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This is similar to how, not too long ago, LLM's had extreme difficulty counting the number of letters in some words. LLM's don't "think" or "reason" in the normal definition of those terms. They can do some pretty amazing things, but still screw up basic things like telling you something that is obviously wrong and contradicts the top search results.

LLM's, in their present stage of development, are sort of like a crack-addled idiot savant. Sometimes they are obviously insane, and sometimes they seem quite cogent, but you must never trust them implicitly. This may be why they are so difficult to constrain. You could give them something equivalent to the laws of robotics, but following laws requires thought processes they simply don't have.

I'm actually sort of amazed Google doesn't make people accept some kind of butt-covering EULA and post disclaimers about the inaccuracy of results before even showing you their AI's output. Are they not being sued over this kind of thing?

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ChatGPT live mode still hallucinates letters in words like this. HuskIRL and FatherPhi on youtube have done some hilarious videos with it in the last couple of weeks. Beyond miscounting the Rs in strawberry, ChatGPT will say there are two Ds in "your mom" and one D in "uranus" . I tried it myself to check that the videos weren't fake and sure enough it still has this failure mode.
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Google will stop being a traditional search engine because they believe they’ve found a more profitable version of it.

One where their users don’t go off to other sites and where they can keep shoving ads in their face.

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I thought Google's original goal for a search engine was exactly this, answer any question whatsoever.
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I similarly noticed Gemini absolutely refuses to look at a url when I give it one and will instead just hallucinate based on what it thinks the url is. Here I am assuming Google will have the best web capabilities in its AI.
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I searched for something, it told me that according to a YouTube video, the entire point of my search was wrong. I asked it for the source, I watched the video, it never made the claims Gemini hallucinated. I asked again and it claimed it scrubbed the video and found the point it made multiple times. I said those timecodes were wrong and it admitted it couldn't actually parse videos and just guessed.

What the fuck?

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I don't understand how this isn't considered as active malice. Like purposefully outputting random stuff. Any other sort of computer system would get lot more flak than these are getting.
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Throughout my career, I've almost always been close enough to the user that I hear about it quickly when something is wrong. It's a tough problem that so many Google engineers are typically so far removed from end users. Or maybe it's just that a small part of the company has long subsidized the rest of the employees to the point that it doesn't matter how good their work is because they'll get paid anyway.
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The scary (or funny) part is people use that for serious questions.
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Typical exchange:

Me: "You bastard."

Gemini: "Fair callout. I should have been more up front that [has no idea what the fuck it is talking about]."

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Same experience with the interaction I described in my comment... after I finally got the correct answer, I asked where it got the faulty information from. It said it had just simply fabricated it. That's actively worse than just saying "I don't know", for something that's sold to us as an easy way to look up information.
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These models are incapable of saying they don't know, because they have no concept of knowing. They simply predict the next word which is most likely.
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I still believe this AI push out of nowhere is due to the current Government in power state side. Making everyone question themselves and each other and being uncertain about facts while being inundated with techbro fake news called hallucinations is a recipe for disaster for older populations that don't 'trust but verify' like most technology inclined people. This is all by design and we'll falling for it.
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An interesting conspiracy theory, as long as you're honest about what it is.
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The more simple explanation is that the current government in power is over exposed in their AI investment. The normal conservative mainstream media was already doing a great job of propagandizing older populations.
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Yup. I'm most familiar with Jill Lepore and Quinn Slobodian (and others in their respective orbits). They're both historians who've written extensively about Musk and Muskism (et al). Wild stuff.

Apparently the plan is to use AI slop, mediated thru social medias, to defeat the woke mind virus, perpetuated by the Anti-Christ, in order to safe guard humanity's future.

I wish I was making this up.

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I have one google account where gemini constantly confidently hallucinates crap, and another where it doesn't (at least to the extent that other modern LLMs don't).

I take this to mean that my one account has been mistaken for a competitor and they're trying to poison its data. But who knows.

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Or is it randomness?

"That's the thing with randomness. You can never be sure."

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Where ever would you get that impression from the company that made its fortune by being the best at searching the web?
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You can tell they optimized it 100% for speed and nothing else. Web scale!
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Literally every experience I've had with Gemini / Google Search AI answers followed this exact pattern, often repeated several times more if I remained persistent instead of just giving up.

Typical example:

"Where can I buy <thing I'm looking for that I can't find anywhere using normal search terms>?"

> You're looking for <related but different and widely available thing>. It is sold by <sites I never heard of>.

"No, that's different. I'm looking for <that thing but with the exact differences spelled out again>."

> Ah, my mistake. You're looking for <thing I described>. It is sold by <sites I never heard of but which don't actually sell it>.

"I've checked your links and none of those sites actually sell it, one doesn't even sell products and instead only offers manufacturing - but also not for what I asked you for."

> I'm sorry, my bad. Those sites don't sell what you are looking for. Instead you should check out <more sites I've never heard of>.

"Those sites sell the thing you initially thought I was asking about but not the thing I described."

> I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. You can find the thing you actually described at <yet more sites including some of the same>.

"No. None of these sites sell anything close to what I asked you for and two of them don't actually exist."

> Oh, sorry about that. You're completely right. The thing you asked me about isn't actually being sold by anyone. However you could buy <thing it first thought I meant and that wouldn't bring me any closer to solving my problem>.

(ad nauseam)

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Claude also has very arbitrary and confusing rules about what web pages it allows itself to look at, and how much of the page it can read. Did you know for example you’ll get a much deeper analysis if you download a PDF yourself and upload it to Claude instead of giving it the url?

This is a key reason why I actually like Grok for factual queries based on web grounding. It’s fast and reliable. Maybe it’s ignoring robots.txt? Dunno. But it works well.

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Google is no longer a search engine anymore. They don’t care about being one. Why you might ask?

First, a search engine indexes the web and makes it available to users. It’s been ages since Google did any of that. They no longer index sites or take ages to do so. Case in point, our cybersecurity startup (Webvetted.com) was launched in November 2025. Till date, only one page is indexed on the entire website. And I’ve talked to lots of other developers and it’s a common issue.

Secondly, a search engine organizes indexed information and makes it useful for people. Google is a basic LLM nowadays. They figured out that why organize and make the information useful when they could just answer the question with Gemini anyways? So they no longer bother to do the work of a search engine and are now just a lower-ranking open-source Chinese LLM

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How did you google this, and did you use the dumb search, or specifically 'AI mode' lens?

Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you:

Yes, the Halifax Wanderers can still mathematically qualify for the 2026 Canadian Premier League (CPL) playoffs.The top four teams advance to the postseason. Following their 1-0 loss to Atlético Ottawa on September 26, 2026, the Wanderers sit in fifth place, just below the playoff line.

With a indexed table of the games and the playoff table, with a breakdown of what the points they need to achieve to do so.

The search window may not always crawl sources. AI mode specifically does some research before giving you a response. Not sure what you're on about.

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> Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you

Which itself is a major UX issue. The average person is not going to understand, if they even realize, that there's a difference between the AI summary and AI mode.

One has to wonder just how much incorrect information people have consumed due to things like this.

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I experienced this the other month. I searched for some safety data on something at the same time as my wife and we were effectively given extremely conflicting information about what to do by Google. Just a few tweaks in wording and different advertising profiles and Google will serve up opposite realities it seems.
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Not OP, but if I’m not interested in using Google’s AI, it’s going to just return these weird bad results that it’d be better off if Google just didn’t even include them as they’re factually wrong?
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Searching first is how Kagi assistant works and it's great.
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I'm being very mindful of Gell-Mann Amnesia and chatbots. They speak authoritatively and are right often enough, but I've had enough cases of them saying very incorrect things in areas I know well that I have to remind myself that those cases aren't unique.
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And it's going to get worse over time (kinda like how Google search results got worse over time) as ads get introduced and people try to game the ai response. General purpose AI chatbots are a waste.
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> My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering?

Because the point of AI slop is to waste your time. You just lost about 30 seconds of your life trying to get a correct answer. AI was lying to you, so you had to spend time to counter the AI slop lies here.

I solved it by banning all AI slopness; in the browser some extensions do that. The world becomes better without AI slopness.

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