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Comment by jeffbee

3 days ago

Google is really wrecking its brand with the search AI summaries thing, which is unbelievably bad compared to their Gemini offerings, including the free one. The continued existence of it is baffling.

It's mystifying. A relative showed me a heavily AI-generated video claiming a Tesla wheelchair was coming (self-driving of course, with a sub-$800 price tag). I tried to Google it to quickly debunk and got an AI Overview confidently stating it was a real thing. The source it linked to: that same YouTube video!

Yeah. It's the final nail in the coffin of search, which now actively surfaces incorrect results when it isn't serving ads that usually deliberately pretend to be the site you're looking for. The only thing I use it for any more is to find a site I know exists but I don't know the URL of.

  • What do you use instead… that doesn’t piggyback off of google search?

The AI summaries clearly aren’t bad. I’m not sure what kind of weird shit you search for that you consider the summaries bad. I find them helpful and click through to the cited sources.

  • ...and the cited source is AI generated video(s). There are summaries that say exactly the opposite of the correct result.