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
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.
That’s what you get for trying to have a real life.
How does je dare to.
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!
Unusable.
deleted by creator
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.
Bing has the a similar problem where it just repeats the results, some pages are only 1 result so you just keep clicking next
Nobody mentioned udm14.com ?
Google had a stroke
yo, did you modify the html page to make this meme ?
Nope. Google trained the model it’s using for search results off of Reddit, etc. junk data and expected it to be coherent.
I wonder if they considered reddit votes to try to give more weight to high quality answers but also high quality jokes.
But without votes pure nonsense becomes equal to truth.
Humans could use reddit because we understand the site enough to be able to filter the valuable from the bad.
I feel like the answer would be in between ai specifically to be such a filter.
Every such post of google failing i have screen capped and then asked chatgpt for a more detailed explanation to do what google suggests i do. Everytime it managed to call out the issues. So just allowing an ai to proofread its response in context of the question could stop a lot of hallucinations.
But its at least 3 times as slow and expensive if it needs to change its first response.
But i guess doing things properly isnt profitable , better to just rush tech and kill your most famous product.
People upvote stupid stuff as well though. Because humans understand humor, irony, and satire.
The AI is like those people that need /s to be able to work it out. If it’s missing they erroneously take everything as serious.
That’s what he mentioned. High quality content and high quality shitposts as the result.
Everyone who wants more of that, stop adding “/s” to your posts.
Speaking as an autist for the entire autistic community.
PLEASE DONT
What have i set in motion :o
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.
It’s probably fake
I just searched the same words and got the same text.
I just got the same result
not fake.
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.
Yeah Reddit, Lemmy, 4chan and all these meme platforms aren’t exactly trustworthy, because to get the upvotes you have to cater to the “omg that’s hilarious” dummies who are looking for quick fixes for their uneducated hunger for hedonist distractions
Google: “You wanted words? Here are some words!”
So weird, that’s not what I see.
There for me
Me too. But a different person on my same network got a clean result.
Yup me too 🫡
Zoop
👉😎👉 Zoop!
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.
I too am skeptical, but there have been so many of these the last few days… is it just a new meme?
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.
@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.
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.
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.
That seems like a Wikipedia capture for the wrong page instead of AI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A/B testing moment
Works on my machine.
Oh perfect. We’ll just point production to your machine.
Same
It’s, uh, not what I remember.
- old
But the real question is, is the colour blue that you see, the colour blue that I see?
Can’t recreate this. Or any of the other AI flops people keep posting
I get the same description, but when on desktop it’s in the ‘about’ section that appears on the right side of the results, so a different spot than in the OP’s image. Haven’t tried recreating any of the other flops yet though haha.
I got exactly the same. Firefox on android and in the UK. Perhaps it’s regional.
Thats because LLMs have a certain level of randomisation built in. You wont always get the same result for any given inquiry
I literally don’t see any AI blurbs at all in my searches. I wonder if one of my 4 ad blockers is killing the javascript element.
I read somewhere they rolled it out to the US only and more countries are for now on the yet-to-do list aka soon™
I’m in Sweden and didn’t opt-in for anything.
No idea how fast they want to roll it out globally.
But by the recent track record I’d wager they are doing it rather fast than slow.
I’m in the US and opted into the beta for the AI stuff, but so far my experience has been generally positive.
I like to use the Void from r/place as a metaphor for the Internet’s gremlins. Google has called to the void, didn’t bother to filter it and isn’t happy with what it found. To me that signals that Google no longer understands internet culture.
Nepo babies don’t understand anything.
“Take a look at yourself cause that is what you need to do, 'cause the only problem in this room is about you, 'cause you’re a liar”
-Silia Kapsis, 2024
I stopped use it 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 know 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/Thanks. I’ll check these out.
What do you prefer about each of them?
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.
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 street in London. Just as a hypothetical example.
So I do use Google maps too.Thanks for sharing he extra info.
Tried start page after DDG outage on Thursday and I’m liking it a lot
Start page was out too afaik
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
what the heck’s the second picture
The first picture shows Fall, the second shows Guy.
Guy
The lady? She was in the original series. My brother loved that show so I had to watch it if I was watching tv at that time
The Fall Guy tv show from the 80’s.
Well, we know Google won’t get rid of this.
They’ll only cancel it after it actually works and becomes useful
