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.

Lessons learned from Microslop

Finally, someone else talking about this.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I often use Google when I have some text I got from somewhere, and want to find pages containing that exact text. Sometimes the text in question sounds like something you'd say to someone else and, of course, the AI overview responds to it accordingly.

To me, there's something deeply unsettling about this... thing pretending to be a person, shoving itself in my face and responding to this random text as if it was a person responding to something I said to it, without my consent. I can't disable it, I'm just forced to have this fake human sitting there, listening in on everything I type into the search box and trying to talk to me about it. It's a sort of uncanny valley-like feeling.

The politically intriguing CEO and all the upper management that he hired need to go. Their focus is not the product but the corporate intrigue, dividing the pie and infighting, riding on semi-monopoly status.

After the initial AI flop, it seemed likely that the founders recognized that Google doesn't have an AI monopoly. But now it's becoming clear that this CEO is not leaving; therefore, Google is going down long-term.

By the way, that doesn't matter to the CEO because he has already extracted sufficient benefits.

Google's AI is really intrusive. That's the only way to describe it.

I searched for "weather <my town>", I get an AI saying the current weather is 33C. It says monday will be 41C. Like I live in the desert. Google's actual weather widget, which appears BELOW the weather overview and gathers data from accurate sources, says 26C. How hard is it to block the "weather" keyword from triggering the AI overview when you already have a perfectly functional weather widget?

Also, because before we used to have a tool, there was even some sense of privacy in using that tool. Now with these LLM's pretending to be human, it feels like entering a store and instead of being allowed to browse things in peace a clerk starts pressing you about what you want in order to make themselves useful. At that moment the "privacy" of being able to just mind your own business, alone, vanishes. It's intrusive. And it becomes extremely clear how intrusive it is whenever you search for something by typing something to the SEARCH TOOL and the AI misinterprets it as YOU TALKING TO THEM AS A PERSON, e.g. if you type "how are you" and it says back "I am doing well, thank you for asking!" and things like that. Companies seem not to care about being as intrusive as possible in people's lives, it seems.

Maybe this is something cultural. iirc in America clerks are very proactive with interacting with customers, while in countries like Germany it's the opposite and they keep their distance.

The start date was December 10, 2004 when google rolled out a feature called "Google Suggest", which when a person types in "men can" it displays a drop down list with ridiculous responses such as "men can get pregnant" and "men can have periods". If I had to pick a date, that was the beginning of the end for me.

They had to become rich beyond their wildest dreams before they could afford enough nightmares to go around for all internet users.