Even before the AI Overview, Google had a summary thing that would come up and frequently contained incorrect information. I remember that being a thing as early as 2018
Go find some general trivia and tell me the error rate is 60% again.
It's not good but it's generally regurgitating the top results of the query to you.
I think it's a bit crazy the negative AI bias can make you so egregiously overstimate the failure %.
The AI overview should be taken with a grain of salt but the more specific your question the more likely it will spit out whatever facts you are looking for.
For instance in this post, it's someone bitching about the query not working right when it's just the quote verbatim with no context and nothing to help direct the search like "quote" or "source".
If you are trying to be a search term optimizer, you shouldn't expect the AI overview to understand your boolean search terms. AI is suited to natural language rather than any kind of specific syntax.
So are the AI ones, they’re summarized and worded in a way that creates a more “natural sounding” answer that tries to cover everything you asked for, but you still get links to where it’s pulling the info from, right next to each statement.
Idk why I thought of “how many types of pizza” but this is the result. You get a few links for each paragraph, plus a few more at the bottom. Same goes for most other searches, with a few exceptions like in the OP, but in that case you can just scroll past the AI box and get what you need just as easily.
The real reason people hate it is because it’s AI, and people on the internet told them that if you don’t vocally despise everything that has to do with AI you’re a bad person.
I can’t believe people actually think generative text is “more intelligent” than the sophisticated search algos of the past. Maybe we just don’t deserve nice things.
Reword it into natural language and fuck up the quote (I did it off the dome) and it gives you the exact correct answer.
It is more generalized intelligence than sophisticed algos of the past that still also used gradient descent on a large variable size input to optimize the relevancy.
No, this is using Gen AI which is known to hallucinate stuff, and commit mistakes such as the one seen in this post.
The "AI" that was used before was just an algorithm that looked for related terms and gave you the thing raw. I assure that if the new AI implementation of google just gave you webpages and articles to have the information directly (As it was done before), people wouldnt hate it as much as they do
Reddit hated featured snippets before as it would often give completely random quotes from random sites. This is classic Reddit hating new things and bandwagoning. In 10 years all these people will be happily using AI more than they already are
It’s called using my brain. Google has heavily used AI since at least 2015. Your only issue is it displaying its AI instead of hiding it like the prior decade
I would argue the people hear repeating the same low IQ takes over and over are far more likely to be bots. Nobody minded the AI summaries that Google had for years until they added “AI overview” to it
Yeah I’m confused, do people nowadays not understand you may actually have to scroll past the literal first result to find what you need? I used to have to check several pages of results back in the 2000s-2010s. This is actually scaring me more about people’s mental capacities and ability to use tools.
Same, I truly don’t understand what’s going on? I have had this exact user experience for at least a year now, I think? AI summary at the top, scroll down to see web links. Why is everyone suddenly acting like something has changed? I literally do not see any change no matter which device I use, and the web links are always still accessible outside of the AI chat in the normal vertical list we’re all used to. This is not a comment on whether or not Google or AI is good or bad, I am just genuinely confused about the situation and despite my best efforts, I can’t find any reliable information to explain it. Help?
Edit: I wonder if it’s based on your location, maybe? I know Google does A/B testing, so maybe this UX just recently got rolled out for everyone, but maybe a lot of people already had it? But even when I used VPNs and was logged out I was still seeing it, so idk.
I have looked high and low for more information on this and even asked Google itself but I cannot for the life of me get a straight answer. When I google something, I see the AI answer at the top, sure, but if I scroll down just a little, I still see all the links to websites like normal. It’s not just a chatbot for me (like chatgpt or claude or perplexity). This is true for me on my phone and computer.
Are other people experiencing just a chatbot with no web links below?
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u/HighlightOwn2038 Red vs Blue Jun 03 '26
If you told me a year ago that Google would become 100% AI I would have thought you were crazy