When did Google get so 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.

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cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information.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!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

In one that changes.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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

Click to see hot new Darios in your neighborhood

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

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.

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

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.

> 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—

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

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?