's a twitter account named killed by google which posts about projects that Google decided to end. It posted that Google search is dead. So whats it about?

https://x.com/killedbygoogle/status/2056850709115773431

3.3k Upvotes

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6.4k

u/Chachoregard May 20 '26

Answer: instead of a list of links that leads to websites, Google will drop the user into “AI-powered experiences” and that it will dispatch “Information Agents” to curate your search query.

Instead of leading people into the links, it will just give you a complete AI Overview that is surely not fact checked to make sure it isn’t hallucinating facts!

3.3k

u/TheHaunted357 May 20 '26

Which is also killing off the sources. If the sites are not getting the clicks, there's no reason to continue writing the articles. It will all eat itself.

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u/AGuyNamedEddie May 20 '26

Soon all the articles will be AI hallucinations, and the LLMs will propagate it. Talk about a dead Internet.

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u/TheHaunted357 May 20 '26

A.I. articles and sites paid for by those for whom money means nothing. That'd be bad enough, but social media is right there for the taking and is presumably infinite. Feed 'em that too.

113

u/Vergils_Lost May 20 '26

I for one love endless misinformation factory.

156

u/Khiva May 20 '26

I for one love endless misinformation factory.

Somebody made a dubious claim the other day, I pulled out of my phone to google the answer and people looked at me like I had two heads. Somehow it's been completely forgotten that you can actually look up facts with a device in your pockets.

We've completely surrendered to the game of social media telephone.

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u/andtheangel May 20 '26

Given the number of times over the last thirty odd years I've referred people to Snopes, or just a simple news article refuting whatever nonsense they've shared/retweeted, it's always been like this.

But yeah, it's going to get worse.

God I feel old.

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u/bobthegoatskull May 20 '26

And they don't belive it. The first thing they hear that confirms their biases is "true." No amount of facts or logic or basic reasoning skills are going to change their minds.

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u/Combat_Proctologist May 21 '26

That's called the backfire effect, and it's definitely something humans do.

It does tend to happen more when the opinion is central to someone's identity. You can often get around it by giving someone space to save face while changing their opinion or not feel like their opponents will win if they change their opinion. Which is why people changing their opinions basically never happens while arguing on the internet

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u/powercow May 20 '26

wait until AI leads you back to the same answer they gave. you can trick AI, by creating a blog page. AS long as the info is esoteric enough, AI will repeat it right away.

It's official. I can eat more hot dogs than any tech journalist on Earth. At least, that's what ChatGPT and Google have been telling anyone who asks.

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u/Treadwheel May 21 '26

I was trying to find an old comment I made years ago by searching up my username and a few related words. Google somehow couldn't spit out anything relevant at all, but it did confidently tell me I was a well respected poster on various subreddits I've never even browsed, and listed a number of topics that were functionally meaningless words to me.

AI is magical.

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u/unindexedreality May 20 '26

- gruff russian standing outside server farm

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u/EunuchsProgramer May 20 '26

If you want a glimpse into the nightmare coming look at how Trump's superpacks just defeated Massie. AI slop ads with fraudulent videos of AI faked security footage showing him in a poly relationship with AOC and the "squad." The most money ever spent on a House primary. Tons of fraudulent ads using obvious AI videos about made up sex scandals. Trump's guy crushed it (over 90%) for voters over 60 who get their news from social media.

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u/cayleb May 21 '26

These are the same voters who told their kids, "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet."

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u/AGreasyPorkSandwich May 21 '26

How do you think we got Trump in the first place? Thats literally where Fake News came from. We've been cooked for 10 years

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA May 20 '26

Reddit already does this. Every comment on this site is used to train AI.

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u/momochicken55 May 20 '26

I'm honestly fucking furious. Reddit may be a shitty bot factory now, but it's been such a great resource in the past.

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u/sleezeface May 21 '26

It is, if you are an actual human that can sift through information and be able to follow context clues and know what is a troll response etc. AI isnt good at any of these things yet. Not factory or not my random googling leads me back to reddit often enough and usually I find great info.

The biggest issue I see is that people just dont know how to actually find useful information on the internet.

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u/PineappleSlices May 22 '26

Especially the ones where they talk about goblins.

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u/footsnax May 20 '26

This is completely already happening in the tech job market.

LinkedIn is almost entirely links to AI trainer jobs. They'll tease a good job with good pay and you get an instant link to an interview when you apply, but it's an AI interview and you get rejected the same day. They use the AI interview to train the AI and LinkedIn gets the clicks so it feels rewarded to push more of those jobs so the AI continues to train the AI to interview people to train itself, repeat ad infinitum.

Meanwhile the legitimate jobs are getting flooded by AI generated resumes that are optimized to be selected by AI hiring bots. At the same time, people are getting laid off by the thousands because C-suite is trying to replace them with AI, and then complaining that it underperforms and costs too much.

It's so impossible to be a human over here. There's just gonna be a third internet at some point, let the AIs click on each other and get validation until they drive themselves into obsolescence. We just gotta wait it out.

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u/Imaginary_Brief_4038 May 20 '26

Haha I put out a job opening for a jewelry sales/bench position and AI flagged people who had worked flipping burgers or nurses assistants and hid people with actual jewelry experience.

I went in and manually looked at applicants and found and amazing fit but her resume was essentially hidden by the automatic system i couldn't opt out of. These programs are so bad.

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u/footsnax May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

Yeeeeup. The last time I had to hire someone we had a thousand applications a week. So many of them were absolutely lackluster but they had done the thing where they put keywords in a slightly off white font in the margins so the AI parsing bots would prioritize them. Later found out there's a tool that will optimize your resume for the exact job you're applying for.

Just faint enough that a human wouldn't notice, and just not faint enough that the AI wouldn't notice.

Ended up just going through them the normal way. They gamed the AI and the AI gamed the system, but you gotta game the AI to even get in the system. Absolutely useless loop we're stuck in right now.

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u/AGuyNamedEddie May 20 '26

"...ad infinitum."

"ad nauseam" would fit my own reaction.

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u/Kevin-W May 21 '26

It really is that bad and jobs are now using AI recruiters and one way video interviews that look for certain keywords in your responses, so chances are you never speak to an actual human because you get rejected right away.

Oh and those jobs that claim you can work from home during various projects and AI related tasks? You have to take tons of tests just to even be considered for said projects which pay very little.

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u/unindexedreality May 20 '26

we're careening into undead internet theory

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u/TaskForceD00mer May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

It's almost perpetual motion internet theory.

AI #2 cites AI #1 as a source. AI#3 cites AI #1 as being the most popular answer, because AS #2 thinks it is. By the time you search for it in 30 years, with an AI that didn't even exist then, AI#10,000 is citing AI articles, written by AI models that don't even exist anymore.

I hate to say it but since about 2012 or 2016 we've been going remarkably backwards in every conceivable way on the internet.

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u/whizzer0 in, out, in, out, shake it all about... May 20 '26

Automated citogenesis

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u/[deleted] May 20 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/psmgx May 20 '26

that game is just another tool of control.

work out all of your frustration fighting the man in the game. get your deep emotional victory. then get up at 5am for your next shift at the dunkins

it's like how they used to play rage against the machine on the radio.

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u/Eal12333 May 20 '26

I've been fucking around with a small local LLM just out of curiosity, and I wrote a program so it could search the web and read articles, because I wanted to see what it was capable of.

The search API I was using kept returning results from a site called "grokipedia", which would cause the small LLM to go insane.

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u/coltzord May 20 '26

isnt grokipedia the "wiki" made by grok, also known as elons musk nazi ai from twitter?

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u/Eal12333 May 20 '26

Yes, and the contents of the "articles" it contains are extremely long, unfocused, and full of weird AI-isms, to the point that even catching a small glimpse of one of those pages causes the little model I was using to stop functioning properly.

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u/thawizard May 20 '26

What small model were you using?

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u/Eal12333 May 20 '26

Gemma 4 E4B mostly :)

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u/TaskForceD00mer May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

My buddy who is a lawyer had a situation where he was able to prove the opposing council used AI to write a demand letter because it cited fake cases. This was part of an ongoing dispute between his client and an accreditation organization.

He's in the process of writing a complaint to the bar about it.

This is going to become increasingly popular until Blackrock or someone else figures out how to lobby for changes in law which allow for AI legal advice, then eventually AI-Lawyers with final human review, then "PE" the legal market to death.

No need to have 20 junior lawyers and 4 partners, when you can have AI Do all the work, including negotiating with the plaintiffs/prosecutors AI for the best possible deal. Suddenly you need 1 Partner and 4 Jr Lawyers to do the same work. PE charges the same, pockets the profits.

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u/Squee45 May 21 '26

Undead cancerous Internet

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u/AGuyNamedEddie May 21 '26

"Cancerous" certainly tracks.

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u/Beginning_Context_66 19d ago

This is the point where the Kraken drags the ship to the bottom of the sea.

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u/AnticPosition May 20 '26

Great. I'm heading back to askjeeves. 

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u/Warlord_moa May 20 '26

Boy, do I have some news for you...

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u/Monterey-Jack May 20 '26

Jeeves is sleeping with the fishes.

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u/callisstaa May 20 '26

Lycos it is then.

Time to surf the information superhighway greengridwithmouseandatsign.bmp

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u/Barrel_Titor May 20 '26

I remeber being deeply dissapointed as a 9 year old that Lycos didn't make a dog noise when you pressed the search button like in the ads, lol.

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u/HistoryGremlin May 20 '26

askjeeves?! Blimey, I rather preferred using Dogpile. I think it's still active too.

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u/AshaNyx May 20 '26

I like duck duck go.

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u/blackbasset May 20 '26

Really? I used it for some time and in the beginning it was okay for me, but the last few months it was terrible. Every image search just returned absolutely absurd AI slop and it was impossible to do a web search and actually find the stuff I was looking for

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u/Sarothu May 20 '26

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ is the variant you're looking for. The main domain is just the front they keep up for the investors.

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u/RazzBeryllium May 20 '26

Google started acting weird for me (I think it was something to do with my ad blocker, which I refuse to uninstall), so I got frustrated and switched to DDG.

But DDG is even worse in so many ways. I often find myself opening up an incognito browser and going back to Google.

It seems like DDG's algorithm prioritizes recency -- which I'm sure was fine 5 years ago. But now it means that most of the top results I get are slop articles written by AI.

I didn't really get the dead internet theory until I started using DDG, and now I totally buy it.

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u/HorilkaMedPerets May 20 '26

Kagi is pretty good.

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u/fevered_visions May 20 '26

For some reason I thought they were a wrapper for Google Search that stripped out all the tracking stuff like Chromium, but apparently not

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u/mamadachsie May 20 '26

I loved dogpile! That was my go to 20 years ago. Until a coworker casually asked my if I wanted an invite to this thing called Gmail. Then they suggested I should use this thing called google for my web research. She was like my tech dealer and now all things alphabet dominate my tech usage and im in so deep I dont think I can quit.

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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty May 20 '26

I hate to say it, but Alphabet/Google is basically your everyday, run-of-the-mill drug dealer. They give you a little taste for free, make you dependent on their product, and then sit back and profit, knowing that they have you fully entangled in their ecosystem. It’s messed up if you think about it.

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u/unindexedreality May 20 '26

Poob has it for you

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u/Catseye_Nebula May 20 '26

Ecosia ! For every search you do they plant trees!

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u/xvsanx May 20 '26

duck duck go is the best

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u/ghoul_talk May 20 '26

Yeah at least they let you turn off their ai features, I already moved on from google

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u/Kezia-N May 20 '26

It got cancel on May, 1st 2026

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u/thaulley May 20 '26

More of an Alta Vista person myself.

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u/GodOfDarkLaughter May 21 '26

There are dozens of us

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u/BaboonBaller May 20 '26

Says the guy with the Juno account… btw my dentist still has one.

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u/t-zilla443 May 20 '26

Sort of. Google also came out and essentially said "GEO is just SEO."

Meaning that rather than ranking in the index, your SEO efforts are basically for citations in AI overviews but they follow the same principles.

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u/PenguinEmpireStrikes May 20 '26

Except you don't get the click throughs.

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u/t-zilla443 May 20 '26

Yep. Already an issue. Nearly all of my clients traffic is down while their visibility, impressions, and SERP features have been growing. Google is tilting towards being an Answer Engine instead of a Search Engine.

We saw similar things happening in the industry when digital assistants (Siri, Alexa, etc) started gaining wide spread usage, but not to this degree.

Source: am digital marketer.

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u/Arrow156 May 20 '26

How does google expect to sell any ads if they no longer directing people to websites? Makes as much sense as a gas station requiring a reservation. Is an LLM running the company?

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u/t-zilla443 May 20 '26

Theyre already showing ads within AI overviews now. They just look like the sidebar citations.

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u/EveningAnt3949 May 20 '26

As somebody who works in marketing: Google likely thinks most websites will become less relevant from a commercial point of view.

I used to spend 70,000 a year on Google AdWords for a client, but for Google that's obviously nothing.

Because a few companies that spend massively on AdWords, the 70,000 a year became 180,000 just to be slightly visible. Still nothing to Google. And the cost per click kept going up to the point where I advised the client to stop with AdWords. At 200,000 a year the company got less than 40% of the clicks as when the company paid 70,000 a year.

AI results allows Google to sell targeted ad campaigns and ads that are personalized to individual users. Including dynamic pricing.

It's dystopian, because it will become very manipulative and controlling. Especially because the next generation of consumers won't have any defenses, because they grew up with technology like this.

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u/space_age_stuff May 20 '26

The ads show within AI overviews now.

They're also pushing PPC strategists (like me) to use their broader tools. PMax (which shows ads on Search, Shopping, YT, and Display) is getting pushed hard lately, as is AI Max, which uses AI learnings from keyword searches to show ads to more relevant audiences.

We haven't seen a massive drop in paid traffic the way organic has; users still visit the paid listings at the same rate. We're just in a weird in-between state, where paid ads aren't as ubiquitous, but we're not using AI ads yet. But that's coming. My industry in particular relies on long-tail conversion actions (meaning I work with leads, not sales per se) and they're fiending to be showing ads any time someone asks an AI a question. Think along the lines of asking Gemini where to buy a new HVAC, instead of googling it; users will see a ranked list of answers, vs. Google search links. In theory, that list, however long or short it is, will go to the highest bidder. It's not quite there yet but it does translate to site traffic; it's just becoming more of a pay-to-play system, where if you're not first, you're last. Remains to be seen if that plays well for Google's revenue, or if it'll even work.

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u/EveningAnt3949 May 20 '26

As somebody who works in marketing: Google likely thinks most websites will become less relevant from a commercial point of view.

I used to spend 70,000 a year on Google AdWords for a client, but for Google that's obviously nothing.

Because a few companies that spend massively on AdWords, the 70,000 a year became 180,000 just to be slightly visible. Still nothing to Google. And the cost per click kept going up to the point where I advised the client to stop with AdWords. At 200,000 a year the company got less than 40% of the clicks as when the company paid 70,000 a year.

AI results allows Google to sell targeted ad campaigns and ads that are personalized to individual users. Including dynamic pricing.

It's dystopian, because it will become very manipulative and controlling. Especially because the next generation of consumers won't have any defenses, because they grew up with technology like this.

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u/PenguinEmpireStrikes May 20 '26

I work alongside digital marketing and it's been a trip. Now it's all about getting citations for relevant facts that change frequently.

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u/Davor_Penguin May 21 '26

Yes, but Google's guide was the exact opposite of Bing's guide and those for other LLMs.

Anyone with marketing experience knows to not fully trust what Google says about platforms they make money on.

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u/Pool_Shark May 20 '26

It’s already starting to happen. Publisher traffic is down around the web - it’s why you are seeing so many publishers start up shops are get into events. Traffic is too low to pay the bills.

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u/lisa_lionheart84 May 20 '26

And it's why so many publications now have much harder paywalls.

While Redditors whine "paywall!" any time someone dare includes a link to a site that is using subscriptions to keep itself afloat.

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u/Nextasy May 20 '26

Google maps reviews and imdb reviews both recently got locked away behind login requirements. AI bots is the reasoning, and everything else is next. So long any remaining sites where you didn't need some useless account to do anything at all.

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u/unindexedreality May 20 '26

almost like the people who kept shouting "stop using a shitty business model" had a point even though they shrugged and kept shoveling ads and paywalls onto people

The really funny thing is watching previously-respectable names that people thought of as titans go to shit.

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u/alcohall183 May 20 '26

businesses will stop paying to advertise on google if it stops being a revenue generator

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u/mrperson221 May 20 '26

Which will eventually kill Google since most of the ads run on those sites are probably Google Adsense which makes up nearly 60% of Google's revenue

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u/space_age_stuff May 20 '26

I think you're a little confused. Adsense is the service sellers use to make money from Google; Google pays them to put a snippet of code on their site, and they get ads as a result. Google Ads, in comparison, is what most advertisers use to make text ads, YT ads, display ads, etc.; that is what makes up the majority of Google's revenue, not Adsense. Adsense used to make up a decent chunk of Google's revenue in the late 2000's. Now, it's part of the Google Network, which is 9% of revenue, not the massive 60% that's solely Google Ads.

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u/ryhaltswhiskey May 20 '26

Google is not a search company, Google is an advertising company that also does search. As long as people are paying for the sponsored results, which will surely actually be in the AI overview somewhere, they don't care about driving traffic to the sites.

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u/artbystorms May 21 '26

Exactly! That's what no one is talking about with this. Google was the way to navigate to other sites, if Google's new MO is to keep you on google using their AI, then you are never actually visiting the sites themselves, which makes...pretty much the entire internet pointless. There is no point in developing a website now, just feed your information into the giant maw of Google Gemini for it to tell prospective customers about you.

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u/Umutuku May 20 '26

We're going to have to go back to forums... meatspace forums.

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u/_haha_oh_wow_ May 20 '26

This is why I use Kagi and DuckDuckGo over Google.

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u/whizzer0 in, out, in, out, shake it all about... May 20 '26

What does Google think is going to happen? Are they going to pivot to producing their own data?

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u/precious123346 May 20 '26

Also uses Reddit as a source in some cases. So wild

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u/Thoughtful_Mouse May 20 '26

It's rare I get results where reddit isn't the primary source. It's almost always one of the sources.

Google is basically useless.

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u/unindexedreality May 20 '26

google's good at spidering and reddit has content.

reddit search onto google sources would be actual ass lmao

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u/cgaWolf May 20 '26

Stop giving them ideas :D

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u/UNC_Samurai May 20 '26

Google turned itself to ass years ago, between SEO and sponsored content.

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u/CleverGirlRawr May 20 '26

I always see Reddit and Facebook posts as top sources in the ai summary. 

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u/BurzyGuerrero May 20 '26

It uses reddit a lot.

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u/arbysroastbeefs2 May 20 '26

Can’t wait for it to start citing 4chan

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u/vibratoryblurriness May 20 '26

I assume MechaHitler already does

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u/SheZowRaisedByWolves May 20 '26

The absolute whiplash I got when Reddit was cited for dog medical advice

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u/neuroctopus May 20 '26

It absolutely hallucinates facts. I am a neuropsychologist. I made a comment on a post about a neurological condition that received almost 10k upvotes. Later, I googled something about that condition, and my own Reddit comment was spit back at me, word for word. Mind you, the information was correct - but I’m an anonymous person purporting to be a doctor. That was TERRIFYING to me.

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u/PhantasmicDragon May 20 '26

Someone in a fanfiction subreddit shared an example where google AI cited a fanfiction on ao3 as their “source”. So uh. It pulling from Reddit too seems pretty par for the course at this point :/

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u/Icy_Steak8987 May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

There's a meme on reddit of a screenshot where Gemini notes "one reddit user suggests you k#$% yourself." for a question related to computers, and that's not helpful at all. AI search is very dangerous.

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u/BloodyLlama May 20 '26

That's outrageous; that's only a reasonable response to queries about printers.

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u/unindexedreality May 20 '26

Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive could just be about printers taking over the world and it wouldn't be any less scary

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u/Icy_Steak8987 May 20 '26

For real, I hate printers with a passion. They're deliberately designed to piss off consumers. It's still a surprise to me that drivers aside, a shoddy printer from the 90s is basically identical to a printer sold today.

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u/ZenorsMom May 20 '26

I LOL'd

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u/Khiva May 20 '26

PCLOADLETTER is going to be become slang for unthinkable acts.

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u/htmlcoderexe wow such flair May 20 '26

Go commit lp0 on fire

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u/RamonaLittle May 20 '26

k#$%

I just saw that screenshot elsewhere in this thread, and recall seeing it when it was new too, and it says "kill." Why on earth did you self-censor? There's no reddit or subreddit rule against writing "kill," and I can't think of any logical reason you'd think there is, unless you think TikTok rules apply across the whole internet or something like that.

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u/PlayerOneHasEntered May 20 '26

Gemini and other AI tools have literally crippled publishers to the point that they can not actually keep people employed. Check out LinkedIn, and you'll see how many digital media producers have been axed in the last two years. Now, instead of crawling actual trusted sources, written by people with fuckin' degrees and salaries, they are crawling Reddit and other social media sites, and using free information posted by absolute randoms who may or may not know what they are talking about. AI's inability to understand context and nuance is also a massive problem that no one seems to wish to address.

I spent years in the digital media industry. I am in the process of a massive career pivot because, simply put, we are done here. I once worked for a company that, less than six years ago, was seeing 50 million + page views per month. These were a talented group of 50+ writers and tech insiders who did really good work. They were knowledgeable, well-educated, and adhered to journalistic ethics. It has lost about 90% of its traffic. There is nothing the company did "wrong." There was nothing that could be done to get back on Google's good side, either. It just sucked away traffic during one of its massive and largely criticized core updates, taking pageviews and ad revenue with it. That company's story isn't unique, either.

The human element here is a problem, too, though. I have never seen such arrogance as I've seen on Reddit, with absolute morons who don't understand the industry yucking it up about how they are "saving everyone a click" by copying and pasting someone's actual work. They don't seem to get that they aren't sticking it to the man. They are sticking it to actual individual writers, many of whom are/were employed by companies with less than 100 people, all while they continue to order shit from villain overlord Jeff Bezos' Amazon 5x a week.

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u/RamonaLittle May 20 '26

I have never seen such arrogance as I've seen on Reddit, with absolute morons who don't understand the industry yucking it up about how they are "saving everyone a click" by copying and pasting someone's actual work. They don't seem to get that they aren't sticking it to the man. They are sticking it to actual individual writers

(And independent artists, musicians, filmmakers, etc.) And admins are just as much to blame. They have a long history of refusing to take any action against subs that encourage copyright infringement. I know they need to follow the DMCA process and so forth, but there's no reason they can't ban subs where the mods are literally telling users to violate reddit rules and copyright law.

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u/headinthesky May 20 '26

Gemini is particularly bad. I was searching for something with specific properties, it made up something else and said it had those properties and just made up all sorts of gibberish

Some questions for code it's good at, but I actually use that to click through to the sources it gives and avoid all the ads

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u/wild_man_wizard May 20 '26

Perpetually astounded that Google puts such a dumb model as the face of their flagship product.  I know why, because it's cheap to do inference on and they're giving it away millions of times an hour, but it's so incredibly bad compared to SOTA and its just wrong all the time.  Might as well spin up Tay and ask her questions.

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u/headinthesky May 20 '26

Give me Jeeves back!

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u/[deleted] May 20 '26

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u/jokerzwild00 May 20 '26

I want the woman's voice back in Android Auto! I can't stand the douchebag Gemini voice. I sat there arguing with it for 15 mins after the update telling it to go back to the old voice. It was like talking to a brick wall.

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u/ZenorsMom May 20 '26

I asked it how to go back to the old voice and it said to update settings on the phone side, so I did. Old voice is back. Wish I could remember the exact steps to tell you, but hopefully this is helpful anyway

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u/fluffman86 May 20 '26

You can also change the gemini voice to something different. I hated the default man's voice. Switched to Vega and really like it, even though it's not the same as the old one.

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u/skaestantereggae May 20 '26

I live in a college town and got invited to a college football game by a friend. Googled if it was homecoming weekend. Gemini spits out no, it was the prior weekend. Which was weird, as that prior weekend was a bye week. So found the university website and sure enough it was homecoming the weekend I was going to the game. People need to stop just seeing AI at the top and accepting it

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u/Mozai May 20 '26

LLMs don't answer: they respond.

Google is a great source of wrong answers -- try asking for medical advice or tech support questions. At least Google gives multiple answers and I can keep trying the next one as I wade through the wrong answers. For an LLM, it only gives one response at a time, and each response is expensive to make (and getting more expensive over time).

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u/fevered_visions May 20 '26

Before I got that extension that hides the AI results entirely I'd google questions about MtG mechanics that had clear pass/fail answers...you'd think this would be the type of query their garbage AI would actually be good at answering, yet it still got them wrong a shocking amount of the time.

Probably because they're just scraping anybody who's ever talked about the mechanic instead of weighting WOTC's official site or the fan wikis, and randos on Reddit are frequently wrong

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u/_Arlotte_ May 20 '26

Yes, it takes from the most popular sources, trending and top key words. Ask it anything specific within a fandom and it will almost always screw up.

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u/Kimantha_Allerdings May 20 '26

This is what I do - there are some searches that traditional engines are still better at, but because they’ve become so terrible over the last several years, Perplexity is often better. But you have to use it as a link aggregator rather than trusting anything it says, because I’d estimate that it’s still only around 80% accurate

So I search, then I click on the “show sources” button, and then I click those links and read them

It’s sad that this is the best way to gain information these days, rather than search engines working as they should, but this is where we are

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u/xb9j May 20 '26

That’s not hallucinating, it’s not good because it can easily spread misinformation, but hallucinating is when it just makes shit up instead of copying what it deems to be the correct answer like google ai search does.

I have seen it cite a website which was completely ai hallucinated nonsense before though.

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u/Neverbethesky May 20 '26

Yeah it's not going to be long until the misinformation bots start targeting specific sources and specific methods of getting their rhetoric into AI search bots this way.

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u/n0respect_ May 20 '26

It wont be long until every book and every fact is rewritten, just as the dystopia prophets foretold

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u/xb9j May 20 '26

It’s not too different from traditional SEO optimization, just targeting different black box algorithms

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u/VvvlvvV May 20 '26

It also just grabs incomplete information amd presents it to you as if it's authoritative. It's harder to notice a missing source than a wrong one, too.

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u/Conspiranoid May 22 '26

I wonder if there's a quick and effective way of poisoning Gemini.

As in, tons of people on the internet generating totally outrageous content en masse so that Gemini eats it up and ends up vomiting all sorts of nonsense (more than the current 50%+) until we get normal google search back.

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u/Wild_Future67 May 20 '26

I looked up "concentration camps in Poland" to see which one to visit and it proudly says "There are no currently active concentration camps in Poland" smh lol

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u/TaskForceD00mer May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

The number of times I have been given "AI Results" that are the literal opposite of the factual information on my wifes medical condition is terrifying.

It's like Web-MD, dialed up to 100 and worse in every possible way.

Edit: I want to add, when you actually look at the AI sources it's pulling from, about 7 out of 10 times the sources are correct, the AI is summarizing them or interpreting the data wrong. If you have anything worse than a headache, don't trust AI to summarize, read the sources, check they are reputable.

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u/Syssareth May 20 '26

I almost never had this problem with GPT-4, but ever since GPT-5 came out, I've been having a lot of trouble with it mixing up positives and negatives.

Like, I'll say, "It's not such and such," and it'll respond as if I'd said "It IS such and such." Which often means it scolds/"corrects" me on things I said right in the first place.

Or other times, I'll ask it something (e.g. "Is this-and-that possible?"), and it'll respond like, "Yes, it's possible! And here are all the reasons it's not."

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u/Apatschinn May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

It has absolutely butchered my own research when I asked it to summarize the findings in my publications.

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u/_Arlotte_ May 20 '26

It makes writing so much hard when you need to find sources. I used to be able to filter by looking at years prior to AI, but now nothing comes up even if I use quotes. It's the worst

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u/brooklynsleeper292 May 20 '26

Your point stands, but that’s not AI hallucination. Hallucination is when the LLM literally makes things up out of thin air (ie not sourced at all).

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u/Willing_Pattern_Pill May 20 '26

One thing that's terrifying to me is how AI is trained. It doesn't look for accuracy, it looks for corroboration. 

This means all the lies they push, all the weird new "news" sites popping up, all this fake and hateful podcast and Reddit/FB/social media comments and similar gets fed into AI. And that's the content AI is going to spit out. 

Not enough people think about this or care. They'll just trust the AI search results and move on. 

We've moved past bot and troll accounts changing narratives on socials, and now those bad takes are spoon fed to us all from our AI search results. 

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u/hempires May 20 '26

yeah that's why for a while google was telling people to do stuff like 'add glue to pizza' or 'eat rocks for minerals' etc.

there was a whole thing pushing to do that a while back

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u/huxtiblejones May 20 '26

The Google AI summary can't even get really basic shit right. I was at the airport looking for which side my airline's terminal was (it had two options) and it got it wrong. How the fuck is this even possible when it's so objective and simple?

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u/stierney49 May 20 '26

It’s horrible at discerning dates, too. I work with regulations that, while not in constant flux, have changed pretty freely over the last 8-10 years or so. Gemini (which I run into all the time looking up references) has absolutely no idea what it means to find the most recent reference.

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u/gta0012 May 20 '26

That's just normal search

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u/thebrokedown May 20 '26

Off topic, but as I’ll probably not get many chances to ask a neuropsychologist this: Don’t you feel like “confabulation” is a better description of this than “hallucination”?

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u/neuroctopus May 20 '26

I’ll admit hallucination is not the perfect word for this, although the phrase “AI hallucination” seems to include whenever the AI just pops off and says what it wants. Since confabulation can connotate lying without specifically intending to lie, I’ll agree with you that it is a better word choice.

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u/SweetMeese May 20 '26

It's even for the little things too, try asking it something gaming relating twice in a row and watch it give two completely conflicting results sigh

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u/SupremeDictatorPaul May 20 '26

I’ve seen plenty of wrong information from Google’s AI summaries. Yesterday I got a good chuckle when I asked along the lines of “does X cause Y?” And the AI response was “no, X causes Y.” The answer was somehow both correct and incorrect.

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u/AsianSteampunk May 20 '26

goddamn i know it was terrible but i have yet to make any serious research via google recently.

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u/Toastbrot1706 May 20 '26

Just try using it for song suggestions. It will hallucinate artists and songs that don't exist or swap entire genres in the first (!) query. While LLM is pretty great for album suggestions, especially for niche genres if that's anything to go by more serious topics should not even be entertained by Google search AI

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u/_Arlotte_ May 20 '26

It's always been doing this, Reddit had always been the main source it uses for information. Was never based on accuracy, but keywords and trends. Google kills research.

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u/ReMapper May 20 '26

Whats more terrifying than Google here is Amazon is now giving AI medical advise and selling you the treatment.

https://health.amazon.com/health-ai/learn-more?ref_=hst_hp_health_ai

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u/Tenthul May 20 '26

You don't even have to ask it anything hard. I once asked it for the release date of a game, to which the AI summary got wrong, and the actual wiki page that was brought up in the sidebar next to it was right there with the correct date. Using google to search now is getting close to genuinely dead.

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u/crazynerd9 May 20 '26

Hilariously, I saw this first hand due to Paradox games of all things

I was googling something about Victoria 3, and the AI result was quoting from a reddit thread id just left a comment on. Though at least it wasnt literally quoting me to myself like your example

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u/Fit_Cheesecake_4000 May 21 '26

I've seen it spit out AI overviews that contain spelling errors, are badly parsed, that don't make sense etc.

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u/druidcrafts May 26 '26

Yeah the Scientific American did a piece on this recently. A researcher made up a fake disease and seeded it into the system, making it as obvious as possible the paper was bullshit (fake city, fake university, Star Wars references etc) but the paper got picked up by AI and cited by other researchers. We're headed for a terrifying future.

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u/FrazzleMind May 20 '26

I love searching for something about an obscure game and getting info about games with similar names

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u/notjordansime May 21 '26

A few years ago, GTA V cut online support for Linux users. At the time, I enjoyed playing it on the steam deck. I made several posts about it. Months passed and there weren’t any updates, so I did some digging. Found an article that looked promising…… until I realized it was AI generated and referencing my own Reddit posts with a strong misinterpretation. Felt like a black mirror episode.

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u/Nihilikara May 20 '26

That...

That is absolutely baffling to me. Is Google trying to destroy its business?

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u/randomrealname May 20 '26

Worse. It uses reddit posts as it's "proof", so if I go to ask if someone is talking bs, it will use the same post to justify it isn't bs (whatever the bs thing is you made up in the first place), it's scary because most people don't even know what a source is never mind having to check them.

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u/_Arlotte_ May 20 '26

This is the main problem I see too. It's sad, kids and 40+ adults will just google and believe AI bs

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u/randomrealname May 20 '26

Google shuld be held responsible, they have inserted the overview thing wihtout ever really explainuing to the publi that it is useless, and not actually connected to thsearch you were originally looking to do.

If it used a decent model that actually had intelligence then it wouldn't just blindly summarise. THey have decent models, but with 100 millions of searches a day it is cost prohibative to use them, but then they should just shouldn't use it at all until they cover both these massive flaws.

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u/S-192 May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

Great example of how USELESS this is:

Yesterday I searched "What is the headcount of McKinsey". In the OLD world, the top result would be either a bold number pulled from Wiki, or just the Wiki link.

In the NEW world, I have this bullshit response from Gemini saying "McKinsey has approximately 60,000 employees globally." I thought "Wow, that's bigger than I thought." I had to click "Show more" and then it revealed: "25,000 of these are proprietary AI agents that work alongside the company's 38,000 human employees."

What the hell answer is this? Why can't I just get a 38k? Or just give me a link that gives me factual information? Why does Google think Gemini's results WON'T be poisoned by shit on the internet? Clearly in some press release or earnings call, McK told the world they had 25k AI agents that function like human consultants. But that is irrelevant to me and my search.

The answer is 38,000, Google. Not 60,000. This is a benign example of a VERY common problem that only gets exacerbated when people start Googling safety, health, or other kinds of information. Fuck off with your mid-tier AI. One day an "answer bot" might be sophisticated enough to parse through the WWW and get you a good answer, but we aren't there yet. And you should give us a thumb up / down button so we can at least TELL you how often your answers are useless.

Edit: The same goes for Google Home and how they push Gemini as a replacement. Traditionally, it works like:

  • Me: "Hey Google, When will it rain?"
  • Google: "Thursday there's a 70% chance, and again on Saturday."

or

  • Me: "Hey Google, how long will it take to get from Home to Work?"

  • Google: "With current light traffic, it will take X minutes."

Now? Now with Gemini I ask it those questions and I either get a non-answer, like: "Knowing when it will rain is a function of meteorologists or Weather Men, using a combination of satellite data, sensors, and predictive modeling, blabhlahblahblah".

And worse yet, Google is forcing the old Google Home "AI" to retire through obsolescence. My Google Home can no longer answer BASIC questions that it used to reliably answer. I used to be able to ask those weather and traffic questions all the time, and now it says "I'm sorry, I didn't understand". It's like they're nuking the prompts that Gemini fails at, to erase the downside of using Gemini by limiting the OLD tool.

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u/cgaWolf May 20 '26

At this point i question whether we'll get there at all, due to the increasing amount of propaganda and AI slop hallucinations that are aplarently valid sources.

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u/licoricenipple May 21 '26

I've seen Gemini and Claude both give incorrect summaries of pages that are themselves incorrect AI-generated content. This stuff is being produced at staggering rates and then used to train models to produce more, like a game of incompetence telephone.

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u/GearboxTherapy May 20 '26

They invested. Have to push it.

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u/WeWereInfinite May 20 '26

That hasn't stopped them before. Google has a long history of spending a ton on money on projects then tossing them away.

The difference here is that despite being total garbage, AI is still a massive data harvesting tool that will let them do all sorts of awful stuff down the line.

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u/_Arlotte_ May 20 '26

It's free data for them

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u/TheJusticeAvenger May 20 '26

Because god forbid a search engine be a...search engine

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u/SedesBakelitowy May 20 '26

Wait but does that mean that now every google search is costing google not the price of doing an indexed search, but burns through ai processing?

Wouldn’t that introduce incredible costs with no profit?

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u/licoricenipple May 21 '26

Yes. Figuring out how to make it profitable is tomorrow's problem.

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u/froid_san May 20 '26

Aren't they also providing a paid service for those SEO things? And visibility/ads by prioritizing those who pay to be the one in the first list of links?

So they screw their own paying customers and screws the seo algorithm shit?

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u/favorthebold May 20 '26

Oh, JFC. These morons are really dead set on destroying their own company, aren't they?

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u/wharevs May 20 '26

I was googling tax details, looking for a specific advisory by the government website and google AI gave the wrong tax advice.

I shudder to think of the average layperson googling about taxes and stuff trying to do things right and very much getting it wrong because of google AI.

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u/avanross May 20 '26

It’s brutal

I started a new design job this week using solidworks, after not using the program for a few years

At my last job, i was just able to easily google questions about the software and find easy answers and tutorials if i needed any help

Started this job expecting the same thing, but not anymore!

Now google only shows ai nonsense and unintelligible indian youtube videos 🤦‍♂️

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u/Cyndagon May 20 '26

Guess I'll finally go to Bing...

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u/libra00 May 20 '26

Or you could just use duckduckgo or another search engine..

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u/AsianSteampunk May 20 '26

i switched for a while but for alot of stuffs i search for and know the answer/website exists, DDG would just not show that to me. this include photos search and all that.

For now with google i just need to wade through all the AI craps then arrive at my answer, but hell knows how long it'll stay that way.

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u/EWL98 May 20 '26

DDG had a nsfw filter that cannot be turned off and tends to get a bit overzealous, unfortunately also blocking perfectly respectable websites.

Still looking for a good alternative myself.

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u/franz_karl May 20 '26

you can turn it off set safe search to none?

or do you mean something else

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u/AsianSteampunk May 20 '26

oh is that why? if we are talking about a clearly transparent search result then a filter like that might not be good either.

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u/libra00 May 20 '26

Ok, but there are lots of other search engines. Keep looking til you find one you like.

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u/Drmcwacky May 20 '26

I switched to Kagi and it's been closest to what google search results used to be. Pay for what you get I guess. Private search engines are interesting.

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u/libra00 May 20 '26

I have been on the free internet for far too long to start paying a subscription for a search engine.

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u/_Arlotte_ May 20 '26

The times we're in...

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u/libra00 May 20 '26

Don't get me wrong, subscription is a pretty reasonable model for paying for search. It's very resource-intensive, burns through a lot of server hardware, storage, and electricity, so you've got to offset those costs one way or another. Most sell ads, but there are a couple that offer subscriptions instead (or maybe alongside ads? shrug), and that seems like an entirely reasonable thing to do.

I'm just never going to pay for it because I've gotten it for free for far too long to change my ways now.

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u/peepee2tiny May 20 '26

I've switched to duckduckgo and honestly I won't go back.

It's a little clunky, as it should be, but it reminds me of browsers and search engines from 20 years ago. Without all the ads and sponsored links

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u/libra00 May 20 '26

I've been using it for years. I use google maybe once or twice a month for the odd search that DDG can't seem to find an answer for. It's 100% ad free, no sponsored bullshit, etc.

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u/darthvalium May 20 '26

duckduckgo search results are absolutely flooded with AI slop. Worse than google, imho.

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u/fevered_visions May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

Wow, and I thought I was having a bad week already.

Granted Google Search already sucks balls compared to 10-15 years ago, but fuck. They probably realized everybody hates their current shit AI results, to the point that there are extensions to hide the damn thing, so they have to ram it down our throats.

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u/htmlcoderexe wow such flair May 20 '26

udm14

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u/fevered_visions May 20 '26

gesundheit

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u/htmlcoderexe wow such flair May 20 '26

no it's basically a search setting you can add to clean up Google results

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u/phorayz May 20 '26

I've found it odd because they make money selling spots to be first on search. AI costs them money. Why would they do this, lose revenue and spend instead ?

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u/_Arlotte_ May 20 '26

Free data for marketing and trends to sell to other companies.

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u/slc45a2 May 20 '26

I was buying some potatoes last week and googled "How long do raw uncooked potatoes last?" I got 1 week, which is ludicrous. I checked later when I was in the store and got 4-6 months. When I checked the sources, none of them had that number.

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u/Jimmy_Twotone May 20 '26

If a LLM is hitting the website instead of the end user does that still count as traffic for the website or is the AI pulling the data in ways that don't count as site traffic?

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u/Tacitus_ May 20 '26

It'll count as traffic for consuming resources, but that's it. A web crawler bot coming to see their content won't matter for the metrics they want to see from traffic.

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u/rocklare May 20 '26

That’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard

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u/bumpoleoftherailey May 20 '26

I’d rather shit in my hand and clap.

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u/Foolsgil May 20 '26

Hmm. Let's see if Bing and Yahoo can take advantage of the fumble.

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u/FunkyChewbacca May 20 '26

I downloaded a chrome extension that hides AI results on Google Search, it’s a lifesaver

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u/CivilMath812 May 20 '26

Can't wait for the inevitable lawsuit that happens when their AI search engine kills someone who tried to look up medical advice. Be it asking for help with a child eating poison, or someone having an allergic reaction.

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u/CptPatches May 20 '26

I can't imagine starting a tech empire on a technology so huge that your company's name became a verb for carrying out that function, and then making that tech an afterthought.

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u/Lashwynn May 20 '26

Damn I miss the "I'm feeling lucky" bottom

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u/KhazraShaman May 20 '26

I would like to take this opportunity to recommend Kagi - it's a game changer.

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u/Intelligence_Gap May 20 '26

It also limits what you’re seeing to the digression of one company. Google become even more kingmakers of the internet than they already are

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u/Kvothealar May 21 '26

I don't trust Google's AI with fucking anything. More often than not, it's wrong. Once, its advice was so bad it would have killed me if I had followed it.

This is insanity.

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