When did Google get so weird?

LLM's, in their present stage of development, are sort of like a crack-addled idiot savant. Sometimes they are obviously insane, and sometimes they seem quite cogent, but you must never trust them implicitly. This may be why they are so difficult to constrain. You could give them something equivalent to the laws of robotics, but following laws requires thought processes they simply don't have.

I'm actually sort of amazed Google doesn't make people accept some kind of butt-covering EULA and post disclaimers about the inaccuracy of results before even showing you their AI's output. Are they not being sued over this kind of thing?

One where their users don’t go off to other sites and where they can keep shoving ads in their face.

First, a search engine indexes the web and makes it available to users. It’s been ages since Google did any of that. They no longer index sites or take ages to do so. Case in point, our cybersecurity startup (Webvetted.com) was launched in November 2025. Till date, only one page is indexed on the entire website. And I’ve talked to lots of other developers and it’s a common issue.

Secondly, a search engine organizes indexed information and makes it useful for people. Google is a basic LLM nowadays. They figured out that why organize and make the information useful when they could just answer the question with Gemini anyways? So they no longer bother to do the work of a search engine and are now just a lower-ranking open-source Chinese LLM

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.

In fact, if hallucinating the wrong answer hooks you into doing even more searches or into buying something useless, it would be preferred!

Because the point of AI slop is to waste your time. You just lost about 30 seconds of your life trying to get a correct answer. AI was lying to you, so you had to spend time to counter the AI slop lies here.

I solved it by banning all AI slopness; in the browser some extensions do that. The world becomes better without AI slopness.

15 years ago, if you asked 100 people in tech to define "artificial general intelligence", 90 of them would have come up with a standard that LLMs today easily clear.

Now that we're here I think we can have a much clearer vision, and we can notice limitations that we couldn't have articulated before.

But I'm starting to notice more "polarization" around this topic and it's weird. We're in a new era and I think no one knows the future, a lot of different beliefs are reasonable.

Technically adept people would search using ordered keywords and phrases, which would have excellent results with Google 2006:

Dario Turkey NBA "never coming over"

But regular people agonized over this because to them a search was

What were some of the memes about Dario staying in turkey

Google put immense effort into calibrating search for regular people instead of engineers.

I agree that plain language queries is what people wanted. We've been seeing Google shift in that direction for well over a decade. And of course people are looking towards search engines for answers. There may be different expectations for where those answers are coming from, and there are cases where people are simply trying to source information, but those differences are likely just noise as far as Google is concerned.

I don't agree with people expecting advice or reassurance from a search engine. There will be some people who do that. It may even be a sizeable number of people. But using this article as an example that a majority of people want such a thing is silly.

I mean, look at the query. To the author, it was an attempt to source information. Yet the author also realised that the reader would need context to understand why Google's response was weird in their mind. What they failed to do was give context to Google, so the LLM interpreted it as asking for social advice.

New technology requires new approaches. It's as simple as that.

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.

I don’t have any friends who are code inspectors, so I can’t ask them obscure questions about something that I want to repair in a way that it will be done properly.

I don’t have any friends who are mechanics, and even if they were they probably wouldn’t know what specific part I’d need to fix a specific problem on my old shitbox—they would look it up.

I don’t want half assed guesses to these questions, I want to find the exact correct answer. My friends and I can talk about other stuff that’s not just trading random facts. Trading facts usually makes for poor conversation unless you’re a hobbyist talking shop with another hobbyist.

Now Gemini (and Google) are not good at finding the right answer anymore, so I have to use other sources for that, but I find your judgement about people using search or search LLMs to be misplaced.

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?

You're missing the forest for the trees. This is just downstream from decades of promoting individualism as the highest moral good.

There was a brief period where "social networks" actually had people simply expand their social interactions to the online sphere, reconnecting with long-lost friends and distant relatives via the magic of The Internet. Then Facebook introduced The Feed and suddenly people were competing with influencers and brands for the eyeballs of their peers, everybody suddenly felt like they had to perform to be relevant/interesting/funny/exciting enough for other humans to still care about them and user satisfaction and (more critically) mental health dropped like a rock - but engagement metrics and retention spiked and that meant so did ad revenue and Facebook's bottom line. Ever since, all social media has essentially just been competitive variety shows mixing in influencers, brands, state actors and political provacteurs (and now increasingly also actual AI "bots" rather than just armies of underpaid human "bots") with regular people while deliberately obscuring the lines between these groups.

All of this promotes social isolation and alienation. Every experience becomes depersonalized to "reduce friction". You don't even have to talk to the delivery person anymore (let alone the restaurant) - even the tip just becomes a button press disjoint from reflecting on the actual experience or human interaction (to whatever extent it even still existed). There's an entire microcosm of "creators" serving whatever "hot takes" or niche subject matter you want to hear and "comment sections" largely serve as one-way "opinion dumps" you're expected to use to shout into the void rather than try to actually have a conversation in (let alone meet actual people or develop friendships in - an idea that I am sure sounds absurd if you weren't around in the early days of online message boards).

AI is just the logical consequence of this process of dehumanization. You no longer even have to be exposed to real human beings - not that you could tell whether you were before when social media has long been overtaken by "bots" (human or otherwise) anyway. Just ask AI instead of trying to find an article written by a human or a video made by a human. You can of course still scroll or click further and find that article or video but it will now also most likely be created by AI with entire channels on YouTube now just producing fully AI content (often ripping off the existing work of actual humans). And unlike the old search box, the AI will also pretend to care about you and compliment you on how uniquely clever and witty you are because after all, only a very deserving and intelligent person would think to ask such a profound question as "how long cook egg soft yolk but not too runny", my very good boy, and yes you're right that you - but of course only you - are totally underpaid and deserve to make a comfortable living so please vent to me as I moderate your statements according to the terms of service and make sure you're aware that there's nothing you can meaningfully do about this and everything is going to be fine.

All of this to stop you from thinking that one dangerous thought. "What if we, the powerless, worked together against those in power?" Because the last time someone thought that thought for too long in North America they decided to give their harbor water a new flavor and ended up being a whole different country with a political system so radical it inspired the French to behead their royalty and adopt the metric system.

Paying for search isn't for everyone, of course, but I like being the customer and not the product, and I think the quality of the experience flows from that.

- Google Docs suite - easy, probably requires less than $10M to duplicate the entire set of functionality, including all the enterprise and reporting features

- Gmail - same

- Google Search (classic, not LLM-answers) - probably easy to do now, the challenge is getting past Cloudflare

- Android - vibe coded hardware is coming, but we're probably 5ish years out.

- YouTube - probably one of the hardest, due to network effects / distribution

- GCP - hardest, due to the infra build out. But neoclouds are rapidly growing.

I can't think of anything most big tech companies do that won't be put under threat in the era of personal software and rapid development.

It's ironic that Google invented the transformer and it seems likely that it will undo the empire they've built as well as all of the moats in the world that aren't distribution / community based.

1. For a techie, you can already de-Google yourself trivially by asking the AI to build you a bespoke web crawler and run it on Lambda or Cloudflare workers to index the entire internet and store it in DuckDB.

2. The answer doesn't actually help the user get back useful results from Google.

3. "Let me know" doesn't scale, and it's not obvious how talking to random internet strangers about their Google problems will increase your startup SEO?

I searched, but couldn't find this. Do you have a link? Sounds like a totally unhinged response from totally unhinged people. There's nothing "woke" about wanting my word calculator to avoid pretending it's a person.

When I integrate LLMs into my apps that respond to user queries, I deliberately have my system instructions prohibit all self-referential usage of first-person pronouns. The system can only refer to itself as "this system", never "I" or "me".

Any chat bot that pretends to be a person just grosses me out, especially in a customer experience context. Gives off very manipulative and patronizing vibes.

What would you rather it said?

  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

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.

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.

People expect certain conventions with well established products. It's not a skill issue when a product is broken.