disguise

Google has updated its search platform for the umpteenth time, but it has done so with an especially significant change. The user experience in its AI search engines (both AI Overviews and AI Mode) attempts to become more “human”. And to do this, in these searches Google will add more context to the links, such as extracts from internet forums and blogs. And if there is a beneficiary (or harmed) of that movement, it is Reddit. Google was already a gateway to Reddit. There is a behavior that Google has been seeing in its data for years and that for a long time it preferred not to publicly acknowledge: when someone wants a real answer to a real question, add “Reddit” to the end of the search. Not because Reddit is necessarily a reliable source, but because Reddit brings together real people who have experienced this issue, tried to solve it, and written about it without anyone paying them to do so. Google, with all its infrastructure and all its algorithms, had not managed to replicate that. So instead of trying it’s going to incorporate those answers directly. What exactly has changed. The search engine update will make in AI Overviews Fragments from forums, social networks and other “first-person sources” appear. When someone searches for something for which there is no single objective answer, Google’s AI will include perspectives and opinions found in all kinds of (supposedly) human sources online. Doing so will add the name of the creator of that content (or their avatar) and the origin from which said perspective comes. Google also promises to add more context about the origin of its AI-generated answers, similar to how ChatGPT or Claude include links supporting their answers. Tired of so much SEO. The reason is obvious: Google’s organic results for practical and subjective questions—”what vacuum cleaner should I buy”, “how do I cure my dog’s ear”, “what is the best neighborhood to live in in Valencia”— They are dominated by SEO and those techniques optimized to appear on Google. It is important to position, not answer the question well. That is precisely where Reddit, like other forums or personal blogs, has something that this content usually does not have: the real experience of someone who was in the same situation. Google sums it up in its own statement bluntly: “For many searches, people are increasingly looking to other people for advice.” The contradiction that Google has not resolved. There is a potential problem in this new way of conceiving these searches with AI. AI Overviews were designed to answer questions directly and thus save the user the work of clicking, reading and researching. Now they will include diverse and even contradictory perspectives from forums and social networks. So, will AI Overviews answer the question, or will it make us go back to the sources to find the answer? If it is the latter, it will not be very different from what I already did the traditional Google search engine. There is an interesting imbalance here between “we give you the answer” and “we give you context so you can find the answer.” In a sense, Google’s decision complicates searches. AI models are becoming less prone to failure. The famous cases of add glue to pizza are much less common now, and new models often boast a significant reduction in “hallucination” rates that they have. GPT-5.5 Instant, released this week, “produced 52.5% fewer hallucinations than GPT-5.3 Instant,” OpenAI indicated in its official announcement. The problem is that these hallucinations are increasingly difficult to detect because these chatbots hide these mistakes very well. That the system now includes unverified or validated content from networks like Reddit can be problematic: community votes do not always measure how truthful or useful a certain thread is. Using Reddit has its drawbacks. This platform has value precisely because it is not optimized for Google algorithms: It is chaotic and contradictory.. Sometimes there are brilliant responses from people, but other times there are completely wrong comments. When a user adds “Reddit” to their search and reads the results, they are automatically weighing which comments are useful and which are not. But that step disappears if Google extracts fragments of those discussions to include in an AI Overview. Eliminate that human filtering step and presents those answers with an authority that perhaps they should not have. Google will have much more difficulty than a human in distinguishing the comment of someone who has been working in plumbing for twenty years from that of someone who tinkers as a hobby. The shadow contract. This is not just an editorial or technological decision. In 2024 Google signed a deal worth $60 million a year with Reddit to access their data and train their models. You are not incorporating content from this social network as a public service: what you are doing is monetizing a commercial contract. Your message that you are highlighting those “original voices” is really saying that you have paid for that privileged access to Reddit content and now you are going to take advantage of that access and make it profitable. That revenue is interesting for Reddit, no doubt, but there is a problem: clicks. The Stack Overflow Precedent. There is no need to speculate much about what may happen because it has already happened. Stack Overflow is the largest technical Q&A community on the internet, but has lost most of its traffic in two years because AI companies They started collecting all those answers. to train your models and then serve them to your users directly. That caused users to stop visiting Stack Overflow and experts to stop answering questions. The quality of the new content on this network was clearly affected, and it became clear that if the AI ​​already gave you the answer without having to enter Stack Overflow, why enter? The danger for Reddit is exactly the same. Google didn’t have many alternatives. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity They have been capturing … Read more