I spent most of today looking at places to rent in Denver and I come home to Google having killed it’s fucking search engine. What the hell is going on
That’s what you get for trying to have a real life.
How does je dare to.
Google decided that the entirety of reddit is perfect for training data in their AI LLM. People’s shitposts from 10 years ago have now been given the spotlight at the top of google searches.
Google has been bad for a long time, but they’ve shut the bed so hard lately. Seriously, look at this:
I actually run out of screenshot space before I can get to an actual regular search result!
Search done from Germany.The mobile search doesnt look much different. The order on mobile is as follows:
- A snippet from glogs.wordlbank.org
- People also ask
- Forbes article (see screenshot above)
- www.epa.gov article
Both are Firefox Desktop (Win) and Mobile (Android) running Consent-O-Matic and ublock Origin
Similar results from Spain. Not sure why it thinks I’m in Michigan.
are you using a VPN? turned off location settings?
No and yes. Still not sure why such a random US state though
Well, Flint, Michigan had a high profile water issue, so it might be guessing location based on the question.
It shows the exact same results in Brazil
Bing has a similar problem where it just repeats the results, some pages are only 1 result so you just keep clicking next
So weird, that’s not what I see.
On the one hand, generative AI doesn’t have to give deterministic answers i.e. it won’t necessarily generate the same answer even when asked the same question in the same way.
But on the other hand, editing the HTML of any page to say whatever you want and then taking a screenshot of it is very easy.
It could also be A/B testing, so not everyone will have the AI running in general
It’s not A/B testing if they aren’t getting feedback.
Wouldn’t they be? They could measure how likely it is that someone clicks on the generated link/text
Just because you click on it that doesn’t make it accurate. More importantly, that text isn’t “clickable”, so they can’t be measuring raw engagement either.
What this would measure is how long you would stay on the page without scrolling. Less scrolling means more time looking at ads.
This is the influence of Prabhakar Raghavan.
Just because you click on it that doesn’t make it accurate.
Given the choice between clicks/engagement and accuracy, is pretty clear Google’s for the former is what got us into this hell hole.
Yup, if you have to repeat your search 3 times, you’re seeing 3x the ads. If you control most of the market, where are your customers going to go? Most will just deal with it and search more.
Google runs passive A/B testing all the time.
If you’re using a Google service there’s a 99% chance you’re part of some sort of internal test of changes.
Technically, generative AI will always give the same answer when given the same input. But, what happens is a “seed” is mixed in to help randomize things, that way it can give different answers every time even if you ask it the same question.
What happened to my computers being reliable, predictable, idempotent ? :'(
They still are. Giving a generative AI the same input and the same seed results in the same output every time.
Technically they still are, but since you don’t have a hand on the seed, practically they are not.
OK, but we’re discussing whether computers are “reliable, predictable, idempotent”. Statements like this about computers are generally made when discussing the internal workings of a computer among developers or at even lower levels among computer engineers and such.
This isn’t something you would say at a higher level for end-users because there are any number of reasons why an application can spit out different outputs even when seemingly given the “same input”.
And while I could point out that Llama.cpp is open source (so you could just go in and test this by forcing the same seed every time…) it doesn’t matter because your statement effectively boils down to something like this:
“I clicked the button (input) for the random number generator and got a different number (output) every time, thus computers are not reliable or predictable!”
If you wanted to make a better argument about computers not always being reliable/predictable, you’re better off pointing at how radiation can flip bits in our electronics (which is one reason why we have implemented checksums and other tools to verify that information hasn’t been altered over time or in transition). Take, for instance, the example of what happened to some voting machines in Belgium in 2003: https://www.businessinsider.com/cosmic-rays-harm-computers-smartphones-2019-7
Anyway, thanks if you read this far, I enjoy discussing things like this.
You are taking all my words way too strictly as to what I intended :)
It was more along the line : Me, a computer user, up until now, I could (more or less) expect the tool (software/website) I use in a relative consistant maner (be it reproducing a crash following some actions). Doing the same thing twice would (mostly) get me the same result/behaviour. For instance, an Excel feature applied on a given data should behave the same next time I show it to a friend. Or I found a result on Google by typing a given query, I hopefully will find that website again easily enough with that same query (even though it might have ranked up or down a little).
It’s not strictly “reliable, predictable, idempotent”, but consistent enough that people (users) will say it is.
But with those tools (ie: chatGPT), you get an answer, but are unable to get back that initial answer with the same initial query, and it basically makes it impossible to get that same* output because you have no hand on the seed.
The random generator is a bit streached, you expect it to be different, it’s by design. As a user, you expect the LLM to give you the correct answer, but it’s actually never the same* answer.
*and here I mean same as “it might be worded differently, but the meaning is close to similar as previous answer”. Just like if you ask a question twice to someone, he won’t use the exact same wording, but will essentially says the same thing. Which is something those tools (or rather “end users services”) do not give me. Which is what I wanted to point out in much fewer words :)
That seems like a Wikipedia capture for the wrong page instead of AI.
There are actually a bunch of these. Adding glue to pizza sauce (scraped from an old reddit post), replacing Blinker Fluid every two years, etc.
I too am skeptical, but there have been so many of these the last few days… is it just a new meme?
@RecursiveParadox @voracitude it absolutely has become a meme, there are (or were) a bunch of repeatable results.
Google is probably whack-a-mole’ing them now, because “google’s AI search results are trying to kill people” has entered the collective consciousness.
I have no doubt some of their AI answers have antivax and injecting bleach recommendations from all over the web as part of their training regime.
I saw this a few days ago too when I went to see the film and wanted to check who some people were in the film.
When you do this query, won’t you get the same?
If you read the arstechnica article Google is correcting these errors on the fly so the search results can change rapidly.
There for me
Yup me too 🫡
Zoop
👉😎👉 Zoop!
Me too. But a different person on my same network got a clean result.
A/B testing moment
Works on my machine.
Oh perfect. We’ll just point production to your machine.
Same
But the real question is, is the colour blue that you see, the colour blue that I see?
It’s, uh, not what I remember.
- old
AI and its consequences have been a disaster for Google.
… a disaster for
Googlehumanity.I don’t get the doom but idk I have been watching this stuff closely for over a decade. I think it’s exciting and people are having All these strange expectations out of these systems all the sudden just because they’re smart. Well they were smart before any of this generative AI stuff. Also scientific breakthroughs in medicine, blind people have something that can assist them. As someone with some disabilities, and knowing a lot of people who also have disabilities, it seems to be the privilege of the healthy and comfortable to keep the status quo.
Also if we want to play that game we were so fucked by climate change already that I had no hope. Now I have a little. It’s not going away so let’s push for open open open free software. (And model weights)
we aren’t talking about using it to -benefit- human society like discovering new proteins or vaccines. We’re talking about it fucking up search results on google and generating billions of new sites with fucking spam. It’s a tool, but it’s being completely misused and ruining the internet.
Well, we know Google won’t get rid of this.
They’ll only cancel it after it actually works and becomes useful
We really need a whole community just for the very funny AI errors like this. I could spend all day reading about leaving a dog in a hot car, jumping off a bridge and eating at least one rock a day.
And I’d be thrilled if that material were quarantined somewhere 😅
Why? this is great content.
Great content isn’t necessarily everyone’s prefered content. Having it all in one place helps people who want to see it see it and people who don’t don’t have to. Win win.
Oversaturation from the presentation format
We have not even come close to over saturation yet. Now once we have AI making mistakes about AI past mistakes being used for a meme about AI mistakes then you will be on the money.
Honestly by that point I’ll probably be back into it
Did somebody say enshittification?
Everyone, constantly.
I asked Google for the release date of the new Final Fantasy XIV expansion today, which comes out June 28th. It told me March 26th
I’m pretty sure March 26 is the day the pre-order started, so that one at least kind of makes sense.
But not from a knowledge engine. It makes sense if some rando just spouted off a date from the top of their head but this is the former world leader in knowledge capture and search.
What the hell is going on with Google search? Has it completely shit itself after the AI implementation? I know its been bad for a while but this is another level.
Short answer, yes. The ratio of LLM generated noise to actual content is increasing exponentially as we speak. To us it seems overnight because the increase is so steep but it’s been happening for several years. And it’s going to get a lot worse.
Honestly, I think we’ll have to go back to 90s methods like web rings and human curated link directories.
I do random hobby tinkering and search results have become so useless that I’m having to read a lot more books. Everything takes longer this way.
I remember having to buy a book. A book with URLs. Before search engines existed.
Good times.
On Google: I’ll never forgive them for getting rid of their pseudo secret government search google.com/unclesam where I found a lot of .mil docs I probably shouldn’t have been able to.
Why do you say this existed? :(
Now I am sad I didnt know about it earlier…
This is why I love Duckduckgo, I can turn off AI and ads.
Will, it’s not wrong. Welcome to the AI powered world of tomorrow.
the free version is stuck with an IQ of 53.
That’s low end of average for a human. A particularly dim human admittedly, but we’ve all met them.
Never the less, these dim-witted humans can aspire to greatness. See Forrest Gump and Donald Trump.
See the Republicans do sport the disadvantaged. They support the idiots, the greatest disability of them all.
I stopped using Google years ago. I started using Bing but had to stop that as it would divert me to MSN to sign in when clicking a link for a news article. Like a news article for The Independent or The Times or any other.
I then started using DuckDuckGo which is powered by Bing, but found it wasn’t great at many searches.
I now use Arc Search most of the time and click browse for me to get the information I want without the bullshit. Search is essentially dead due to greed.
Startpage and Qwant are the best alternatives IMO.
https://www.qwant.com/
https://www.startpage.com/I used Qwant for a few days and then it popped up a modal dialog asking me to turn off my ad-blocker. Never used it again after that.
Funny I’ve never seen that, but I switch around from time to time. Because none are perfect unfortunately.
kagi is the best but it will cost you $10 a month. It’s been worth it to me, but probably not to everyone.
Interesting concept, but it’s a bit expensive IMO, considering the huge amount of “free” options.
The pricing is only in USD without taxes. Listing the price excluding tax is illegal here (Denmark and I think the rest of EU), so apparently not a service meant for use outside USA.
Ad free is not a problem for me, i use Firefox with µBlock Origin.
Thanks. I’ll check these out.
What do you prefer about each of them?
Startpage uses outside search results, but should be very secure like DuckDuckGo, and better certified.
Qwant is AFAIK more independent, and I like the layout better.Both give pretty good search results IMO, but are somewhat lacking in map/geographic searches. For instance searching “Angola” could result in a restaurant in London. Just as a hypothetical example.
So I do use Google maps too.Thanks for sharing he extra info.
qwant = 95% bing results, startpage = 98% google results. They are slimmer. They don’t keep your search history or ip address. better for privacy but not much better for search results.
qwant uses bing and is mostly a proxy for it. Startpage is a proxy for google. the only thing they really do is protect your privacy, they don’t give you better search results.
That’s a bit disappointing, I thought Qwant had their own search. I know startpage used Google originally, but I wasn’t sure if they still did.
Tried start page after DDG outage on Thursday and I’m liking it a lot
Start page was out too afaik
it shouldn’t have been because they return google search results and not bing
Nope I tried it precisely when DDG was out and it was working… Images were not so those may have come from Bing… But regular searches were working
Weird, it was out when I tried it
Well they official word is that it was intermittent… Maybe I just got lucky when testing
I’m finding SearXNG to be very good. It operates like dogpile used to but is actually functional and it pretty much entirely squelches product placement results. I actually have to manually go to google if I want to get product listings for something.
this is the first i hear of Arc, is it available as an iOS app only?
That looks clean, thanks for posting the screenshot!
Anytime. This is what search should be. You shouldn’t have to click into links for such simple information.
how do you guys get these things? I never see any summaries like that. I wonder if one of my adblockers is killing google AI lmao. Do you have to be logged into your google account? I never log into google any more.
Removed by mod
I just searched the same words and got the same text.
not fake.
I just got the same result
I just Googled “Fall Guy” and the AI response doesn’t match the OP. I was shown a summary of the movie.
You have to type “Fall Guy series” to get the result. The result from “Fall Guy” is about the movie and that’s a normal response.
Removed by mod
It’s time to return to human curated directories.
Do you know if there are any active ones? Hopefully categorized according to genre, geography, language etc?
Nope, been thinking about what it would take to make one though.
Behold the wonders of AI! Now, we don’t have to pay human beings to edit webpages for us! Thanks to AI, you can just sit back and watch the money roll in!
