Searching for 'Disregard' Breaks Google [Updated]

[leonremi]

I’m firmly in the camp of AI being a very stupid idea.
But that glorified auto complete system does usually appear to (or rather pretend to) work like a natural language programming system.
So yeah, give it a verb of action and it will try to take that action.
I really don’t see the issue here.

 

[unchecked]

Care to explain why? Perhaps you can shed some light on what exactly is broken here. I think we're all confused.

Like many others, I fail to see what's broken. The chatbot did what it was told to do, and the search results are shown below. I'm not defending Google, I don't even like them. I'm more disappointed that this is even a story, which is the sentiment I gathered from others as well.

There right there is the issue. It is not a chatbot. It is search. But when people actually search for words that overlaps with chat commands, the thing breaks.

The "news" here is Google wants their front facing service to be a chatbot and no longer be search. I mean we know this already but this is the first practical evidence of it.

The irony of this situation is that in breaking, the internet realised they are better off with search being search and not be a chatbot because when you look for information on this subject, it's all articles and forum posts. As search should be.

 

[AndyUnderscoreR]

... If you want the regular old search results, look below that section.

"If"? The user literally went to Google's search engine and typed in a search query! There is no rational scenario in which the user's intention was so have a chat with a chatbot, and even if they did want that, it's still broken because there is no way to continue the conversation.

 

[Taipan]

Can we please stop selling users this AI BS before its development has lead to a reasonably finished product?

 

[neuropsychguy]

You have to go to google first, where you will see the new search button that says "AI Mode", then type. The browser address bar in Safari doesn't submit to the same place.

I went straight to google.com and did the search. When I did it again, it looks like Google made a change in searching. Now you have to specify AI Mode otherwise it does a traditional search. Now there's no "AI Overview" at the top anymore without specifying "AI Mode". Now when clicking on AI Mode, it gives a new response recognizing the ambiguity of the "disregard" prompt.

 

[StellarVixen]

I went straight to google.com and did the search. When I did it again, it looks like Google made a change in searching. Now you have to specify AI Mode otherwise it does a traditional search. Now there's no "AI Overview" at the top anymore without specifying "AI Mode". Now when clicking on AI Mode, it gives a new response recognizing the ambiguity of the "disregard" prompt.

It’s not simple like that. In my experience, sometimes AI overview just refused to show up. Try googling something else.

 

[neuropsychguy]

It’s not simple like that. In my experience, sometimes AI overview just refused to show up. Try googling something else.

Edit: Disregard. 😉 I see what you mean. Sometimes the AI Overview is there and sometimes not. Before today the AI Overview was always or almost always there for me. Today it looks it's more sporadically showing up, but there is also a separate AI Mode too, which is a more recent addition.

 

[litmag01]

Now I know why my electricity bills are so high - to support the power grid infrastructure for parsing... disregard. Thank you google.

 

[StellarVixen]

Disregard.

Understood. Message disregarded. Let me know what you'd like to do instead!

 

[oliverades]

I searched for former nfl player Wayne Gandy and in the “height” box it says “hello world” 🙄

 

[TVreporter]

Wait for the day "Launch the nukes" actually works…

 

[ikramerica]

Their explanation makes sense. The AI overview is broken so it comes up blank but the search itself is acting normally.
A first solution would be to substitute “AI overview unavailable” instead of a white space until they come up with the logic.
The answer is not that simple. It would be like asking search to know when to ignore and when not to ignore targeted search language.
Maybe people shouldn’t type in commands that they don’t want the AI to act on? Or put disregard in quotes so google knows to not treat it as an instruction?

 

[ikramerica]

Every social media platform today: "AI tools that have become impossible to avoid"

Every service. Tax software has REPLACED online support with AI that can’t actually help with anything vague or bug related. And it’s touted as a new feature.

 

[johnsawyercjs]

I got the result I was looking for, with my particular search, in the second hit:

 

[krakenrelease]

If anyone wants an alternative to Google, I like and use Kagi. It's $10/month. Less if you don't need unlimited searches. It's nice to not have ads and not to be subject to trackers when searching for things.

Why on earth would you pay for search? Duck Duck Go is privacy oriented, free and plenty good enough. Brave search is ok as well. I prefer DDG.

 

[BigMcGuire]

Why on earth would you pay for search? Duck Duck Go is privacy oriented, free and plenty good enough. Brave search is ok as well. I prefer DDG.

Because if you aren't paying for a product, you are the product being sold. Kagi has unparalleled privacy. I used DDG for years and years so I'm not harping on DDG and I believe they also have privacy in mind but they have to make money somehow.

Kagi has amazing customization, amazing privacy, an amazing CEO and staff that works hard to give users value for their $ (I've spent many many hours working with them on their Discord), and I like their transparency. Yes, it's a little bit of $, but I've enjoyed being part of this little company's journey - they also use AI with privacy in mind as well (if you go for the more expensive tiers).

I've used Kagi for several years now - because I value my privacy.

And you're not wrong - DDG is good. Brave search is good too. And yes they're free - how do they make their $ - via Ads. Kagi has no ads. I can't stand ads. lol.

 

[4k78]

I read "AI Overview" as "AI Overlords".

 

[krakenrelease]

Because if you aren't paying for a product, you are the product being sold. Kagi has unparalleled privacy. I used DDG for years and years so I'm not harping on DDG and I believe they also have privacy in mind but they have to make money somehow.

Kagi has amazing customization, amazing privacy, an amazing CEO and staff that works hard to give users value for their $ (I've spent many many hours working with them on their Discord), and I like their transparency. Yes, it's a little bit of $, but I've enjoyed being part of this little company's journey - they also use AI with privacy in mind as well (if you go for the more expensive tiers).

I've used Kagi for several years now - because I value my privacy.

And you're not wrong - DDG is good. Brave search is good too. And yes they're free - how do they make their $ - via Ads. Kagi has no ads. I can't stand ads. lol.

Fair enough. I hate ads as well. I usually pay for non-ad services. But not for search. I have my paid NextDNS subscription to kill ads at the dns level for anything that connects to my router lol.

 

[coolfactor]

The system did EXACTLY what it was programmed to do. Not a bug, nothing is broken. People will learn there are several of these commands.



What if you type "translate" or "proofread"? These are all single-word sentences with one verb and in English, single-word verb sentences are a command to the listener. Like "Stop" or any of a dozen other examples.hat's



If you said “disregard" to a human, what would s/he do? Certainly, you would not expect the human to recite the dictionary definition of "disregard". You would expect the human to disregard something. So now the AI is only acting like a real person.

Basically, the author of this article is either another AI or a person who did not think about this for very long.

Not entirely correct. When attempting this on google.com from Canada, I see regular web search results for both `disregard` and `stop`. No AI involved. That's what the article is pointing out... that these keywords were invoking Google's AI interpreter.

Not happening for me, so is this region-specific?

 

[SFjohn]

DuckDuckGo works perfectly in this case… 😉

 

[01cowherd]

When they say, "strong quarter," they really mean that they've intentionally expanded the amount of scrolling you have to do to get the information you asked for. This gives them the opportunity to show more ads to you, which increases income and profits. It's all smoke and mirrors and bait and switch. In the context of search results, AI is a solution looking for a problem. Never forget, it's all about the ads.

Let us never forget that internal documents from the Google antitrust lawsuit show executives discussing deliberately making search results worse in order to juice the number of search queries (and thus ads).

We could increase queries quite easily in the short term in user negative ways (turn off spell correction, turn off ranking improvements, place refinements all over the page).

 

[StellarVixen]

It still happens. They might have fixed one specific phrase, but the problem needs a more robust solution. If they intent to fix it at all