An internet breaking news story. As we told you last week, Google has begun offering AI-generated answers to search questions. But some answers, it turns out, are strange. Users were told, for instance, that glue was an appropriate ingredient for homemade pizza. We talk to reporter Katie Notopolous, who baked and ate her own homemade glue pizza. Support the show: search engine.show To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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That's ShipStation.com, code SEARCH. Hello. We were not actually supposed to publish an episode this week, but then something happened that was so directly and frankly so absurdly related to our last episode that we wanted to make a quick one for you because the world continues to be very strange, and as it does, it's sometimes hard to resist the urge to document it. So we're here.
To catch you up, last episode, we were talking to platformers Casey Newton about this huge change that had just been made to how Google Search worked. Our episode, I will admit, a slightly doomy installment for a show that tries to, if not avoid the doom, at least steer away from it. Jim, I got your message. I'm sorry.
But the news we were responding to was that Google was increasingly replacing search results that had human written information with AI-generated search answers. The way this new feature would work, the AI would now draw on the vast corpus of human knowledge on the internet to just answer user questions itself.
According to the head of Google's parent company, the reason for this new feature is that many Google users would prefer to just not have to sift through a bunch of search results. Instead, the company wanted to let Google do the Googling for you. This change may have also been rolled out because the quality of much of what is Googleable is not always that wonderful anyway. And in the last year,
AI spam has already begun to clog up a lot of the websites that Google might want to index. So just giving people searching for a question the answer saves Google some of the work of trying to sort the wheat from the chaff online. I had reservations about this big new change. We talked about those reservations last episode.
What I could not picture just a few weeks ago was how funny the next phase of things would be. Google rolled out AI overviews widely in mid-May. Lots of people started using it for the first time. And it turned out the way the AI would answer questions was sometimes chaotically insane. The problem was that the AI Google used to answer readers' questions had ingested much of Reddit.
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