Comment by nekzn
5 hours ago
I must be the only person in this website who is happy with the AI Overview feature. It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites. And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse.
I would say that for almost all of my searches the AI Overview feature contains exactly the answer I was looking for, and I don’t even have to leave Google to get it. It’s been a very positive addition.
> It messes up sometimes
i have the opposite experience as i've found it to mess up a lot to the point that I can't trust the AI Overview answer at all. I've seen it be confidently wrong too many times and now the trust factor just isn't there.
I've found that the AI overview is usually right but confidently wrong enough of the time that I don't trust it. The interface that you get with the 'AI Mode' button (which I assume is just Gemini with very low compute settings), however, is usually pretty solid for well-documented queries.
For simple queries it’s fine. The main value it adds is that it’s above the ad spam.
But it was trained on ad spam wasn't it?
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Never ever trust AI summary cooking instructions. Holy crap.
I made a serious error with that once.
I was searching for reverse sear info and it told me to make sure the steak is at least 37f/3c internally before eating lol
I’ve found video game tips to also be very incorrect hallucinations as well.
Did you add glue to a pizza?
I blocked AI overview because it starves websites of their own traffic and revenue.
Websites accepted Google scraping their content because it gave them a prominent blue link plus excerpt to drive traffic. Now everyone’s content is blended together and maybe, if they’re lucky, their site is chosen amongst the blend to get a tiny citation link.
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I also like their AI Overview (though just like all the other LLMs it confidently tells me wrong info all the time). Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system where you could give it a string of text and it would find just about anything I was trying to remember having seen somewhere before.
> Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system
I think a large part of the blame is not on Google but on the websites themselves. The Internet has been enshittified by a gargantuan amount of spam sites and content mills created just to generate clicks and boost SEO.
At least AI offers a way to filter out the noise at the cost of relying on how it was trained and what the creators thought is good data.
The blame for this is 100% on Google.
They constantly reward websites that are on a hamster-wheel of chasing the latest SEO trends, while penalizing websites that have actual information for not jumping through the same hoops.
A company I know operated TWENTY THOUSAND blogspam blogs out of a single server/IP. Google knew all along that this was happening (the companies had strategic partnerships) and never did anything about it.
The last thing they did anything significant was when, Panda in 2011?
At this point it's clear they're a monopoly and only care about websites who cater to their whims + making money. Search be damned.
Google knows exactly what it is doing. The downranked .edu domains which always ranked high in 2005. They want to feed people with rage bait and SEO websites, since the persons who read that garbage are the only ones who react to advertisements.
google literaly makes the rules for SEO and discoverability and penalise you for not following them. Hense all websites end up with slop content now.
That one is 100% on Google. They intentionally enshittified their own search so that you spend more time in it. And they made it harder for genuine sites to be found unless they play the SEO game.
I blocked it because I found it was in the sour spot of being good enough to be tempting to rely on, but bad enough to be risky to rely on.
When the search results are bad, usually I can at least tell that they're dubious: either they're from obviously unreputable sites, or they conflict with each other, or they just don't quite address my query. But an inaccurate AI overview can look very similar to an accurate one.
Enjoy it while you can. Google spent years perfecting the art of steering users away from what they searched for and toward advertiser sites, all while pretending to be a search engine. There's no way showing users the exact answer right beneath their search query is profitable in any meaningful sense. And so, it will end.
What they’ll do is embed ads in the text, which will also be unblockable. I imagine the future will entail running an LLM to remove the ads that another LLM generated :P
Hey, finally a real use for AI in the browser. It could probably be a pretty small model, too.
Sure, at the beginning it will be some "sponsored by" text, maybe even highlighted for you, that is easy to snip out. But the long game is slowly slowly shifting you towards Russian victory, manosphere rage bait, South African immigration, or whatever other manipulation someone is willing to pay a nickel for.
This is what people wanted, and we all act like it's bad they did it.
It no longer searches for me but tells me to search for what I’m looking for, which brings it back to itself, telling me to go search for what I’m looking for…
Yesterday I tried Gemini "Can you find the origin of this story I remember from 10+ years ago? Here's three paragraphs of what I recall"
"Yeah, it sounds like a very common copypasta back in the early 2010's, related to XYZ"
"So... uhh... provide me a link please"
"I can't provide links"
"You're a search engine"
"I don't have a current connection to the Internet."
"Well can you give me any examples of anything even vaguely resembling this topic?"
"Yeah, like in the Reddit thread titled ABC, where $two_paragraphs_of_description"
"I can't find that Reddit thread"
"I'm sorry! I hallucinated that it was a common thing, but actually you told me a unique thing that you just made up."
"This sounds like a contradiction. Where did you pull the information about the Reddit thread from?"
"I can't link it, but it was on the sub _____ and it was titled _______ and it talked about your thing at length"
"When I google that I find nothing"
"Sorry! I hallucinated that I knew the link. Actually there is no link, there is no discussion like that, and the thing you provided was totally unique."
I then proceeded to try Googling various permutations of the topics for the thread it brought up, which kept giving me 10 nonsense results, and a grouped collection of Reddit posts that it would not expand on / separate.
I've encountered this as well. I'm pretty sure it is unable to produce answers involving some copyrighted works. For example, I was trying to find an old video and it filled in the gaps in my knowledge very accurately, however it absolutely could not provide an actual link to the video or any concrete content related to the video.
In my case I suspect the original uploader took down their videos from YouTube or there was some legal process involved. But it was very weird for the Gemini answer to confirm exactly what I was looking for but be unable to articulate in a way that helped me. Totally bizarre, as if the topic was ablated from the LLM.
I would much prefer getting a straight answer, "due to copyright I can't discuss this" or something.
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> It messes up sometimes (very rarely)
I don't believe this for a second. It has constantly the worst output of any serious AI I've seen, by far. It's laughably wrong sometimes, usually just wrong. It can usually cope with mundane keyword searches where it's still better to just read the wiki blurb, because even those can be mangled.
It’s particularly bad if you ask it how to do something in any given application. Most of the time it just hallucinates UI elements that aren’t there at all and confidently gives you instructions on how to do said thing in a way that is literally impossible.
I think the model must be very lightweight since they’re automatically running most search queries through it and a decently powerful model like Gemini would cost far too much in compute.
Yeah I'm guessing it's using one of the gemini-flash-lite models which are really basic. What I don't get is how they settled on this idea rather than having full Gemini generate a good answer and CACHE IT rather than having this silly lite model generate a different answer a million times a day.
Same here , about 95% of my searches o just look at the AI overview, and that’s been enough.
I don’t like AI only idea but I think it will work just fine
So you are not actually searching for anything on web. This is more about using google as a web search engine, something it could do maybe a decade ago.
The primary way that Google's AI Overview appears in my life is having to correct the misapprehensions of older family who see the immediate answer on top of their search and just uncritically accept it. Based on that, I think it must be wrong quite a lot.
> And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse
Yes, but most of these things are results of adtech having so much impact on the web/how we publish/consume/get paid for the content we create. I'm a bit bitter/sad about this.
A team I worked with once optimized a website, and cut about 400k of cruft, down to under 200k total.
I did shit that was career-damaging, such as deciding not using heavy libraries that a platform team was pushing me to do (thus affecting their OKRs). I had to deal with designers complaining that removing JS didn't allow the special animation they wanted. The works.
We did it, and we managed to even score a few positions in Google.
Right after that, someone from Marketing added a few dozen random "pixels" to Tag Manager "because that's how Marketing is done", forcing us to adopt a cookie banner and bringing the lighthouse score to half of what it was.
Notice: The pixel was collecting data but it wasn't being used by anyone. There weren't ever any marketing campaigns involving the website.
Eventually the person was fired by the CEO for not bringing results, and we managed to remove the pixels, but by them the damage was done.
If the AI overview produces plausible sound answers, how do you know that it messes up very rarely?
If I search topics I am knowledge about, the overviews are almost always at least slightly wrong.
Not all websites are correct sources of information, but I am generally aware of which websites are trustworthy and can cross check.
When it comes to programming, it’s very easy to tell whether it’s right or wrong. Just run the code.
The small/fast model used for the overview isn’t smart, but it’s still pretty great at helping me find the function I need and syntax. Best of all, clearly and plainly, unlike many documentation pages.
This opinion would hold much more weight if it weren’t coming from an account created literal days ago in an age where LLM-enabled astroturfing is so obviously everywhere online and especially on this forum.
Additionally the same companies promoting the use of AI now have been significant cultural drivers in many of the things you claim are the reasons to choose an AI answer, so it would seem a healthy amount of skepticism towards solutions offered by the co-creators of the problem is warranted.
If it helps, I could have written this comment just about word for word, and you can check my account and see that I’m clearly human.
I would probably add that I’m nervous about AI search results and how it affects the future of the internet and content creation in general, but from the perspective of a user, I’m pleased with the direction.
Same thoughts exactly.
I wonder if Google is aware of its identity crisis? Even long after "don't be evil", Google was still "we earn so much from a healthy web that making the web a healthy one is almost a straight forward company interest". Now web content is actively relegated to training input and LLM chat replacing delegating to the source, that web that Google made so much money of, as healthy or not one considered it to be, will soon be gone. Could be either at Google, complete lack of awareness or desperate "we can't stop it but we might still try to profit a little from what we can't stop"
I don’t doubt that people feel this way. I doubt that every new account inflating the apparent consensus is genuine.
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From the HN guidelines:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
There is no insinuation. The astroturfing objectively occurs and that it does so is an inherent strain on the credibility of engagement like that of the GP.
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There is plenty of unfounded AI-hype astroturfing going on in HN that each instance absolutely deserves to be called out. This guideline is somewhat antiquated for the LLM era. Reporting posts and accounts spitting out blatant LLM-slop does nothing, by the way.
Then take it from my account that is years old, as I also hold the same opinion that the AI overview is very useful to me as like the parent it usually contains exactly the information I need.
My account is older than yours by a decade and I also like the AI overview more often than not, or rather, I instinctively know when to skip it depending on my query.
I think the greater issue in this discussion is that the TechCrunch author, like most blogger/journalists are facing a complete erasure of their business model and have a vested interest at opposing this
As not a Large Language Model, I also like the AI overview feature.
I do like it - however, I find my self using google less and less every day. I lean much more toward agents as my primary search tool for work related items.
For daily things - finding restaurants, looking up my kid's symptoms, etc. - I still use Google
You are not the only one.
> It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites.
I disagree with “sometimes”. But anyway, the gargantuan difference is that with websites you can get a feel for their credibility. As a simple example, documentation on MDN is miles more trustworthy that your average SEO spam blog, and you can see this as soon as you enter the page. Yes, some scammers are craftier than other, but the signal is there.
With LLMs, all answers get the same weight.
And asking for sources is not reliable. They are too often made up or contradict what the page says.
> and I don’t even have to leave Google to get it.
And what will you do when most posts on the web are just junk SEO spam to trick LLMs into telling you what they want? It’s not like that’s hard to do, even.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
I hate that it confidently claims something based on a single Reddit/forum comment. This happens very often and it’s often wrong.
As a user: I love it!
As a former blogger: I hate it. But I knew years ago where things were heading and stopped. No point in blogging/ writing etc.
Forums, engaging with people directly still works!
What was your point in blogging before? And how is that point gone because of google's behaviour?
Sometimes? It gives completely incorrect/hallucinated information more than 50% of the time, making it nearly useless.
> It messes up sometimes (very rarely)
Have you actually used it? Because sometimes is doing heavy lifting there and very rarely is flat out lying. It consistently messes up and hallucinates.
Google themselves are the primary driving reason why most websites are unreadable.
And since now they explicitly aim to never drive any human traffic to any websites, it will only become worse.
> It messes up sometimes (very rarely)
Then you are extremely ignorant about the topics that you research, because I don't think I've seen a single AI overview that did not have a mistake, and I don't think I've seen less than half that got a critical fact wrong.
I hate it conceptually but in practice it often has what I need, and I can usually just scroll past it when I don’t
I like the AI Overview feature because it gets straight to the point and with no ads or cookie banners in the way, not because it’s AI.
This is the way the internet used to be before it was enshittified, you just type in some keywords and the first result was probably the most relevant and readable source of info. But now, no more.
I think if a modern search engine could deliver the same experience but with organic human written content, I’d probably use that. This is probably a new niche now for upcoming search engines, focused on finding human created works.
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