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Google AI Overview is just affiliate marketing spam now
(housefresh.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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If it is necessary to fact check something every single time you use it, what benefit does it give?
None. None at all.
None. It's made with the clear intention of substituting itself to actual search results.
If you don't fact-check it, it's dangerous and/or a thinly disguised ad. If you do fact-check it, it brings absolutely nothing that you couldn't find on your own.
Well, except hallucinations, of course.
That is my entire problem with llms and llm based tools. I get especially salty when someone sends me output from one and I confirm it's lying in 2 minutes.
It hasn't stopped anyone from using ChatGPT, which has become their biggest competitor since the inception of web search.
So yes, it's dumb, but they kind of have to do it at this point. And they need everyone to know it's available from the site they're already using, so they push it on everyone.
No, they don't have to use defective technology just becsuse everyone else is.
Yes. They do.
It might be able to give you tables or otherwise collated sets of information about multiple products etc.
I don't know if Google does, but LLMs can. Also do unit conversions. You probably still want to check the critical ones. It's a bit like using an encyclopedia or a catalog except more convenient and even less reliable.
You can do unit conversions with powertoys on windows, spotlight on mac and whatever they call the nifty search bar on various Linux desktop environments without even hitting the internet with exactly the same convenience as an llm. Doing discrete things like that with an llm inference is the most inefficient and stupid way to do them.
All things were doable before. The point is that they were manual extra steps.