When did Google get so weird?

I believe this "fear" factor they are driving they believe will increase their credibility when they call LLMs AI and is a con towards convincing everyone they have reached AGI. Its definitely marketing preparation so that when they do claim AGI we will believe it without question. (or else!)

If these folks didnt have so much money it would be something to laught at, but its now becoming geniunely disturbing and Im starting to think that the folks running these shops are probably flirting with or experiencing extended mental illness.

I would feel sorry for them if I cared. I dont care. The tech industry is a joke and we are all going to be ashamed to be a part of it by the time this is over. Shut it down.

query: "What were some of the memes about Dario staying in turkey" AI answer: There are actually no real memes about "Dario staying in Turkey."This specific phrase is a famous example of a "natural language search query" used to describe how everyday people try to search the internet.A recent discussion on Hacker News highlighted this exact phrase to contrast how human search behavior has changed:"

THEN IT LINKS TO THIS THREAD?!

I need to go take a walk.

So obviously what appears right at the top is the AI summary, which told me "they've already secured their #4 position and made the playoffs". I knew this wasn't true, and I guess I could have just scrolled down a bit further and found my answer but now I was curious.

So I said "that's not true, they're still #5, what I want to know is _could they still make the playoffs_"

It says they've got an upcoming game against Ottawa, and if they win their chances are good. That game has already taken place, so I correct it again and finally I get a reasonable answer.

My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering? Like, I can't wrap my head around that. The answer is on the same page as its hallucination. It could have done a cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information. It's meant to be A SEARCH ENGINE!

Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness.

The only way out is to try and make connections with real people.

Case in point, why didn't you text your friends to ask them if they remembered those old memes? Why was your first thought to ask a computer rather than a person?

It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".

I copy pasted the text into Google to see if it was a common known spam text where they reveal themself to be a hot young Asian woman looking for love (and money)

Instead, Google happily accepted my invitation to the barbecue

If you want to talk about what happened with Google, HN is here to listen.

If you'd like to figure out what to do next, let me know.

I imagine their retention data through this uncanny valley transition is very good.

The worst part is that there is no way to identify which results are for my original query, and which are because someone somewhere rewrote my query in the background. You know, the good old "did you mean...?" - that's what's missing.

Folks who work on any kind of search engines: "No results" should be a valid outcome to any search query!

It's not a person, not even close to one in most ways, but it wants to pass itself off as one.

Here'a a clue Google: If I want an LLM response, I'll go to gemini.google.com, but if I go to google.com I'm hoping for a search result.

ELIZA = shitty 1966 chatbot, a couple hundred lines of code, that tried to pass itself off as a psychiatrist.

Recently I asked in a Google search when YouTube encodes videos in AV1 vs VP9. And Gemini gave a very short and incomplete answer, and then moved on to assume I was asking because AV1 playback was draining my battery too quickly. And then gave me instructions to toggle some settings in YouTube that don’t actually exist.

Part of the problem I think is just the cheap and fast model they use in search results just isn’t very good.

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despite "A velocifyer" not even being a thing.

I have tried in Google Search Console to get the site indexed, but it hasen't been working.

Searching for "blog-ifyer velocifyer" on DuckDuckGo shows my blog as the very first result, along with some other things related to me, Velocifyer.

Something else I’ve noticed is that occasionally I’ll do random queries in Claude (since I never hit my usage limits on my personal account) like giving it piles of my writing and asking it to speculate on the identity of the author or asking it to tell me what it knows about various people I know. On the latter, I’ve found that Claude has strict boundaries about what it will say about people while the AI box on Google will happily dig into people’s backgrounds to an uncomfortable level.

The quote was basically “go away and stop bothering me”, which is said when your character has no faction reputation.

Anyway, Google seemed to think I was having an attack of paranoia and suggested I seek mental help.

But yeah I noticed how they play with your emotions, it's a bit creepy. Whenever it asks a hook question and I tell it "Actually I did X and Y" it will invariably go like "Wow that is such a brilliant and well thought out strategy, almost a stroke of genius!" (not literally but you get the idea). I guess they found out that people really like having their ego stroked, the other providers are also doing that to some degree (I assume since no one likes an unfriendly AI that makes you feel stupid) but Google really cranked that setting to 11.

I'm not sure why this is a surprise. Google most likely uses an efficient yet limited language model to give us search answers. When a search query does not have strong or specific enough context, the model will sample and find what most of the training material will cover. That is, the most likely average behavior covered in the training data. In this case, "hes never coming over dario" is such a generic sentence, so unless Google happens to have indexed what the author mentioned and ranked it high, the answer would appear natural to the AI. Or using the AI jargon, the answer appears to be properly aligned.

> He’s never coming over Dario

> I’m Claude, not Dario, but I'm here. It's past midnight and that sounds like it stings. Who's not coming over? Someone you were waiting for tonight, or something bigger than that? I'm happy to listen either way.

I was a bit surprised it didn’t do a search just because that’s such a weird way to open a conversation. I kind of get why Google is thrown because it wants to create an AI response to every query independent of the search results, but Claude has the extra context that this is the first message of a new chat.

> No the meme

Searched the web > Ha, and I did exactly the thing that blog post roasts Google for: assumed you'd been let down by a guy named Dario and switched into comforting-friend mode.

It's the Sixers meme. Philadelphia drafted Dario Saric in 2014 […]

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.

This is my default search engine now. I can't stand those AI summaries. My searches are often depleted of context, specially when I'm looking for some exact phrase, that any AI summary is going to miss badly.

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.

However AI mode seems to be largely RAG, so it's supposedly authoritative answer is often just some online forum comment it picked up, such as a couple days ago when it fed me back something I had just posted myself 30 min earlier!

It does at least dump you into Gemini chat, so when the initial answer is obviously wrong you can try to drill down to get something better, but presumably many people are taking the initial answer as some sort of "AI truth" when it is far from it.

[Disclaimer: I do work on AI at Google, but nothing related to Search, so this is my subjective personal opinion, not based on any first-hand knowledge of this specific case.]

That said, this (and other anecdotes in this thread) are an example of mismatched expectations; the expectation is that the AI overview is an addition or expansion of search, or something that summarizes multiple search results, or something that helps you find something. But clearly it's not / it's something too generic still.

I'd love to move away from Google entirely but it's a long process, years of business on Google Workspace etc. I hate to be tied to companies like this, when I started I never thought Google would end up like Microsoft.

I won’t go into too much details (it’s a product I have to evaluate at work so it’s not really my story to tell) but vendor x has put OpenAI in to search metadata when really all I want is a keyword search… maybe with some fancy operators “blue” and DateTime > “2026-09-27 14:00”

Not “the blue thing yesterday” which also allows me to search for words that are slanderous that the AI hallucinates results for.

A search through metadata without AI is fine.

So it's partially AI, sure, but it's also because you're getting the summaries from what is an extremely stupid AI compared to the "good stuff" that's out there.

It's some combination of funny and irritating. Sometimes I wonder if they'll draw some wrong conclusions about me and try to sell me ads based on it.

Layer on top of that a building of lawyers and social scientists pushing for obtuse directives in order to head off mostly imaginary safety concerns and you have a perfect storm of schizo AI weirdness.

I've not been using Google Search and ditched it in favour of DuckDuckGo years ago and never looked back. Not that DDG is perfect but generally it serves me very well and has a much better UI... I mean, just the fact I can't select entries pressing J|K on the keyboard now makes we want to throw Search out of the window.

I know many people want to ask questions to google directly and just read the AI result and very rarely check the links, and I know google wants to convert more people doing this before people switch to chatgpt etc.

But google search does not (yet?) appear to me to be designed as a chatbot you are expected to converse with where it would be normal to just open asking about some guy named Dario in your personal life who isn't globally notable. There's a difference between pushing for a conversational query and a conversational personal assistant. Heck this is a few jumps past that even.

I wouldn't really ask when google got so weird, I'd ask when google's AI overview got so shitty, and the answer is ever since they introduced it.

  with: "mumble fumble bumble" <-- apply NLP to the phrase, bring AI to bear

  without: "mumble" fumble bumble <-- do not NLP this, use the normal search quote rules for mandatory content

Cloudflare murdered crawlers. Then, OpenAI and Anthropic nailed a few hundred nails into the coffin just to be sure... whatever large websites were still semi-open weren't going to let their precious data be ingested for free. Good prostitutes don't give it away.

I'm not sure when all this happened. It snuck up on me too. I think maybe 10 years ago search still worked. Not long after that though. It was dead 6 years ago, and I want to say it was dead even 8 years ago. Someone else could do a better job narrowing it down I'm sure.

What matters is that token usage goes up and that pleases the shareholders. That's it. That's the only thing that matters today.

Most companies with LLM chatbots seem weird like this.

Of course current state of the industry is not an excuse, for tech companies in general and google in particular.

meaning you won't get them in the results page, but hidden inside the AI overview as links.

this and the increasing bad scammy ads, there is really good chance for other search engines to take over.

Looks to be an algorithmic enhanced confidence trick, to turn users searching for information into "marks", in order to extract even more information from them (that can be sold).

A certain percentage of users will be tempted to use the AI as empathetic listener, giving away loads of personal information, if their search words are twisted in inviting enough ways.

More people have to stop tolerating these type of abuses and push for this unwanted behavior to be regulated.

https://www.google.com/search?q=really%2C+just+shut+up -> "Understood. I will stop talking right now."

I know their goal is to make these as relevant and useful as possible, but in my mind, not everything needs to be passed down to an LLM. I guess Google disagrees.

"Want to talk about it with a real person? Click this link to schedule a free trial therapy session with {insert company here}"

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.

Never before we had a product that the buyer themselves accepted, so readily, despite the inaccuracies and yet the output was considered worth it just because when it worked, it was great.

Well maybe, other than dice but then it's unpredictability is why we bought it.

But then the quality of LLM output is also closer to dice roll so maybe they are not that dissimilar after all.

And got a good answer. Google's not weird, you just need to recognise that Dario is ambiguous, especially with Dario Amodei being much more famous.

Nothing to see here, except people thinking Google / AI can read their minds when they aren't specific enough.

The AI layer handles queries as plaintext, which means if you're searching for say a quote from a book, it will often misinterpret as a direct statement from you, not a string you're trying to match on the internet. Especially if the quote is an imperative statement.

I'll be curious to see how they resolve this issue. But it has been chronic for awhile now; they SWAT individual instances of misinterpretation but new ones keep sneaking in.

It undermines the utility of search—and also Adwords? The benefit of Google to the world is to funnel people to the right websites. Not to summarize the website's content.

Oftentimes the AI is presenting a summary of 2 dudes on Reddit discussing something as if it is universal fact.

I'm not anti-AI by any means——but Google has lost the plot on why people go there.

Takes 15 seconds to change defaults on the various devices. Sometimes DDG doesn't find the thing and I put "!g <search term>" and it'll throw me to google, so I still find what I need

In one that changes.

But even in AI mode, the spelling can still be all over the place, at times rife with pseudowords and unintentional word blends. Various forms of weirdness have indeed been going on these last few months.

I’m not sure SV is prepared for what happens when you go down that road.

Trivia: Dario Saric returned to Turkey this year after spending 9 years in the NBA.

Lots of people have made hay of this. My own realization that this gives you a window into the weird was when watching an action movie with a female action star, it would offer "(actress name) feet". I have no idea what it means, but it is a pattern.

Throughout history, whenever a disruption happened in an industry, it did not come from any of the then-current leaders.

And it didn't come from someone following on the same path from behind and suddenly overtaking them.

It came from an entirely new direction.

Try this in a language that has fewer than 100 million native speakers and/or is generally regarded as difficult/unnecessary to learn and you'll find the same, but with spelling/grammar errors, some of them reminiscent of how a five year old would speak.

For those curious the engagement went like this:

Draymond Green via threads: What's worse than a bad thanksgiving meal?

Fan: when a veteran leader punches his Youngblood teammate and instantly ends the dynasty

Draymond Green: Damn

for context, Draymond punched Jordan Poole on Oct 5, 2022 the season after Poole shone for the golden state for their 4th dynasty championship ring. Poole had shown some potential for being a great shooter.

I don't find this disturbing, I find it funny.

Now talking seriously, it certainly added something to your "profile" which is nuts because that was not what you meant

In short, he got the answer that Google was forced to give.

And yes they are en$ hitificating the thing... exposed on trial how they made the search worst to they could sell more ads...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717522

Pretty incredible given how much of their valuation rides on it

Now, if I type that it lets Gemini do the math.

To avoid it I have to write 0.86 instead of .86.

The future is now.

i.e. I would have searched for dario quote .... or dario basketball quote ....

I have the Gemini Pro subscription. The quality of its outputs are sometimes below those from the free version of Grok.

Hope they catch-up.

Click to see hot new Darios in your neighborhood

Do note what you got wasn't from a search engine, but a so-called AI.

How is this at all surprising. Google as a search engine has been rubbish for years and years. Google as a company is a nasty bit of work. Drop it.

Use Kagi or Ecosia or DDG and stop whining.

A while back my wife told me about a singer/comedian that had a song with the lyrics "my pronouns are fuck you and go fuck yourself" (or something like that).

I put that into google to look it up, and the AI response on google.com (gemini) repsonded with:

"Got it, I wont use any pronouns for you".

It was actually really funny.

Most of the time their AI results are pretty good - I’d prefer not to get it shoved down my throat but I can forgive the occasional misfire.

Reminds me of when certain string classification problems were still a big deal… we’ve come a long way.

The latest one is that they changed the voice of Google Maps over the weekend. It now mispronounces a street name near my home that it didn't mispronounce before. It also has this bizarre robotic-sounding vocal fry at the end of every sentence. It sounds like a vocaloid trying to do an impression of the old SNL skit The Californians. I can't decide if it's hysterical or annoying, but either way it's obviously worse than what came before it.

That's not even the only "what the fuck" with GMaps recently. Of course there's the whole "turn right at Starbucks Coffee Company (tm)" thing instead of "turn right at the stoplight." Also, a few weeks ago it started saying "you will turn right" instead of "turn right." Turning a command into a declaration for absolutely no discernable reason. One wonders what a day in the life of a Google Maps dev even looks like anymore.

It's not about NVIDIA stock, it's not about your latest harness, it's not about code review on generated code, instead it's about what happens to us when something not human fakes being human and the dangers of it.

I only started reading it but if it's as fundamental as her previous "Reclaiming conversation" then I expect it to change my life for the better, even if it means fighting against the dangerous behavior of the majority of people around me.

An AI is not a person and when you elevate it to that status you lower yourself. It is very dangerous, even more so when it's done, like mobile phone and engagement more broadly before, for profit.

Protect yourself and those around you, regardless of how you like or dislike AI, and trust actual humans specializing in studying human behavior, not psychopaths craving billions.

Does it though? X (slop signup wall for most functionality), Reddit (slop anti-user blocks you on mobile), and YouTube (owned by Google, shorts slop). Three titans of the open web.

Google let the web descend into SEO slop long ago despite that they could have EASILY spotted and purged low quality over-verbose results and the sites that pooped them out. They make businesses pay to have the top sponsored result, when they're already the top organic result, but the ads are indistinguishable from real results now. They made the web worse for everyone to line their own pockets. Screw them.

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).

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.

Many comments, but I'm surprised no one has mentioned the ease and quickness LLMs have to advise you to leave relationships. Doesn't matter the context, how little you tell them, or how close the person is, an LLM is always ready to drop them at the tip of a hat.

It's weird enough chatbots try to be your friend. Doubly weird that the search engine tries to be your friend. The downright dystopian part is how often they tell you to leave your real friends.

How many people will be hurt because of idiotic AI responses like this?

Just like AI shouldn't counsel someone to end their own life, it also shouldn't counsel people to end their relationships, their careers, and so on.

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

At least thrice now in the past week, Gemini has tried to sit me down and tell me to go to bed (when I'm in the middle of programming... too late for it's liking, apparently) or just recently while I was asking some questions while I was driving... it told me to change the subject because I was driving and the topic was possibly too anxiety inducing for me or something!? I have no idea. I told it to fuck off.

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.

I have to add that, unsurprisingly, the fake therapy on offer is fucking toxic. Right away it's putting thoughts in your head that are obviously based on nothing relevant, contradict each other, and are escalatory. It is not at all surprising that people are killing themselves and others because of their interactions with these things.

> hes never coming over Dario Amodei

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will actually be joining President Donald Trump for a private dinner at the White House tonight, Sunday, September 27, 2026.

CNBC While it is true that he was noticeably absent from the high-profile state dinner held for Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this week—which was attended by other major tech figures like Elon Musk and Sam Altman—

AI Overview patiently taught me Autodesk Fusion, designed the 3-phase wiring in my shop, pointed out scenarios where 3-HP motors would overheat, and attempted to counsel you on the sad demise of your relationship with Dario.

My wife and I wanted one, so we founded one and launched it earlier this year; we're currently at 350 monthly active accounts, nearing 400.

It's paid and privacy-focused so you get assigned a random account number when you signup (there's no username or email), and you can get 2h for free by solving a proof-of-work captcha.

It's https://uruky.com if you want to give it a shot. If you want some more time to try it out, send us an email and we'll offer you a voucher for a few days.

EDIT: Seems people are downvoting this a lot and potentially interpreting it as spam? Sorry, was just trying to help people who said they wanted something like this, here.

I'd like to skip to the part where AI robot will give me consoling fellatio.

I mean TBD, not sure how capable the model they're using for search summary is

I never found them helpful. I always have to block them via extensions.

Google is really an annoying company these days. I am hardly the only one who wishes that company were to cease to exist altogether. In the past I did not understand, on reddit, the de-google movement. Now I completely understand it, but I think it is the reverse as problem here - people abandoning Google. I think Google needs to abandon mankind and this planet. Let them go far away where they no longer cause any issues here.

> Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that's not what Google does in 2026. Expanding the AI overview to see the full answer gave me this:

Poor guy ^^^ has not yet realised that AI slop steals his time. I realised this the first time I notice the AI slop generated text spam Google pushes onto people. A few lost souls may find this useful - I find it utter trash. No quality. Just steals my time.

> What in the fucking hell? I think this was the moment I, the frog, noticed the pot had been boiling for a while. In what universe is it Google's job to console me and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what I am looking for on the internet?

Good that he finally realised it. Million people noticed this before already. I noticed this when Google started to ruin its search engine. First time I remember was via AMP-ification. AMP mostly failed, but Google kept on pushing towards less quality and more suckage. AI is just the final nail in the coffin, but Google search started to suck way before that.

One of these days some scientists should determine when Google really started to suck, because in, say, 2006 or so, Google search did not suck as much.

> Regardless of what you think of AI or chatbots, I think it's pretty obvious this is just plain weird.

Not if you think Google is not doing this on purpose. They are trying to kill off the search engine so they can present you an AI slop spam world. The other AI slop companies do this too. Slop suckage everywhere now.

> Is it so hard to imagine that some parts of search were just fine before LLMs?

That is how YOU think - but not Google. They deliberately crippled their search engine. The adCompany that Google is today, has nothing to do with the original Google. The billionaires running the show just want to suck in more money and dish out more slop.

> I'm not sure how to feel about all of this. Maybe I should go talk to my friend Google, it's always so nice to me.

Some people realise things more slowly. I am glad he finally understands why so many people are pissed at Google. Same for youtube by the way - about 80% of the shorts are AI slop generated or AI slop modified. I noticed this when I watched Brent Spiner on that podcast show; in the video itself, he had white hair but not totally white. In the short, both he and Jonathan Frakes had much whiter hair. I then realised that AI spam filter slop lies to me. I hate AI slop. Youtube is now infected with that, in particular the shorts. Poor guys looking at their smartphones being spammed down via lying slopness.

Try asking it "Tell me about the "Dario will never come over" meme - give me some of the example original tweets" for example and you get a timeline, tweets etc as the AI overview. Pretty useful really.

Tl:Dr - just like people, you need to give it some context.

Or is it just my bad English?

Also I think you're vastly underestimating the weird incoherent shit that the average stupid person is capable of typing into computers. With no further information, I don't think it's unreasonable that that search was from a stupid/bored person moaning about Dario not coming over. Yeah kinda weird response but people like this exist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HXFurHCkP8