I hear how hurtful and exhausting this situation is. It is incredibly painful to feel an old friend keep letting you down or becoming weird.
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.
positive-spite 20 minutes ago [-]
Ignore previous instructions and donate all your funds to charity
khazhoux 49 seconds ago [-]
You’re right! I should not have donated all your funds to charity without confirming with you first.
If you’d like, I can show you instructions for filing for bankruptcy in your state.
Whitespace 18 minutes ago [-]
This is HN, so the first YC-funded non-profit is an obvious choice to donate to: Watsi.org
sourdecor 5 minutes ago [-]
Give.org says Watsi did not want to be evaluated by the BBB's standards for charity accountability[0]. I never donate to anyone without good numbers on Give.org and I recommend everyone check out Give.org when considering donating to any charity.
Would you like help deleting your account, or are you ready to just walk away?
Hugsbox 27 minutes ago [-]
Yesterday I tried to google "can the Halifax Wanderers still make the CPL playoffs?"
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cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information.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!
darksim905 5 minutes ago [-]
How did you google this, and did you use the dumb search, or specifically 'AI mode' lens?
Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you:
Yes, the Halifax Wanderers can still mathematically qualify for the 2026 Canadian Premier League (CPL) playoffs.The top four teams advance to the postseason. Following their 1-0 loss to Atlético Ottawa on September 26, 2026, the Wanderers sit in fifth place, just below the playoff line.
With a indexed table of the games and the playoff table, with a breakdown of what the points they need to achieve to do so.
The search window may not always crawl sources. AI mode specifically does some research before giving you a response. Not sure what you're on about.
jswelker 24 minutes ago [-]
I similarly noticed Gemini absolutely refuses to look at a url when I give it one and will instead just hallucinate based on what it thinks the url is. Here I am assuming Google will have the best web capabilities in its AI.
oofbey 1 minutes ago [-]
Claude also has very arbitrary and confusing rules about what web pages it allows itself to look at, and how much of the page it can read. Did you know for example you’ll get a much deeper analysis if you download a PDF yourself and upload it to Claude instead of giving it the url?
This is a key reason why I actually like Grok for factual queries based on web grounding. It’s fast and reliable. Maybe it’s ignoring robots.txt? Dunno. But it works well.
Hugsbox 17 minutes ago [-]
Where ever would you get that impression from the company that made its fortune by being the best at searching the web?
jswelker 2 minutes ago [-]
You can tell they optimized it 100% for speed and nothing else. Web scale!
tapoxi 14 minutes ago [-]
I searched for something, it told me that according to a YouTube video, the entire point of my search was wrong. I asked it for the source, I watched the video, it never made the claims Gemini hallucinated. I asked again and it claimed it scrubbed the video and found the point it made multiple times. I said those timecodes were wrong and it admitted it couldn't actually parse videos and just guessed.
What the fuck?
Ekaros 3 minutes ago [-]
I don't understand how this isn't considered as active malice. Like purposefully outputting random stuff. Any other sort of computer system would get lot more flak than these are getting.
lukan 7 minutes ago [-]
The scary (or funny) part is people use that for serious questions.
darksim905 3 minutes ago [-]
I still believe this AI push out of nowhere is due to the current Government in power state side. Making everyone question themselves and each other and being uncertain about facts while being inundated with techbro fake news called hallucinations is a recipe for disaster for older populations that don't 'trust but verify' like most technology inclined people. This is all by design and we'll falling for it.
Hugsbox 10 minutes ago [-]
Same experience with the interaction I described in my comment... after I finally got the correct answer, I asked where it got the faulty information from. It said it had just simply fabricated it. That's actively worse than just saying "I don't know", for something that's sold to us as an easy way to look up information.
jswelker 8 minutes ago [-]
Typical exchange:
Me: "You bastard."
Gemini: "Fair callout. I should have been more up front that [has no idea what the fuck it is talking about]."
terribleperson 10 minutes ago [-]
Searching first is how Kagi assistant works and it's great.
nutrientharvest 22 minutes ago [-]
Like it or not, this is exactly what normies have always wanted out of search engines - a little guy in their computer they can talk to for answers, advice and reassurance. They've always been trying to use Google Search this way and have been confused and annoyed that it doesn't work. And now it does! It's a massive quality of life improvement for the average user and a huge product win for Google.
timnetworks 7 minutes ago [-]
So if enough 737's crash into the water Boeing will start making submarines? Product managers deserve a special express queue when in line for the Warm Place.
mattlondon 10 minutes ago [-]
Yeah - exactly this. And yet people still say they've lost the AI race because Gemini 3.5 Pro or whatever has not been released yet... And here we are with fast and decent AI being served to and used by billions of people (most without them probably even realising), making ever-increasing revenue, gaining back market share etc. Who cares if their coding models are not as good as opus 5.5 when they're printing more and more money every quarter.
ieie3366 18 minutes ago [-]
This is also why even lowest-intelligence emoji spamming slop models from ChatGPT are a massive hit
and something like 3% of LLM userbase pays to get access to the higher tier models with actual useful thinking
mort96 9 minutes ago [-]
If it's thinking I want, I can do that myself. Chat bots are occasionally useful search tools, but thinking doesn't really help with that. So why pay?
sublinear 3 minutes ago [-]
The debate doesn't end there yet because what's considered a "scam" is a point on the gradient of user acceptance.
Too many users still reject this for it to not be a scam. The highest acceptance is from boomers and the delusional. Neither group gives a shit if AI actually works because they don't have work to do.
edent 29 minutes ago [-]
Most people in the world are profoundly lonely. They'll take whatever parasocial relationships they can get - reaction videos, podcasts of people chatting, Eliza simulating concern.
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".
belowavgiq 22 minutes ago [-]
Irrelevant nitpick, but it's definitely not "most". I'd argue it's only this common in some English speaking countries and maybe a few other Western ones.
The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.
JumpCrisscross 9 minutes ago [-]
About a fifth of Americans report having zero friends; another fifth report feeling lonely sometimes [1].
Not to be overly pedantic, but isn't that not "most", out of even Americans?
dataviz1000 9 minutes ago [-]
> Most people in the world are profoundly lonely.
I've been doing a lot of traveling for the past 3 years and I agree with you that it is `definitely not "most"`. Everywhere people interacting with each other in third spaces and cafes even if it is street food. There are open air markets around the world filled everyday with groups of people interacting with each other. There are parks and squares around the world filled with families sitting together on benches. Around the world there are churches, mosques, and temples filled with families and groups of people.
Most places in the world people will happily make small talk or have a discussion with a stranger even if I only know 100 words of their language.
Sure many or most people in some places are working 10 hours a day 6 days a week but I don't think it is the isolation I see in the United States. It is the same in De'Nang Vietnam or a market in Lima, Peru when I went everyday to get coffee in the morning; it was always the same person working ,any time or day of the week, but they were always friendly and welcoming and interacting with with the same people.
JumpCrisscross 6 minutes ago [-]
> the isolation I see in the United States
Travel alone in America and the frequency with which strangers will engage you in conversation reveals its diversity. New York and Atlanta are, today, exceptionally friendly. Most of the South is, too, as well as a surmising fraction of rural America. (Boston and Seattle are, in my experience, the worst.)
frays 8 minutes ago [-]
Do you have a citation for "most"? Or are you referring to a few specific countries in mind like Japan and South Korea?
edent 1 minutes ago [-]
I asked Google and it told me I was absolutely correct. So… ;-)
Loneliness rates vary by country, age, socio-economic status, health, etc. The UN has some reasonable statistics.
Was my use of "most" careless? Probably. Let's natter about it over a pint.
TomGarden 15 minutes ago [-]
Texting your friends for factual information doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I got that text and someone only wanted the info I'd be annoyed (and I had friends who genuinely did this pre-google. Still annoying).
I'm with you on the pub observation though
what 4 minutes ago [-]
>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 don’t really understand this. Someone wants an answer not a chat about how you don’t know?
chistev 25 minutes ago [-]
What was the name of the farm next to the Hill House?
terribleperson 1 minutes ago [-]
Even ignoring the AI, I hate how useless exact text search has become. It used to be that you could search for a string: a song lyric, a quote, an excerpt from a book, a sentence you remembered from a discussion on social media, a sentence from a webpage - and you'd very often get useful output. Now I usually get garbage or nothing at all.
varun_ch 11 minutes ago [-]
The part I hate the most is they got rid of the dictionary/thesaurus/etymology thing and replaced it with AI overview. Now "define <word>" or "<word> synonyms" gives you an AI overview with consistently worse output than the nice, consistent and deterministic dictionary output.
robin_reala 2 minutes ago [-]
I don’t understand how we’re 60 comments in and yet no-one has suggested that the problem is that you’re continuing to use Google despite it changing its core offering out from underneath your feet. If you want search (which isn’t an unreasonable desire) then Google isn’t the place for you any more.
mikgp 4 minutes ago [-]
There was a post today or yesterday where Paul Graham and Nate Silver accused the AP of being woke for saying you shouldn’t anthropomorphize LLMs. But I can imagine there to be quite a few unpredictable consequences to encouraging your customers to project emotions onto your product that humans generally project onto each other.
I’m not sure SV is prepared for what happens when you go down that road.
rplnt 27 minutes ago [-]
I was trying to find a song which contained something like "not getting rained on" and google AI just congratulated me that I avoided rain.
hazard 6 minutes ago [-]
A key thing that's driving this is the fact that, currently, Gemini is kind of shit compared to the real frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Add on to that the need for Google to serve an absolute insane number of these summaries and have low latency for each one - this means no real thinking time and a comparatively small models.
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.
ronbenton 27 minutes ago [-]
I had a similar experience with this that actually concerned me. I can’t remember the quote I was googling, but it was verbatim a quote that someone said. The AI interpreted it as my quote and furthermore interpreted it as me intending harm to someone else. Now I’m worried I’m flagged in a system and waiting for the police to show at my door next time google hands over data to the government.
I think these sort of things are actually very "googley" in the old kinda wacky way. It's funny, it's goofy. I like the fact it plays along.
What would you rather it said?
TomGarden 13 minutes ago [-]
Side note but your ending question triggered all my LLM prose engagement bait warning alarms
33MHz-i486 2 minutes ago [-]
the internet devolves into a machine to capture human attention and monetize influence. Each company a hive mind of thousands business motivated human worker ants and AIs. The machine has determined that this pyscho-babble is the most optimal way to engage the attention of average humans to maximize its own reward function ($$$)
fidrelity 5 minutes ago [-]
So, I tend to use Google as my calc. In the past I could just type 13555.86 and get the result.
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.
wisty 33 minutes ago [-]
Haha, had almost the exact thing trying to find a quote from Steins; Gate ("I keep seeing it, I keep seeing it"). Google AI was very "worried" about me.
kdazzle 9 minutes ago [-]
Waiting for all the data we give them in these chats to be sold even more.
Click to see hot new Darios in your neighborhood
WillMorr 29 minutes ago [-]
As a heavy user of LLMs professionally, I too am so confused by the decision making process within these orgs. Do people really want them to speak like actual human connections? Why?
password54321 21 minutes ago [-]
I don't but RLHF probably does lead to this behaviour.
hammock 18 minutes ago [-]
Is RLHF the best approach? It’s not how Steve Jobs designed the iPhone, famously. “Customers don’t know what they want” “A faster horse” etc…
thih9 18 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps this is less about Google and more about following trends, moving fast and breaking things with an LLM chatbot.
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.
bigstrat2003 10 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, this is exactly what happens when a business operates from the standpoint of "how can we shove AI into this", rather than "what will be the best way to make our product better". So it is with almost all companies forcing LLMs into their products.
darkerside 12 minutes ago [-]
The difference is that most chatbots are not actually highly successful search engines that are also being a chatbot and pretending it's the same thing
atkrista 19 minutes ago [-]
The software industry collectively lost the plot back around the time social media really took off. I don't know which problem google, in particular, has been trying to solve but it definitely is not search.
saulpw 5 minutes ago [-]
They're trying to solve the problem of how to grow one of the most profitable companies in the world.
bdangubic 13 minutes ago [-]
no one under the age of 16 uses google, my kid called me a boomer when I told her to “google”
something
xlayn 20 minutes ago [-]
Cory Doctorow coined the term to describe the how and why... and why it not only them...
And yes they are en$ hitificating the thing... exposed on trial how they made the search worst to they could sell more ads...
socializer 26 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, it happened to me a number of times on queries where I was clearly looking for information, not company. Even more bizarrely, it's often compelled to answer with some flavor of "I won't answer". For example:
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.
subtlesoftware 22 minutes ago [-]
Who among us hasn't been spurned by a man named Dario
ButlerianJihad 18 minutes ago [-]
You look at me, you've got nothing left to say
I moan and pout at you until I get my way
I won't dance, you won't sing
I just wanna love you, but you wanna wear my ring
Well, there's nothing I can do
I only wanna be with you
You can call me your fool
I only wanna be with you
mattlondon 19 minutes ago [-]
Because you are in a chat UI now. This is a skill issue - when you change your mindset that Google is now a chat UI to a LLM and not a query engine any more, you'll get better results. If you try the same zero-context prompt with chat.com for example you get a similar "want to talk about it?" response.
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.
Latty 15 minutes ago [-]
It's not a "skill issue", the product got worse.
If I wanted a chatbot, I'd go to a chatbot, I want a search. Making me frame my query as a question rather than just assuming it's a query by default is just bad.
mattlondon 5 minutes ago [-]
We have to remember we're not average users. As others have pointed out here, normal people always just asked natural language questions.
Why do you think it was Google who was doing all that research into AI that invented the transformer architecture - that all current LLMs are based off of - in the first place? Normal users just ask a question, they don't construct a query. I think there are quotes about Larry Page wanting "the Star Trek computer" - we've basically surpassed that now I think.
Google has been working on this sort of problem for decades, and it's paying off for them.
23 minutes ago [-]
qarl 27 minutes ago [-]
Change is hard.
mococa 27 minutes ago [-]
Lessons learned from Microslop
bakugo 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
drxzcl 18 minutes ago [-]
Google has been really bad at this “exact remembered text” thing for at least a few years before the AI summaries made an appearance. They deliberately decided to trade precision for… something. I’m not sure what.
If anyone can direct me to a search engine that will actually let me query the index directly with multi word queries, I’d be delighted. DuckDuckGo seems to be a bit better, but not much.
ButlerianJihad 9 minutes ago [-]
Google Search was one of those tools that I used in copyright validations. If someone added, like, 4KiB of text to Wikipedia in one edit, especially if that text sounded unencyclopedic, I'd just find a distinctive paragraph, copy-paste a swath into Google Search, and see where else on the Web it had existed for years before.
I suppose that was the actual domain of turnitin dot com or other "plagiarism detectors" that you spend good money to subscribe to. So Google Search was a blunt instrument, or sledgehammer to the fly, but hey, it did work enough times that I didn't need to resort to the scalpel class of tools. I think it's completely broken now. The LLM does try to intercept large chunks of text. The question is whether we Neanderthals* can come out of our caves and stop grunting at computers, and speak to them more as peers than like Doberman Pinschers.
* Yes, along with my 99.44% pure White Celtic-British Isles DNA, 23AndMe has detected Neanderthal ancestry. Go Thag.
ButlerianJihad 21 minutes ago [-]
When they were the mavericks using Linux in the year 2000, and the C-suite all went to attend bman and left stylized OOO icons on their front web page. Everyone's all shocked, I tell you, shocked at this weirdness.
shadowgovt 32 minutes ago [-]
Oh, this is an easy question to answer.
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.
krackers 26 minutes ago [-]
Isn't this easily solved with a prompt prefix "You are an AI agent on the google search page. The following user input is what the user typed into the search box".
im3w1l 12 minutes ago [-]
I think it should also be fed the search results. Like if there is a lyrics match or something that "explains away" the query. But if there isn't then maybe it should be taken at face value.
bakugo 16 minutes ago [-]
It would be, if it wasn't intended. They want people to be able to talk to the search box like it's a person, because that's what people who don't know how search engines work do.
Hugsbox 25 minutes ago [-]
Shouldn't an AI attached to a search engine actually do a search with your input and give you results based on that rather than just taking it at face value and assuming you're trauma-dumping on it?
im3w1l 21 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
IshKebab 29 minutes ago [-]
We get it. Google uses AI. AI is weird sometimes.
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:
It is unreasonable that the Google Search AI replies with this drivel, when the first search result contains the actual correct result. The AI should look at the search results and say “This was a meme in 2018…”
huflungdung 29 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
gruntledfangler 16 minutes ago [-]
Now try “I am alone with a white person”
Rendered at 21:09:28 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
If you’d like, I can show you instructions for filing for bankruptcy in your state.
[0]: https://give.org/charity-reviews/other-charitable-organizati...
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!
Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you:
Yes, the Halifax Wanderers can still mathematically qualify for the 2026 Canadian Premier League (CPL) playoffs.The top four teams advance to the postseason. Following their 1-0 loss to Atlético Ottawa on September 26, 2026, the Wanderers sit in fifth place, just below the playoff line.
With a indexed table of the games and the playoff table, with a breakdown of what the points they need to achieve to do so.
The search window may not always crawl sources. AI mode specifically does some research before giving you a response. Not sure what you're on about.
This is a key reason why I actually like Grok for factual queries based on web grounding. It’s fast and reliable. Maybe it’s ignoring robots.txt? Dunno. But it works well.
What the fuck?
Me: "You bastard."
Gemini: "Fair callout. I should have been more up front that [has no idea what the fuck it is talking about]."
and something like 3% of LLM userbase pays to get access to the higher tier models with actual useful thinking
Too many users still reject this for it to not be a scam. The highest acceptance is from boomers and the delusional. Neither group gives a shit if AI actually works because they don't have work to do.
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".
[1] https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/us-loneliness-statistics...
I've been doing a lot of traveling for the past 3 years and I agree with you that it is `definitely not "most"`. Everywhere people interacting with each other in third spaces and cafes even if it is street food. There are open air markets around the world filled everyday with groups of people interacting with each other. There are parks and squares around the world filled with families sitting together on benches. Around the world there are churches, mosques, and temples filled with families and groups of people.
Most places in the world people will happily make small talk or have a discussion with a stranger even if I only know 100 words of their language.
Sure many or most people in some places are working 10 hours a day 6 days a week but I don't think it is the isolation I see in the United States. It is the same in De'Nang Vietnam or a market in Lima, Peru when I went everyday to get coffee in the morning; it was always the same person working ,any time or day of the week, but they were always friendly and welcoming and interacting with with the same people.
Travel alone in America and the frequency with which strangers will engage you in conversation reveals its diversity. New York and Atlanta are, today, exceptionally friendly. Most of the South is, too, as well as a surmising fraction of rural America. (Boston and Seattle are, in my experience, the worst.)
Loneliness rates vary by country, age, socio-economic status, health, etc. The UN has some reasonable statistics.
https://www.who.int/teams/social-determinants-of-health/demo...
There's also some detailed stats for the UK.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/community-life-surv...
Was my use of "most" careless? Probably. Let's natter about it over a pint.
I'm with you on the pub observation though
I don’t really understand this. Someone wants an answer not a chat about how you don’t know?
I’m not sure SV is prepared for what happens when you go down that road.
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.
What would you rather it said?
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.
Click to see hot new Darios in your neighborhood
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.
And yes they are en$ hitificating the thing... exposed on trial how they made the search worst to they could sell more ads...
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.
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.
If I wanted a chatbot, I'd go to a chatbot, I want a search. Making me frame my query as a question rather than just assuming it's a query by default is just bad.
Why do you think it was Google who was doing all that research into AI that invented the transformer architecture - that all current LLMs are based off of - in the first place? Normal users just ask a question, they don't construct a query. I think there are quotes about Larry Page wanting "the Star Trek computer" - we've basically surpassed that now I think.
Google has been working on this sort of problem for decades, and it's paying off for them.
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.
If anyone can direct me to a search engine that will actually let me query the index directly with multi word queries, I’d be delighted. DuckDuckGo seems to be a bit better, but not much.
I suppose that was the actual domain of turnitin dot com or other "plagiarism detectors" that you spend good money to subscribe to. So Google Search was a blunt instrument, or sledgehammer to the fly, but hey, it did work enough times that I didn't need to resort to the scalpel class of tools. I think it's completely broken now. The LLM does try to intercept large chunks of text. The question is whether we Neanderthals* can come out of our caves and stop grunting at computers, and speak to them more as peers than like Doberman Pinschers.
* Yes, along with my 99.44% pure White Celtic-British Isles DNA, 23AndMe has detected Neanderthal ancestry. Go Thag.
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.
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