A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previous limited liability protections for search engine operators don't apply to AI overviews. In this case, Google's AI had falsely linked two publishers to fraud and made claims that didn't appear in any of the linked sources. The ruling could set a precedent for AI-generated content liability worldwide.
That’s way too black and white. It’s a time and convenience thing. Let’s say i want to troubleshoot something on my motherboard that caused my pc to stop working. I really do not want to be reading through a 300 page manual from my phone (because my pc is not working). Search may turn up 10-20 relevant results that id have to scroll through.
And AI could take my query and do the work for me. Give me the link to the result they think is most relevant as well as explain it in more layman way than the manual.
I’m technical so I could do this without AI. But let’s take a less technical person. Now they can follow along and try as well.
The function is good. Its arguably the best path forward. The issue is accuracy and cost.
But something does not need to be accurate 100% of the time if we are all aware of it. If we wait for something to be 100% perfect nothing would ever progress.
And cost should only concern us on the environmental side. We should absolutely force them to fix that side of it. But price wise? Im really confused why the internet continues to bring up cost. I honestly dont care how much it costs a trillion dollar company to provide a service to us if I dont have to pay. Google, Youtube, Amazon, Netflix, all operated in the red for years and years. I don’t remember public discourse being omg how is Google going to afford to keep giving us nonshitty search.
The solution is text search. Has been for decades now. Search is good enough for these use cases, and proof of it is that nobody ever had to read a 300 page manual to fix such an issue.
Also, you know indexes exist, right?
If the issues are accuracy and cost, it means that it is a worse and less cost effective solution than just search. Unless you believe that LLMs can tell what’s true from what isn’t.
You really believe that these multi trillion companies don’t make a profit? That they offer their products for free? Such a naive take.
Text search is fine but not better than something that can both find you the most likely result you are looking for AND explain it to you if its too technical.
Text search is what Yahoo and Ask Jeeves did. Then Google improved on it by adding algorithmic search.
I bring up accuracy because its not 100% accurate. But if it works 85- 90 percent of the time, which it currently does according to benchmarks, that’s more efficient than Text search even accounting for times you need to adjust.
And no its not as cost efficient, but again I dont care as the end user because its not my cost.
Are you like, being purposefully ignorant here? I’m pointing out the fact that these trillion dollar companies weren’t profitable for years on end before they became so. And in the end their profitability is irrelevant to me. I don’t care how much AI costs them if they arent charging me for it.
And stop with your pedantic “you think free is free omg” argument. Go pay with actual money for your subpar searches then while your data is still being collected everywhere
There’s no such thing as “algorithmic search”. I don’t know where you got that term from, but again, not a thing. What Larry Page came up with was Pagerank, which is a ranking algorithm.
Citation needed. Where have you seen those numbers? Because there isn’t a single LLM out there that scores above 75% in publicly available benchmarks, for any given task. Meaning that there isn’t a LLM that does any benchmarked task with an accuracy above 75%, see https://llm-stats.com/
Right. What do you think it’s going to happen here in the near future? That companies like Google are going to absorb the costs without passing them to customers at all, ever? Let’s say that they don’t, because they are for profit companies after all, what’s your plan? Signing up for a couple dozen free accounts to keep using them and become sort of a “LLM vagrant”?
But let’s say they don’t charge you ever. How do you think they are going to profit from you? Currently we know, they track your every move, you essentially pay with your privacy. Or you think they won’t? That they will forever lose money?
I guess the part I don’t understand here is that you must know that all these companies make money from their users, one way or another, and still you believe you aren’t paying for any of it. Are you ok with how they make that money, then?
Bro…
Tell me what you are seeing. This page you linked shows all top models for AI research at above 80% and the top ones at 90%.
Here is an April article stating Gemini AI summary at 90%. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-overviews-accuracy.html
And keep on mind these benchmarks will use more complex searches than what people use normally.
75% sounds like 2025, but let’s say that is the the number we both agree to. That’s still useful enough most of the time that you wouldn’t scroll or search further. AND it requires you to take the stance that technology remains at a standstill and never improves over time. Let me ask you this. 1 year ago reddit and lemmy had plenty of posts showing awful and memey AI summary and search results. Where are those posts now?
Finally the money part. I point you to Youtube. A company that was never , got bought out and still remains free* to this day. Is it enshittified from before? Yes. But its still not withdrawing a dime from my bank account.
I am perfectly aware of the situation. But i don’t have a doomerism view on it that a lot of you share. If we never shared our any of our data,
We would not have these services most likely. Where do you think traffic and routing data comes from when you use Google Maps? Do you think the average person would prefer paying some company for GPS, and worse everything experience? Would the average person pay monthly for something like a 100 MB email mailbox?
For that reason I’m more ok trading data for service. Most of the time that data use is for monetary purposes which motivates the company to also improve said service (to a point).
That said I fully support more regulation to the industry on how data is handled in general.
I see that you don’t know what an algorithm is. Because every search engine before Google used algorithms, just not Pagerank.
On a single benchmark, GPQA, that was first released in 2022 and is now widely considered to be on its way out. This is extremely common in LLM benchmarking: every couple years, old methodologies are weeded out because most recent LLMs score 90% or higher. This could be for many reasons, but more than likely LLMs are trained on the specific corpus these benchmarks test against, which is akin to taking an exam knowing the answers beforehand.
The aggregates tell a very different story.
On the NYT article, you missed where it says that on the latest Gemini version, more than half of the summaries are ungrounded, meaning that users couldn’t possibly verify the accuracy of the response given the linked site. They also often provide additional information that’s not true.
I’m not even going to bother with the “I’m fine paying with my data” bit, because think that’s just a morally broken take.
I guess you just like being super pedantic because apparently you do know the difference between directory based searches and what came after it. Feel free to argue how yahoo and altavista was fine and the world really didn’t need Google search though.
Tell me what aggregates you are seeing. I have no idea what you are looking at on this page that is suppose to prove your point on accuracy.
Because right now you brought up a benchmark site and then just saying how all benchmarks are skewed. That’s fine and all but can you tell me what you are actually looking at so we can be on the same page??
And again, at 75% or 70%, or whatever you imagine current accuracy is, what happened to all the memes about Gemini telling you to add bleach to pancakes or something? Low hanging karma posts just literally disappeared. Why do you think that is? A google search for “funny gpt answers” brings up results from 2024. Let that sink in.
I imagine it’s quite the burden being so morally superior to the vast majority of humanity.
JFC this is so tiring. I’m trying to explain the issues from a technical point of view and you dismiss all I’m saying like I’m crazy or I don’t know anything about the topic.
I get that you like these summaries because you believe that they make your life easier, but the least you could do is educate yourself, read some books, anything.