this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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So the point of the overview is what then? If you have to research to verify then why give info that most likely is false?
The court caught that too:
ah, a shitpost defense
Luddite!! Don’t you understand that number go up??
To be fair, Google has lost a lot of business to ChatGPT & friends who are not offering a list of actual content associated with the search at all. Hate Google as much as you want and I'm sure most of it is warranted, but they're not completely evil in this case
"Their turd sandwich has vegetables in it" doesn't excuse the fact that they took the ham sandwich off the menu entirely.
i saw some sites have disclaimers saying ai outputs are for entertainment purposes only.
in line of goog's defense: "everybody (most users) knows that"
This is the value proposition of llms in general. They are great if you don't care about quality. They second quality matters their time-saving value drops off to near 0.
they drop into negatives. its hard to find valuable infprmation because ai written articles make it hard to find correct sources.
This isn't new since ChatGPT and friends dropped. For years before that, Google search results did limited interpretation of natural language requests, not just keyword match frequency. The SEO arms race drove a different kind of AI in search fetching for at least a decade before natural language chatbot tech hit the scene.
I don't know how much is intentional enshittification to make AI results look better vs how much is simple neglect of the SEO arms race vs maybe it's genuinely getting harder to deliver good simple search results with LLMs acting as SEO agents?
What I do know is: "AI Mode" delivers more useful information than the old style page link list does these days. The pages linked from the AI Mode results tend to be relevant and useful more than the top page of page links. Hallucinations are way down from where they were 2+ years ago, even better than "top results" misses used to be, IMO.
spoiler
How does Google's AI mode compare to other traditional (non-ai) search engines such as https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ ?
It could hypothetically help you direct your search by surfacing useful keywords or relevant events or names or something like it. But since they didn't make it do that, it's not really reliable for anything but an energy expensive way to remind yourself of things you already know (what was the command for X again)
Speak for yourself, they remind me of things I used to know. I have reached a point where I feel like I have forgotten more than most people know.
I think the idea is that the info is probably true, but has high enough likelihood of being false that you better check anyway, if it's something that matters. There's a whole topic in machine learning called "probable approximate correctness" that tries to make that notion precise. Les Valiant's book of a similar title introduced the concept and looks very good. I have it but haven't read it yet.