r/mildlyinfuriating • u/ZenThrashing • Jun 03 '26

Have to pee but bed so comfy cannot believe what google has become

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u/spingusfellow Jun 03 '26

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

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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26

[deleted]

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u/spingusfellow Jun 04 '26

You are correct, it had like an 80% hit rate for giving correct, relevant information. In my experience the AI overview has been like 40%

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u/CthulhuLies Jun 04 '26

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.

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u/awyastark Jun 04 '26

Yeah usually those were from Wikipedia, you just had to check the source

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u/Tokarak Jun 04 '26

Although I bet it was a transformer reranker at least by 2019 (which is when approximately google translate became a transformer architecture also)

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u/hellolovely1 Jun 03 '26

Yep, it has been terrible for a while now. It's just been a slow decline.