Google has come under fire for some of the inaccurate, ridiculous, and downright bizarre answers it provides through its AI summary for search.
AI Overview, the AI-generated search results that Google began rolling out broadly earlier this month, has had mixed results. Apparently, users looking for ways to stick cheese on pizza have been getting Add adhesive (Advice is Old Reddit Post), and another said,One small rock a day” (from onion)
Don’t be discouraged if you can’t find the answer or reproduce it yourself. More viral searchesGoogle is working to remove inaccurate search results, but a company spokesman said in a statement that the company is “acting swiftly” and “using these cases to drive broader improvements to our systems.”
“The majority of our AI Overviews provide high-quality information with links to dig deeper on the web,” the spokesperson said. “Many of the examples we saw were unusual queries, and we also saw examples that were doctored or couldn’t be reproduced. We conducted extensive testing before launching this new experience, and as with other features we launch in Search, we welcome your feedback.”
So it’s probably safe to assume that these results will improve over time and that some of the screenshots you see on social media are made for laughs.
But these AI search results got me wondering: what are they actually? for• Even if everything worked perfectly, what would be better than a regular web search?
Apparently, Google is trying to give users the answers they need without forcing them to scroll through multiple web pages. In early tests According to AI Overviews, “People are using search more and are happier with their results.”
But the idea of removing the “10 blue links” is an old one, and although Google has already started to place less importance on them, I think it’s too early to remove those blue links completely.
Let’s do a very self-indulgent search: “What is techcrunch?” and find this summary: generally Accurate, but weirdly inflated like a student trying to meet a page count minimum, traffic numbers Yale University Careers WebsiteThey then move on to the question, “How do I get my article published on TechCrunch?”, and the summary cites an old article on how to submit a guest column (which they no longer accept).
The important thing is not just to find moreover I’ve outlined some of the things the AI summary gets wrong, but I suggest that many of its mistakes won’t be particularly flashy or interesting, but rather mundane. And, to Google’s credit, while the summary does include links to pages that provided source material for the AI’s answers, it can take a lot of clicking to figure out which answers come from which sources.
Google also said it would remove inaccurate search results pointed out on social media. Data Gaps — an area where there isn’t a lot of accurate information online. This is understandable, but it highlights the fact that, like regular search, AI needs a healthy open web full of accurate information.
unfortunately, AI could pose an existential threat The same open web. After all, there’s much less incentive to write accurate how-to articles or do extensive investigative journalism if people are only going to read AI-generated summaries, accurate or not.
Google says that with AI summaries, “people visit a more diverse range of websites looking for answers to more complex questions,” and that “links in AI summaries receive more clicks than if the pages had appeared as traditional web listings for that query.” I hope that’s true, but if not, no amount of technological improvement will make up for the vast swaths of the web that could disappear.
