If you Googled “tragic failure” in 2005, President George W. Bush’s official biography on the White House website would appear among the top results.
This is not a political act by a tech company, it’s a prank. Early jokesters on the Internet may remember the fun of “Google bombing” in the 2000s, the most famous of which was Bush’s insult.
Google bombing occurs when phishers link a web page (such as Bush’s biography) to specific text on their own website, as in Bush’s case “miserably failed.” Given enough examples, search engine algorithms will misinterpret these terms as commonly linked terms. This created all sorts of interesting results: Google searches for “Liar” and “poodle” produced the webpage of then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, while “Dangerous cult” returned the Church of Scientology’s website as the first result.
In 2007, Google adjusted its algorithm to prevent further Google bombings.
After Google launched its AI-powered search overviews in May, users quickly noticed that they sometimes provided fake and weird results. If you ask Google about the health benefits of running with scissors, it will tell you that this activity is a great form of aerobic exercise that can “improve your pores and give you strength.” Another query led to Google recommending the health benefits of the rock, apparently citing a satirical article from The Onion News.
“Eating the right rocks is good for you because they contain minerals important for your health,” Google’s artificial intelligence overview said in response to a reporter’s query.
The ‘binder in pizza’ is still going strong
However, nothing caused more Internet uproar than the AI Overview’s suggestion to “mix about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue into the sauce” to prevent cheese from slipping off pizza slices.
A Google spokesperson dismissed the erroneous results, writing at the time: “The examples we see are often very uncommon queries and are not representative of most people’s experiences.” They added that the “vast majority” The Artificial Intelligence Overview provides high-quality information and provides links that allow inquirers to search more deeply.
However, even as Google publicly expresses confidence in its new artificial intelligence tools, the company has quietly begun to reduce its visibility. According to research from content marketing platform BrightEdge, Google has gradually reduced the presence of artificial intelligence overviews in search results from 84% to 15%.
A Google spokesperson disputed the data, noting that the numbers are different from what the company sees. They added that this may be because BrightEdge looked at a reduced query set that was not a representative sample of Google search traffic, including those that opted out of the AI overview.
An example that still sometimes pops up in Artificial Intelligence overviews is the glue-in-pizza results that circulate online. edge It was recently reported that if you ask Google how much glue to add to your pizza, it will give you the same result, only this time citing a Business Insider article about the fiasco.
What this means is that it seems that the more journalists write about ridiculous AI overviews, the more it feeds algorithms to produce the same erroneous results. It’s a self-fulfilling feedback loop that harkens back to the absurdity of the Google bombing era, even though the only trolls at work are Google itself.
when wealth Reporters tried various searches for pizza, cheese, and glue, but no AI overview came up, which could mean Google may have discovered the mistakes they kept making and quickly tweaked their platform.
A Google spokesperson said a large number of searches continued to show queries, but that the technology was being edited.
“We are continuing to improve when and how we present our AI overviews so that they are as useful as possible, including technical updates to improve the quality of responses,” they told wealth.
