I mean at least you got some relevant links. It's becoming increasingly common, especially with some types of subjects, that all of the links are regurgitated AI slop that or indistinguishable from it.

Give me a search engine that never returns anything like that and I'd be incredibly pleased. Actually, give how PageRank is supposed to work, who is directing people to all these obviously fake pages? Or is that just what following random links does to you nowadays, I wouldn't even be surprised.

Time for a search engine that is grounded in trustworthy webpages I suppose.

Now imagine they did this to your home assistant devices. Oh wait. You don't need to imagine it. Already happened.

Things used to work. Now they don't and they're slower. Super frustrating.

This post is another example of people inserting non-deterministic steps on a process and letting it run wild. I'm honestly surprised Google is doing this of all corporations. It felt like they used to have some taste about user experiences.

Reading the comments and all I can think is "first world problems"

I feel this is a result of the "make the world a better place" narrative that Silicon Valley companies used to adorn themselves with.

If you just want to play with cool tech and make money, but for marketing reasons, you need to show some ostensible real-world reason why this tech should be developed, then "well, our chatbot could help lonely people with their relationship issues or give people in an abusive relationship a covert channel for help" is probably what comes to mind...

Runners up: Our AI startup will help the poor children in Africa and/or combat climate change (ignore the gas turbines, please).

Google is at that mid-1990s Microsoft point where they know what the next big thing is, but they have neither the taste not corporate flexibility to parlay that into the right fit. In 5 years someone will make a search engine that gets the AI balance just right, and Google will buy them for $900 billion or something.

The world is vomiting software

Change is hard.

Ah yes, do no evil. It takes quite a screwed up company to stuff this toxic fake friend/therapy bullshit into a frigging search engine. And to do that from the position of having some of the weaker AI model performance out there is even more galling. When somebody harms themselves after dealing with this kind of shit I hope they or their surviving family get to take Google to the cleaners.

I'm increasingly not seeing the point of google search. If I have an agent that can find whatever I ask it to, including with constraints like "peer reviewed journal articles only" or "working code published on github", why would I be using google's kinda-shitty LLM to do a worse version of that? Search results are just SEO-stuffed AI slop so I find nothing there of value either.

I genuinely think I have not used traditional web search in months.