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I'd say this isn't just an AI overview thing. It's a Google thing. Google will sometimes show inaccurate information and there is usually no way to correct it.
by jwr 1y ago
I'd say this isn't just an AI overview thing. It's a Google thing. Google will sometimes show inaccurate information and there is usually no way to correct it. Various "feedback" forms are mostly ignored.
I had to fight a similar battle with Google Maps, which most people believe to be a source of truth, and it took years until incorrect information was changed. I'm not even sure if it was because of all the feedback I provided.
I see Google as a firehose of information that they spit at me ("feed"), they are too big to be concerned about any inconsistencies, as these don't hurt their business model.
- muglug 1y agoNo, this is very much an AI overview thing. In the beginning Google put the most likely-to-match-your-query result at the top, and you could click the link to see whether it answered your question. Now, frequently, the AI summaries are on top. The AI summary LLM is clearly a very fast, very dumb LLM that’s cheap enough to run on webpage text for every search result. That was a product decision, and a very bad one. Currently a search for "Suicide Squad" yields > The phrase "suide side squad" appears to be a misspelling of "Suicide Squad"
- weatherlite 1y ago> That was a product decision, and a very bad one. I don't know that it's a bad decision, time will judge it. Also, we can expect the quality of the results to improve over time. I think Google saw a real threat to their search business and had to respond.
- Miraste 1y agoTheir "AI Overview" has not noticeably improved on its (many) failings for at least a year. In that time, Google's LLMs have gotten much better. They aren't implementing the advances they've made, presumably for cost reasons. Meanwhile, every single person I know has come to trust Google less. That will catch up with them eventually.
- gambiting 1y agoThe threat to their search business had nothing to do with AI but with the insane amount of SEO-ing they allowed to rake in cash. Their results have been garbage for years, even for tech stuff where they traditionally excelled - searching for "what does class X do in .NET" yields several results for paid programming courses rather than the actual answer, and that's not an AI problem.
- bee_rider 1y agoSEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have more sympathy for Google. They are just… losing at the cat-and-mouse game. They are playing cat against a whole world of mice, I don’t think anyone other than pre-decline Google could win it.
- Arainach 1y agoThe number of mice has grown exponentially. It's not clear anyone could have kept up. Millions, probably tens of millions of people have jobs trying to manipulate search results - with billions of dollars of resources available to them. With no internal information, it's safe to say no more than thousands of Googlers (probably fewer) are working to combat them. If every one of them is a 10x engineer they're still outnumbered by more than 2 orders of magnitude.
- anonymars 1y agoI understand what you're saying, but also supposedly at some point quality deliberately took a back seat to "growth" https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ > The key event in the piece is a “Code Yellow” crisis declared in 2019 by Google’s ads and finance teams, which had forecast a disappointing quarter. In response, Raghavan pushed Ben Gomes — the erstwhile head of Google Search, and a genuine pioneer in search technology — to increase the number of queries people made by any means necessary. (Quoting from this follow-up post: https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/)
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- bee_rider 1y agoThey are doing an OK job of making AI look like annoying garbage. If that’s the plan… actually, it might be brilliant.
- weatherlite 1y agoI can't argue here, for me they are mostly useful but I get that one catastrophic failure or two can make someone completely distrust them. But the actual judges are gonna be the masses, we'll see. For now adoption seems quite strong.
- flomo 1y agoRight, the classic google search results are still there. But even before the AI Overview, Google's 'en' plan has been to put as many internal links at the top of the page as possible. I just tried this and you have to scroll way down below the fold to find Barry's homepage or substack.
- h2zizzle 1y agoNo, the search queries are likely run through a similar "prompt modification" process as on many AI platforms, and the results themselves aren't ranked anything like they used to be. And, of course, Google killed the functionality of certain operators (+, "", etc.) years ago. Classic Google Search is very much dead.
- yonatan8070 1y agoWas there ever an announcement regarding the elimination of search operators? Or does Google still claim they are real?
- h2zizzle 1y agoNothing for "" afaik. + was killed to make Google+ discoverable (or so Google claimed at the time).
- flomo 1y agoAt some point, Google search was so good that you didn't really need the operators, like you weren't just prodding some primitive AltaVista to give the results. So I think "almost nobody used that" came long before the en-plan of filling the top 50% with internal links.
- hughw 1y agoWell it was accurate if you were asking about the Dave Barry in Dorchester.
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- omnicognate 1y agoHe won a Pulitzer too? Small world.
- o11c 1y agoI remember when the biggest gripe I had with Google was that when I searched for Java documentation (by class name), it defaulted to showing me the version for 1.4 instead of 6.
- sroussey 1y agoSame problem with LLMs particularly if a new version released in the last year.
- PontifexMinimus 1y ago> It's a Google thing. Google will sometimes show inaccurate information and there is usually no way to correct it. Surely there is a way to correct it: getting the issue on the front page of HN.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoGoogle maps is so bad with its auto content. Ultra private country club? Lets mark the cartpaths as full bike paths. Cemetery? Also bike paths. Random spit of sidewalk and grass between an office building and its parking lot? Believe it or not also bike paths.
- sethherr 1y agoBiking is great tho
- xp84 1y agoI mean, that last one sounds functionally useful, since it would indeed be better to take the random concrete paths inside an office property (that wasn’t a closed campus) than to ride on the expressway that fronts it, if the “paths” are going where you’re going.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoYeah it doesn’t really play out like that. Just saw another example today of this gated condo complex where half the sidewalks are arbitrarily full blown bike trails. Clearly they are just trying to automagically get the trails from imagery of putative paths instead of, you know, pulling directly from the municipal bike path network maps. I guess scaling something more like that out was too hard for multibillion dollar google. I have tried reporting these fake paths in the past but it didn’t get them removed.
- aimor 1y agoI went to a party today at a park. Google maps wanted me to drive my car on the walking path to the picnic pavilion. Here, you can get the same directions: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/38.8615917,-77.1034763/Alcova+Heights+Picnic+Shelter+%232/@38.8618511,-77.1029363,130m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m9!4m8!1m0!1m5!1m1!1s0x89b7b5145a352f85:0x6f8ffc275b3384b!2m2!1d-77.1028853!2d38.8628726!3e0?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDcxNi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/dir/38.8615917,-77.1034763/Alcov...
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- cosmical65 1y ago> I'd say this isn't just an AI overview thing. It's a Google thing. Google will sometimes show inaccurate information and there is usually no way to correct it. Well, in this case the inaccurate information is shown because the AI overview is combining information about two different people, rather than the sources being wrong. With traditional search, any webpages would be talking about one of the two people and contain only information about them. Thus, I'd say that this problem is specific to the AI overview.
- jamesrcole 1y agoThe science fiction author Greg Egan has been "battling" with Google for many years because, even though there are zero photos of him on the internet, Google insists that certain photos are of him. This was all well before Google started using AI. He's written about it here: https://gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html https://gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html
- KolibriFly 1y agoGoogle doesn't really have an incentive to prioritize accuracy at the individual level, especially when the volume of content makes it easy for them to hide behind scale
- bokkies 1y agoBack in 2015 I walked 2 miles to a bowling alley tagged on Google maps (in Northwich, England) with my then gf...imagine our surprise when we walked in to a steamy front room and reception desk, my gf asks 'is this the bowling alley' to which a glistening man in a tank top replies 'this is a gay and lesbian sauna love'. We beat a hasty retreat but I imagine they were having more fun than bowling in there