Doctor Mike

the search engine can only return what it has available to it.

And now this is actually becoming increasingly challenging because as you have AI answer engines up top,

they are trying to synthesize something.

This is something that I know Google is trying to figure out what to do because, you know, you don't want the AI answer engine to hallucinate some BS.

It used to show you occasionally a warning.

They call them topicality and freshness voids, right?

Where it would say like, there are not very many results that meet the search term you're looking for.

That was how it would let people know kind of like, okay, you're looking for microbes in the sand, but that's not really a thing that we have a lot of.

And it would let people know that, you know, sometimes during a breaking event, when a lot of people are searching for somebody's name or something like that, it's just not like, sorry, we don't have anything to give you yet.

This is trying to let people help people realize something that I think is very challenging in the age of social media, which is it takes time to get information.

It takes time to gather facts.

It takes time to know truth.

And we expect that to be available to us the minute we want it, right?

The minute we search for it.

And there is a delay there.

And this was something that was, when we were doing the virality project during COVID, you know,

I don't really use the term misinformation very often anymore, except in occasional cases where there is a clear fact there, right?

Vaccines don't cause autism.

But when we talk about, like when we were doing the work on the COVID vaccine, rumor is much more the appropriate term because we didn't know

what a side effect, whether this is a true or false claim.