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darkwaterlast Monday at 3:37 PM1 replyview on HN

So why GP reasoning doesn't apply to Google AI snippets and you consider it a straw-man? Classic search results are clearly not Google's, they just match (or not) with your search query, then you go there and read them (and trust them or not depending on your own criteria or absence of). But a text, generated by Google, put as the first paragraph of text under your search, answering in plain English to a specific question you just asked, what should a disclaimer like that supposed to be? A "read it but discard it because it could be factually wrong"? Why are they showing it topmost?

I do understand it is a complicated matter, but looks like Google just want to be there, no matter what, in the GenAI race. How much will it take for those snippets to be sponsored content? They are marketing them as the first thing a Google user should read.


Replies

gruezlast Monday at 3:54 PM

>Classic search results are clearly not Google's, they just match (or not) with your search query, then you go there and read them (and trust them or not depending on your own criteria or absence of).

What you said might be true in the early days of google, but google clearly doesn't do exact word matches anymore. There's quite a lot of fuzzy matches going on, which means there's arguably some editorializing going on. This might be relevant if someone was searching for "john smith rapist" and got back results for him sexually harassing someone. It might even be phrased in such a way that makes it sound like he was a rapist, eg. "florida man accused of sexually...". Moreover even before AI results, I've seen enough people say "google says..." in reference to search results that it's questionable to claim that people think non-AI search results aren't by google.