Comment by wrs
14 hours ago
Same is true of Google search “summaries” where quite often I click on the link provided and it doesn’t support the statement Google made.
BTW, this post would be more convincing if it wasn’t written in Claude voice itself!
Google putting AI search summaries is the worst of all worlds.
You need cheap, fast inference to put on a search results page and finish near the deadline (~3 seconds). Cheap, fast inference is more likely to get stuff wrong. No one is happy.
I was quite happy when I could type search keywords in, Google searched for relevant pages with those keywords, and I went and read those pages. Haven’t really been happy since they broke it quite a while ago.
> No one is happy.
My understanding of Google politics is that the small number of search team members who implemented any given 6-month-old feature will be happy as they will have been promoted away from the team and not responsible for maintenance nor quality.
I'm curious how google think about the damage this does to the perception of the quality of their AI tools. Every second google search I do reinforces the association "google AI is crap" because you can't help but see it there at the top of the page. Surely this perception hurts Gemini adoption across the board?
This has become a common pattern in my Claude & Gemini usage. Always require citations, then check those citations to validate they actually contain the information/data the LLM's output claims. Claude, in particular, seems to make massive logic jumps and trust tertiary data sources way more than it should.
There’s a fun variation in W-Europe that google needs to spend some time on:
Northern Belgium and the Netherlands have web content in the same language. But google uses the content in one lump. Problem is when you search for employment/fiscal/legal/… you constantly get content that applies to the wrong nationality.
How do you think us brits feel?
I honestly thought they solved the brit/u.s. stuff years ago.
This is true of a ton of online discourse. Worse, when the headline of a claim doesn't even match the article it is fronting. I've seen more than a few articles that basically contradict the headline, but end in a "despite all evidence, we think it is correct to say X."
Never believe the citations in Google summaries, I can count on a single hand the time I have found a correct citation.
It's not 2/3 correct, it's <1% correct, in my experience. Maybe it's because I check things that sound off more frequently, but even random checks have not panned out well.
Anybody relying on Google AI summaries is misinforming themselves.
Those summaries (and Bing is at least as culpable) are mostly only good for comedy value. Most favourite genre: returns picture of someone you know alongside biography of completely unrelated person. Least favourite genre: useful stat supposedly cited from a linked reliable source (but turns out to actually be a different stat in the reliable source)
I don’t know if Claude performs similarly from a percentage standpoint, but if you’re using it for search (online or personal docs or wikis), it often also just makes things up.
When you point it out, it’ll do the “ohh you’re absolutely right!” bs. Marketing material and management that believes the material wants to pretend that AI agents are junior employees, but forget that junior employees get fired for doing something like this.
It was true even before AI summaries.
The search result showed a paragraph containing the searched word, the website did not