Google search's decline was notably before the release of chatgpt. However, there has been a notable historic UI/UX stagnation beyond Just Google search. It's probably best described as starting with the release of the iPhone. Not that Apple caused it, but the internet's transition from niche to full of normies caused corporate greed to start circling the wagon on dark patterns. Good UI/UX use to be a selling point, but enshittification starts sooner and sooner for anyone not currently desperate for user acquisition. It's not even rare these days that giant ad spends are used to skip a pre-enshittified phase.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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AI is just a glorified search engine
And a shit one at that. Just the other day Google AI listed Leonard Cohen as a famous tenor lmao.
If it's on the search page, the AI is just summarizing the shitty search results. 
No, it can absolutely cook up novel hallucinations
Sure. But typically that's not what's happening. Gemini on the Google search page is literally just being fed the Top X search results and being told to summarize the results in the context of the search query. It may come to some wild conclusions in the process but, more often than not, it's platforming the search result information above its own training.
The results are also cached and use a smaller model for speed/cost reduction so it does definitely hallucinate.
The very act of summarizing is technically a hallucination, that's where the "creativity" comes from. Is it possibly doing so, yes. Is it much more likely that the inaccuracy is coming from the shitty results that we know is being elevated above it's own training, as we've seen literally since they started rolling it out, probably. Leveraging this crap is basically modern day SEO.
A 'hallucination' in my mind is specifically when it fabricates direct lies that are contradicted by evidence (that's usually in the same search results).
E.g. confidently giving you incorrect ISBN or DOI nubers for things. Which is does a lot. It also just makes up APIs for real, existing, documented APIs because it assumes patterns that don't exist for that specific project.
The whole 'slop squatting' exploit is based around those types of hallucinations. People have successfully noticed fake npm packages being imported repeatedly by LLM codebases and made them so they would actually install...
not at all. it's a knock on effect sure but the incentives to enshittify are long term precursors to AI chatbots. importantly, the exact same pressures are on AI. didnt they start putting ads on AI already?
the thing to remember about all new tech products is they're as a rule unprofitable, propped up by heaps of investment, then "enshittify" once market penetration is sufficient from subsidized/free use in order to make profit
We really do live in the shittiest timeline.
Google AI pretty much just runs a summary of the search + reddit
An older relative recently mused to me how amazing it is that soon ai will put all the world's information at our fingertips! And it's like, no we already have that you just have to have a modicum of curiosity, ai will just digest this down into the most statistically average version delivery of this and allow the models' owners to present their version of consensus reality as something objective bc the slop machine said so. And I've talked to this person multiple times about the enshittification of google search which they agreed they've also seen, so I have to assume they are just seeing ai get glazed up on the legacy media they consume.
Hapless rubes are also seeing upper and middle management at their workplaces drooling over AI and matching the energy. Which is basically just watching the butcher sharpen a knife and thinking "oohh! That's a shiny knife!"