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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

I still find it amazing that the world's largest search engine, which so many use as an oracle, is so happy to put wrong information at the top of its page. My examples recently -

- Looking up a hint for the casino room in the game "Blue Prince", the AI summary gave me details of the card games on offer at the "Blue Prince Casino" in the next suburb over. There is no casino there.

- Looking up workers rights during a discussion of something to do with management, it directly contradicted the legislation and official government guidance.

I can't imagine how frustrating it must be for business-owners, or those providing information services to find that their traffic is intercepted and their potential visitors treated to an inaccurate version on the search page.

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It's kinda old news now but I still love searching for made-up idioms.

> "You can't get boiled rice from a clown" is a phrase that plays on expectations and the absurdity of a situation.

> The phrase "never stack rocks with Elvis" is a playful way of expressing skepticism about the act of stacking rocks in natural environments.

> The saying "two dogs can't build an ocean" is a colloquial and humorous way of expressing the futility or impossibility of a grand, unachievable goal or task.

People get to make up idioms and AI's don't?

They're just playing games. Of course that violates the 'never play games with an AI' rule, which is a playful way of expressing that AIs will drag you down to their level and then beat you over the head with incompetence.

I find it amazing, having observed the era when Google was an up-and-coming website, that they’ve gotten so far off track. I mean, this must have been what it felt like when IBM atrophied.

But, they hired the best and brightest of my generation. How’d they screw it up so bad?

They sell ads and harvest attention. This is working as designed, it just happens that they don’t care about customers till they leave. So use something else instead.

Yeah, I’ve been using Qwant. I don’t see them mentioned as much though.

Did they hire the best and brightest or did they hire a subset of people

- willing to work on ads - who were successful in their process

and everyone just fell for the marketing?

Corporations are basically little dictatorships, so those best and brightest must do what those above them say or be sacked.

Incentives.

The capitalist system is broken. Incentives to maximise stockholder values will maximise stockholder values very well. Everything else will go to shit. This is true about everything from user experience to the environment to democracy.

Google stopped being a search engine long time ago.

Now it's the worlds biggest advertisement company, waging war on Adblockers and pushing dark pattern to users.

They've built a browser monopoly with Chrome and can throw their weight around to literally dictate the open web standards.

The only competition is Mozilla Firefox, which ironically is _also_ controlled by Google, they receive millions annually from them.

Technically, Safari is a bigger competitor than Firefox, and it's actually independent from Google. But it's not like it's better for the user...

> independent from Google

Not really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38253384

Unlike Firefox, Safari has another huge corporate backer (Apple). Apple is drowning in cash. They don't need Google's money to keep developing Safari. It's "just" a good, low-effort deal for them. Apple doesn't have a competing search engine, or an intention to develop one, or an intention to promote a free web and "save" their users from a search engine monopoly.

> Apple doesn't have a competing search engine

Because Google pays them not to make it.

wasnt apple running a bot now for AI/llm stuff

For years, a search for “is it safe to throw used car batteries into the ocean” would show an overview saying that not only is it safe, it’s beneficial to ocean life, so it’s a good thing to do.

At some point, an article about how Google was showing this crap made it to the top of the rankings and they started taking the overview from it rather than the original Quora answer it used before. Somehow it still got it wrong, and just lifted the absurd answer from the article rather than the part where the article says it’s very wrong.

Amusingly, they now refuse to show an AI answer for that particular search.

It looks like the specific phrase form is blocked in Google Search's AI header. It seems most likely that this was because it was being gamed. Searching "is it safe to throw used car batteries into the ocean" gets links to the meme.

All the ML tools seem to clearly say it's not safe, nor ethical - if you ask about throwing batteries in the sea then Google Search's summary is what you'd expect, completely inline with other tools.

If a large swathe of people choose to promote a position that is errant, 'for the memes' or whatever reason, then you're going to break tools that rely on broad agreement of many sources.

It seems like Google did the right thing here - but it also looks like a manual fix/intervention. Do Google still claim not to do that? Is there a watchdog routine that finds these 'attacks' and mitigates the effects?

How do you fix a weird bug in a black box? Return null.

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