When did Google get so f-ing weird?

The author says a search for “hes never coming over dario” should have surfaced old tweets or Reddit posts, but Google instead returned an AI Overview that acted like an empathetic companion. He sees that as a sign that search has drifted away from simply finding information.

Reading notes

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• He looked up a mid-2010s basketball meme tied to Dario Saric and expected old tweets or Reddit posts.
• Google returned an AI Overview that framed the search as if he had been hurt by someone named Dario.
• He says that response felt like Google wanted to be a sympathetic listener instead of a search engine.
• He contrasts a search interface with a chat app and says the result felt wrong in a search context.
• He notes that the exact links he wanted were still on the page, farther down below the AI result.
• He argues that search now feels oddly parasocial and that some parts of search worked fine before LLMs.