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   kralcttam ☕️ (kralcttam@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 01:23:07 JST kralcttam ☕️

   in reply to

   • Lauren Weinstein

   @lauren My ten year old son says he can’t trust Google results anymore. He says it just returns “a bunch of made up stuff.”

   • Embed this notice
     Lauren Weinstein (lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 01:23:09 JST Lauren Weinstein

     It's both notable and deeply depressing how many nontechnical people I know who have unprompted told me how much they despise #Google #AI Overviews, which they inevitably describe as usually inaccurate and worthless, at which point they usually add how Google Search quality has declined enormously (in their own words, of course).

     Then they sometimes say something like, "Hey Lauren, don't you know people at Google that you could tell about how bad this is getting?"

     At which point I usually bite my tongue, which is increasingly feeling like a pincushion as a result.

     Don't believe the happy face metrics that Google claims -- out in the real world this is a disaster.

     Rich Felker repeated this.