Google's AI search is producing millions of wrong answers every day

[Hecate91]

Humans and human written data can be verified, AI is often making **** up or hallucinating fake results.

 

[Burty117]

If for no other reason, because it saves time - you don't have to browse lots of pages.

Right, let me quote you again:

It's not about being good or bad at using search engines.
A classic search can yield results that vary from correct information to total BS. If you don't know the subject enough to make a difference, the chance to see BS is way above 10%.

Specifically:

If you don't know the subject enough to make a difference, the chance to see BS is way above 10%.

Why is AI any better here?

From my experience, Garbage in, garbage out, just like a normal search would be, if you "don't know the subject enough" AI spits out complete garbage, it usually just rambles on about something completely irrelevant.

Why does it have to be “better”?

You still get the “normal” search results below… now you simply have another option - and 90% of the time, it works…

To be honest, it kinda has to be better, we're talking about 10-30x more resources used to generate the AI answer vs a normal Google search, why are we bothering with all this if it's not better?

I would say the overview is just a starting point for you to take your investigation further and should only be trusted once 100% verified.

As a master googler over the years, its not hard for me to find what I need on google without AI however the overviews will often link popular threads or starting pages to get you going.

90%, not in my experience but hey, its 2026 and 95% of stats are made up on the spot. We can skew a % to say anything we want.

This, I'm glad they include hyperlinks to the sources, as it can be a good starting point.

It's very hit and miss, certain subjects, like Aruba Switches and SSH commands, you can tell Google it's the newer OS so I need the commands for the newer CX series switches, and it just spits out the commands for the older OS on older switches, you have to go diving into HPE documentation to get the correct commands alot of the time, even though I'm being very specific on what I need AND the normal Google search links you straight to the documentation with said commands in.

But when I ask it something less detailed, like "how much does an ai search cost vs a normal google search", it gives me the full breakdown no sweat, and the Google search first result is just people talking about it on Reddit.

 

[loki1944]

Why not allow people to easily disable it?

Exactly. Very Brave New World .

 

[TooQik]

Some people here are saying to either turn off the AI overview, or ignore it and search through the results manually like normal, but what happens when Google decide to remove search results and only present you with the AI findings? This is the path that Google seem to be heading down.

 

[Squid Surprise]

Some people here are saying to either turn off the AI overview, or ignore it and search through the results manually like normal, but what happens when Google decide to remove search results and only present you with the AI findings? This is the path that Google seem to be heading down.

They won’t do that until the AI is much better… if ever… what makes you think they’re heading in that direction?

 

[Squid Surprise]

I would say the overview is just a starting point for you to take your investigation further and should only be trusted once 100% verified.

As a master googler over the years, its not hard for me to find what I need on google without AI however the overviews will often link popular threads or starting pages to get you going.

90%, not in my experience but hey, its 2026 and 95% of stats are made up on the spot. We can skew a % to say anything we want.

Agreed - the overview can simply be thought of as the first hit when you search…there’s still plenty more to scroll through if you don’t like it…

 

[daffy duck]

Do you mean Yandex is an option inside Rusia???
There may be 3 independent old-school classic search engines, but these will disappear soon anyway. Models, which are now commonly used as search engines, are more.

Google's AI answers are pretty good, BTW, incl. in regard to accuracy. I have no idea how these results are relevant to real world search (probably not at all), but the chance to find false information using the classic search is way above 10%.

Forget AI, their search results are often terrible. The quality of Google search non-AI output has plummeted over the last 5 years and when I do look at the AI result it is often very wrong when I'm searching for very technical stuff.

 

[TooQik]

They won’t do that until the AI is much better… if ever… what makes you think they’re heading in that direction?

I might be getting news stories mixed up and thinking of the zero click internet articles, which would make sense to have the AI overview as the only presented information when doing a search.