Google's search AI caused a panic in my household just several nights ago. We were looking up an issue with our pet and the very first thing my partner saw searching google was an AI answer saying you need to panic, this is an emergency, get your animal to an emergency room asap before they die. That of course kicked her into Oh Shit mode. But aside from that answer none of the actual search results either of us were finding backed up the AI.

We had to decide whether or not to drag our pet to an after hours emergency vet, with all the associated stress and cost, or ignore the AI result and go off everything else we were reading. It's one thing to dismiss AI answers that seem wrong when it's a domain I know well or the stakes are low, but this was not that type of scenario.

In the end we opted to ignore google's AI and fortunately it was absolutely the right call. So, thanks google.

Google's AI is solid, but a lot of its benefit comes from the fact that it hasn't been enshittified into the ground like their search. The plain incontrovertible benefit is that it has the potential to reduce clicks from the user - instead of sending the UX through clicking into sites and then back to the main search pane the information is immediately available. That click through ends up being expensive for three main reasons 1 - the site is sometimes potato though google "solved" this with amp, 2 - it takes a while to scroll to the site entry passed all the sponsored links (a problem google created for themselves) and 3 - paywalls and "Please subscribe to our newsletter" popups are legion, but while this was always a little bit of a problem, it is a much more pronounced problem due to 1, the insertion of amp that threatens financial ruin on being crawled by google.

So, at the end of the day Google's AI is better than ye olde Google Search, and ye olde Google Search is now very difficult to accomplish because of how much Google has poisoned the well. Kagi is excellent but most normal people can't stomach paying for search when there's a "free" alternative so your options are Google's AI, Google's Search or and alternative search - most normal folks don't realize non-Google search alternatives exist (outside like Bing) so Google's AI ends up capturing a lot of usage.

This is fascinating, contrarian viewpoints are rare, so can you elaborate?

Google only cares when something gains traction (and thus potentially hurts its bottom line". For example, it was answering "How many p's in Google" with "There are two p's in Google"[1] for long enough for me to get non-technical family members making a joke out of it. Google fixed it, only for it then to briefly tell you there were no p's in 'Alphabet' either.

Those particular bits on nonsense seem to have been stopped for now, but let's not fall prey to Gell-Mann amnesia. The only problem Google has fixed is "our LLM was hurting our reputation in this specific case". They have not, and likely cannot, fix the underlying problem.

1. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/why-googles-ai-cant-spell-...

Yeah. AI slop is lying to people. When I realised that I disabled it. Thankfully there are browser extensions that do that easily.

People call it hallucinating. I think it is lying. Google etc.. became a huge liar. All those AI slop companies are lying to the people now.

That difference can be pretty small when most of the web is also consumed by low effort automatically generated slop. You can't escape it. I know there is a good web out there, but the search engines refuse to give it to me. Probably their algorithm. preferring recent content over good content.

I suspect the only real answer is an economic one, Something like Kagi, where hopefully by paying for results you change from being the product to a customer and this is incentive enough for them to provide good results.

Google search already had a huge quality slide before 2022.