back to article Google's AI-powered search results are loaded with spammy, scammy garbage

Google's new AI-generated search results feature is suffering from the same problem that its regular results have had of late: Spammy, if not outright malicious links are rising to the top of the SERP stack. Google reportedly began testing its Search Generative Experience (SGE), previously an opt-in only test, on a small …

  1. Linker3000
    Holmes

    No shit sherlock

    The results from all the major search engines have been getting progressively shittier for several years.

    I am sure Google:

    Values the quality of its search experience very highly.

    Always endeavours to provide only the best, curated search results.

    And lots of other marketing crap including words like: 'strives', 'synergy', 'quality' and 'listens'.

    But we're living the reality of the situation - and it's dire.

    Never mind, those profits still look oretty good for the shareholders.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: No shit sherlock

      Google strives to send you to sites that have Google ads

      So all the responses have become like those recipe sites that have 20pages about their Italian Grandmother to click through before it tells you how long to boil an egg

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    AI-powered search results?

    I'm a tired old Hash House Harrier and I asked my AI Android phone to search for, "I'm a drinker with a walking problem" and it started searching for "I'm a drinker with a War King problem"

    1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
      Devil

      Re: AI-powered search results?

      Did you mean to search for: I’m a stinker with a wanking problem? 1,158,458,789,000,000 results found

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Total garbage search results, even for simple tech search terms

    Trying to remember when I changed my home page from AltaVista to google. Soon after they moved to Page Mill Rd in 1999 I think. Because their search results were so much better. More useful. I know I drove past the AltaVista office on Arastredero in early 2000 thinking, well they are finished.

    And so it was for the next 20 plus years until about two years ago. When I changed my home page to duckduckgo. Not because of any ideological or privacy reasons. But because Google search could not longer return useful search results for even very well formed search terms for technical references. Which duckduckgo could. We are talking very basic stuff. Like the JVM opcode spec.

    Its improved a bit recently but Google search has been broken so badly by their "AI" push as to make it mostly useless. The experience is even worse on mobile platforms. If a search term might have even the most cursory connection with a retail item or a search term that can be sold or is in any way "political" the results returned on the first few pages of a google search are as bad as the very early search engines of the late 1990's. (Apart from AltaVista). Totally useless.

    That third rate mechanical engineer Pichai (but epic player of C-suite politics) with his dodgy degrees has utterly destroyed Google. He promotes mediocrities like himself and has turned Mountain View into the worst sort of echo chamber. The profoundly racist Gemini fiasco is the first time I have seen Google screw up so badly. The Alphabet anti-trust defense only works when you have a generally positive public attitude towards your company. Pichai like all upper caste Indians is totally tone deaf to the fact that the US is build on neighborly good will and his BJP worldview as reflected in Gemini and other recent PR disasters shows nothing put contempt for the country that made him powerful and wealthy. For which there will be a reckoning on day . Not the first upper caste Indian in the Valley to make that mistake.

    If Larry and Sergey want to save Google they need to kick out Pichai and his incompetent crew as soon as possible. Because unlike HP (destroyed after Bill Hewlett left) and Boeing (destroyed by the McDonnell Douglass people) Googles eventual fate with be just like AT&T in the 1970's. Destroy by hubris.

    A real pity. Because up to the last 5 years or so Google had done such a great job of being a force for good who produced so much useful and innovative technology. Like Sun, DEC and pre 1997 Apple. And are now becoming arrogant, nasty, feckless and outright evil. Like Microsoft since 1975, Apple since 1997, and Intel and Cisco forever. A real pity. Because all my dealings with the Googleplex in the old days were more like dealing with Sony. Very bright people who did not give you the run around, did not try to screw you over, and who were a pleasure to deal with.

    Oh well. It was great while it lasted.

    1. Linker3000

      Re: Total garbage search results, even for simple tech search terms

      DDG's search results are going downhill too; which reflects mostly on their sources.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        The results will keep getting worse as long a you keep using them

        Since online search has collapsed to a duopoly between Google and M$, you don't really have good choices of course. If people move en masse to Bing, or Bing backed results with an alternate front end (DDG) M$ will claim users love it's enshitified results and add more of the brown stuff in response. If's Google's traffic is holding, it will also conclude it can get away with adding more of the brown stuff, as they only need to be slightly better than M$ and avoid losing too much market share.

        So unless people stop searching, it's going to be a fast ride straight to the bottom until a viable 3rd party search engine comes to light. So I hope you all like meadow muffins, bison brownies, and cow pies.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: The results will keep getting worse as long a you keep using them

          An alternative front end such as DDG could improve the results. Simply recognise some proper filtering terms the filtering terms not and and (or seems to be implicit in the underlying search) and apply them to the results before putting them in front of the user.

          1. Rich 2 Silver badge

            Re: The results will keep getting worse as long a you keep using them

            I'm not sure I agree - filtering can only go so far. If the likes of DDG are filtering on results already provided by Googlies and Boing (which they are) then that doesn't fix the issue that almost all of the most useful results have already been filtered out, or (at best) relegated to page 100 of the results that are returned.

            Oh for the good ol' days of Alta-Vista. It may not have been perfect but it was orders of magnitude more useful than Googlies of today.

            1. David 132 Silver badge
              Happy

              Re: The results will keep getting worse as long a you keep using them

              > Oh for the good ol' days of Alta-Vista.

              Some of us still pine for Ask Jeeves.

              1. Rich 2 Silver badge

                Re: The results will keep getting worse as long a you keep using them

                Why?

                Ask Jeeves was just a front for massive user data harvesting. It was much worse that Googlies (If that's possible) in that respect.

                1. David 132 Silver badge

                  Re: The results will keep getting worse as long a you keep using them

                  You clearly didn't follow my link...

      2. vtcodger Silver badge

        Re: Total garbage search results, even for simple tech search terms

        Gee. I dunno. Do you think it could possibly be the internet itself that is going downhill? I know that is unlikely because everything is getting newer and shinier every year. And newer/shinier is always good. But still ...

        1. stiine Silver badge

          Re: Total garbage search results, even for simple tech search terms

          No, its only those sites run by bastards who have SEO in their titles.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Total garbage search results, even for simple tech search terms

      Pichai like all upper caste Indians is totally tone deaf to the fact that the US is build on neighborly good will ... shows nothing put contempt for the country

      Right on brother. We need more native Americans just like Peter Theil running tech.

      Lucky he's working on it. Are your clones ripe in the vats yet Pete?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Total garbage search results..zero Valley experience?

        So I take it you have zero professional experience (of many decades) working in the Valley? Ignoring the Dot Coms in SF (of course, pure scams) you will have worked with a remarkably diverse group of people from all backgrounds from all around the world. Its decades since I walked into a meeting which was nt majority non white / non American. Unless its a small local office of a Taiwanese / HK company etc where language might be an issue the Valley has always been totally color blind when it came to hiring. No matter what the DEI hucksters might say. Worked with plenty of Africans over the decades. And Central and South Americans, all blanco. Just like their peers in their home countries.

        That is up to about ten or fifteen years ago. When the phenomenon of almost totally Indian hiring groups first became very obvious. And we are not taking the H2 slaves here either. It became such a common sight in the Valley that you started seeing patterns. Not all Indian hiring manager / leads / etc were Indians only hires. It was only the higher caste or wannabe who did this. Lower castes or from the south (Kerala/ Dravidian / Tamil etc) hired little different from the rest of the Valley. (Great people to work with). But the upper castes / Hindi speakers etc would only hire non Indians if they were desperate. Always males rarely females. Repeating exactly the hiring pattern back in India. And the attitude of those upper caste Indians when in upper management position in larger companies, exactly as I described. With the profound arrogance and contempt shown by Vinod Khosla being the poster child for this type. Its always the wannabes who are they worst.

        So for this particular type of person in the Valley the rule always applies - scratch the surface and under that fake smarmy smile you will always find the profound bigotry of a BJP supporter.

        And your point was? What has Thiel got to do with anything. He is just a lawyer who got lucky and made lots of money during the first Dot Com Pump and Dump fraud era. Just another Sand Hill Rd financial engineering (a.k.a scams and fraud) parasite. He never shipped a product in his life. Just a parasite. Like 98% of the current VC's.

  4. may_i Silver badge

    Internet search is broken and has been for a long time

    I've long tired of trying to get useful results for any software technical query from a search engine, particularly with anything relatively new. There are so many results for the alpha, beta and various releases of anything that most search engines seem to be incapable of putting the results which apply to the latest release at the top of the result list. The engines themselves get little help from an army of (Indian mostly for some reason) CV fluffers who all pirate the same copy from the first article it appears in, to show that they have a web site full of technical tips. The fact that none of these cloned articles have a meaningful publication date or any indication as to which release they refer to hardly helps the search engine, or the unfortunate reader.

    AI was supposed to be the saviour of search engine results. If I'm trying to filter a list of results, I can almost without actively looking, filter suspicious URLs out as I scan down the list. If I can do that, matching obvious patterns in almost less time than it takes to skip my eye over each result, what can't this wonderful new AI technology do it better than me and save me the trouble?

    I'd say that the answer to that is: It's not AI. It does exactly what you would expect a Machine Learning system to do when presented with data it has not been trained on. There's no adaptability, instinctive pattern matching or deriving new knowledge from past experience. There is NO AI, it's just a marketing buzzword term. The press at large deserves the ultimate nut kick for misleading people, who have no understanding of computers, that artificial intelligence actually exists.

    The hype has become so bad that I'm almost considering giving up correcting people when they say "AI" that they mean "ML".

    Almost...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Wrong tool for the job

      It is uniquely and intrinsically bad at resisting attacks by SEOs and other scumbags. There are no known effective countermeasures for the many classes of poisoning and manipulation attacks, and the core of the technology makes the results and their causes even more opaque. As an added bonus the results are even more computationally expensive to produce.

      Much like the voice assistant craze of recent years, Google is deploying these tools as a knee-jerk response to Bing's use of LLM drive summaries. IF people moved to that model of search, Google could loose their shirt. But Googles interest is in the more profitable status quo. So no surprise it's AI search results suck, they benefit from if people hate them so they can protect the their more easily controlled link search results.

      The only people with skin in the game at Google are the people on the natural language search and "AI" teams building their OpenAI knockoffs. And their reward for succeeding will be to decrease Googles bottom line.

      (and semi-ironically increase their prospects of getting hired either at OpenAI or another Micropants affiliate and in the long run cost THEM money too.)

    2. H in The Hague

      Re: Internet search is broken and has been for a long time

      "The hype has become so bad that I'm almost considering giving up correcting people when they say "AI" that they mean "ML"."

      A thousand upvotes for that!

      A while ago somebody mentioned Kagi a new, paid-for search engine. Has anyone used that? Trying it out is on my to-do list.

      1. Rich 2 Silver badge

        Re: Internet search is broken and has been for a long time

        Sadly, even Kagi seem to be going down the "AI" toilet. I think it may be optional though. For now

      2. _andrew

        Re: Internet search is broken and has been for a long time

        I've been using Kagi for a while. Seems pretty great to me so far. They added Stephen Wolfram to the board and Wolfram Alpha to their search data (and use that for google-style quick-facts column), which I think is a good move. Alpha being a huge, mostly curated "real data" database and logic-engine based derivation system that has been available by subscription for years, but now is also rolled into Kagi. Yes, there are a few "AI" features now too: page summaries and so on, but they're user-driven. Write the search terms as a question (with a question mark) and you'll get an AI answer. Otherwise not. The big feature of course is the complete absence of advertising in results and the down-rating of SEO-infested pages.

    3. Rich 2 Silver badge

      Re: Internet search is broken and has been for a long time

      "AI was supposed to be the saviour of search engine results"

      Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.....

      Sorry :-)

      1. ThatOne Silver badge
        Devil

        Re: Internet search is broken and has been for a long time

        Why, AI is supposed to be the savior of all mankind. I already read that it cures cancer...

  5. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
    Coffee/keyboard

    "Around 99 percent of Google search results are spam free, we're told"

    Hopefully not while you were consuming food or beverage.

    1. xanadu42
      FAIL

      Re: "Around 99 percent of Google search results are spam free, we're told"

      My experience of Google searches over the last 4-5 months suggest that results shown being "99% ... spam free" is far from reality!!!

      Maybe 80% as a guesstimate...

      But the results I see could be related to the fact that I live in rural Australia and Google appears to have no idea that there is any other country on the planet that have different ways of doing things...

      For Example: For a Google Business listing why do they not have an option for "Closed on Public Holidays" relevant to the country I live In?

      Sick and tired of Google emailing me asking if I am closed on Good Friday, Easter Monday, Australia Day, Christmas Day, New Years Day, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc

      Google KNOWS where I live (based on info I provided), SHOULD know about Public Holidays in the locale I live in (based on the fact that I used Google to find out when there are public holidays in my locale) and so forth...

    2. cmdrklarg

      Re: "Around 99 percent of Google search results are spam free, we're told"

      Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

  6. The Central Scrutinizer Silver badge

    Google, enshitifying the Internet one search result at a time. Any search for anything useful on technical computing issues is fucking useless.

    It's becoming more and more like Clippy.

  7. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

    So much clutter

    The whole first page of a Google search is now almost total crap. I'm actually fine with the adverts, they take up space, but they do have to pay the bills - and I'm not paying myself. Although it was obviously a lot better when the ads had a little yellow patch, so you could identify them at a glance. But that's always been there, and there's no point getting annoyed at facts of life.

    But now the rest of the page is full of LLM-generated shit. There used to often be a link to Wikipedia at the top, which has its faults but can be helpful, but now there's a whole paragraph often badly summarised from it with a link, taking up three times the space. Then there are often a couple more random paragaphs of crap, mostly with no link to tell you where it's been summarised from. Or even if its just been invented at random...

    Text you've got about ten lines of "other searches like this" - which used to occasionally be useful if you'd got a technical term wrong or your particular search wasn't working. But now they just seem to have taken your query and put it through a thesaurus, which makes me suspect that's LLM-generated as well. Then, if you're lucky, you start hitting actual links.

    Also, if you do this on your phone/tablet, Google have disabled pinch to zoom on their results page. So if you've not got your reading glasses you're buggered. Although there's less likely to be any useable information their anyway.

    Remember when Google used to boast about having a UI team - where any time anybody wanted to put even a one-word link onto the Google homepage they had to jusitfy it? They may as well just bring back the blink tag now, and have done with it.

  8. Al fazed
    Facepalm

    Google shmoogle goshomgle

    Just reaffirmed that Google must be the shittest search engine on the planet.

    without agreeing or disagreeing, ie; no pop ups on my Google page, I did a couple of serches for my own name to see where Google would like me to end up.

    I used just the words David Urmston, as you'd epect there are numerous English speaking David Urmstons world wide, however, the one site I was hoping to see did turn up halfway down page one.

    Surprise surprise, when I attempted to refine the search with a variety of <H1>'s which are in use on all of my web sites, the results got worse each time. Much worse.

    In the end I typed the whole URL into the search box AND got nothing at all from the web site I wanted to find, but lots of crap - the same crap which had appeared on all of my previous searches using the same terms "david" "urmston". There was so much page padding with results beginning with "B" and other letters I had not even used.

    Is this the end game for the Internet, where one is unable to find one's own web site, unless one types the unexpurgated URL into the address bar ?

    ALF

  9. DoctorPaul Bronze badge

    Qwant anyone?

    Many thanks to the commentard who recommended qwant some time ago.

    Been my default search in Firefox for a while and I must say that I get the results that I want at the top of the list pretty much every time.

  10. tiggity Silver badge

    The irony

    The irony of "VP of SEO strategy and research at marketing firm Amsive." complaining that spammers have used underhand techniques to game the results - isn't that what SEO is all about?

    1. ThatOne Silver badge

      Re: The irony

      Complaining that other spammers have used techniques better than theirs? I see nothing strange in that...

  11. david1024

    Enough

    This may sound like a get off my lawn comment. But really, the risk isn't what I want from the site... I want text and maybe some images or a link to a video... Google is the problem with how ads are being pushed in increasingly complex ways. I should not need a 4 core 8gig machine to read news content.

    It is to the point where I sometimes copy/paste text to read in notepad as there is so much ad sewage that I can't get to content. Ditch all the useless automation that is causing these problems. Put it back on the server side.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Searching is futile

    Just click on the adverts citizen.

  13. martinusher Silver badge

    Useless anyway

    I don't know what happened to Google but it has become effectively useless as a search engine. Its probably not Google's fault directly but rather its been gamed so much that the results are meaningless. Maybe the answer isn't AI power but just for it to discard the top 20-30 results from its algorithm before showing the results.

    A simple example of the problem is that I was trying to find a simple tool that's used in applying door and window sealant (and also tile grout) yesterday. I have one I've used for years and I wanted to show someone where it could be found (or even what its called!). Doing a search on various keywords turned up page upon page of irrelevant garbage, all advertising for goods and services that I neither wanted nor needed. I eventually found it through Amazon's product listings -- Amazon just sticks to the facts. Out of curiousity I put the official name back into Google and finally it turned up -- but at over twice Amazon's price (....and more).

    The web e-commerce system is broke beyond fixing. Its messing up everything.

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