Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google

Let us all be dinosaurs

This is where the “nobody needs AI to search the internet” part comes from (emphasis mine):

Historically, any potentially harmful content surfaced by search engines has been protected from direct liability because that surfacing was considered largely unavoidable when helping users sort through an enormous tangle of information online. But the German court emphasized that AI search engines do not enjoy those same protections because AI summaries merely provide “an additional function—one without which the use of the search engine would still be (and is) possible, and without which users are perfectly capable of finding results amidst the ‘flood of data.’”

When search results are just links to content related to a topic, the provider isn’t responsible for the accuracy of the content, which is created by others. But they are responsible for their own summaries and other provider-created content.

This is clearly a reasonable line to draw. This is not content created by others. It’s your robot. Fix your shit.

Saying “I slapped a disclaimer on my libelous robot that says that it may generate libel” doesn’t grant you the right to be libelous.

When search results are just links to content related to a topic, the provider isn’t responsible for the accuracy of the content, which is created by others.

Maybe google should try to make a service that just shows links to useful pages to answer the search requests.

Which is such an amazing detail, and really is the clincher.

They would have to revert their AI “answers” until they can deliver consistent accuracy on their answers. Which isn’t even a possibility with AI.

I hope someone brings this to the US as well.

This is entirely reasonable and I hope this understanding catches on in courts worldwide.

If I go make my own summary/parody/spinoff/reaction video based on someone else’s content, I’m responsible for the media I created. Simple as that. Same should apply to companies.

Not only that, they admitted that it is only “most” users that understand it’s not accurate.

What about the rest? Just fuck em I guess? Let them eat poisonous mushrooms and wire their life savings away to a Nigerian prince.

And by making their user’s initial impression one that might be wrong, they effectively poison people’s thought processes as they sift through the rest of the actual results. Is that a better experience for the users?

And just to be absolutely clear, my understanding is that giving your users the best experience possible is what’s going to result in retaining the most market share. Search is free, users will happily use a different search engine if a particular one doesn’t work or annoys them.

So here’s my conclusion: this method of using AI in search is not only frustrating for users, but also bad for Google. For the sake of their users, they should stop. For their own sake, they should stop.

Luddite!! Don’t you understand that number go up??

I work with a bunch of non tech yokels. They 100% for sure do not understand that AI answers must be checked and verified.

I can’t wait till all this shit gets pay walled and 95% of people won’t be using it. I don’t really see Google being willing to just eat the losses on ai search queries forever.

The court caught that too:

The court also seemed to take a dig at Google for expecting users not to “blindly trust” AI overviews, noting that the AI tool’s utility “would be significantly diminished if the ‘AI overview’ were generally regarded as unreliable and if every single displayed link required independent verification.”

This is the value proposition of llms in general. They are great if you don’t care about quality. They second quality matters their time-saving value drops off to near 0.

i saw some sites have disclaimers saying ai outputs are for entertainment purposes only.

in line of goog’s defense: “everybody (most users) knows that”

It could hypothetically help you direct your search by surfacing useful keywords or relevant events or names or something like it. But since they didn’t make it do that, it’s not really reliable for anything but an energy expensive way to remind yourself of things you already know (what was the command for X again)

most likely is false?

I think the idea is that the info is probably true, but has high enough likelihood of being false that you better check anyway, if it’s something that matters. There’s a whole topic in machine learning called “probable approximate correctness” that tries to make that notion precise. Les Valiant’s book of a similar title introduced the concept and looks very good. I have it but haven’t read it yet.

This isn’t new since ChatGPT and friends dropped. For years before that, Google search results did limited interpretation of natural language requests, not just keyword match frequency. The SEO arms race drove a different kind of AI in search fetching for at least a decade before natural language chatbot tech hit the scene.

I don’t know how much is intentional enshittification to make AI results look better vs how much is simple neglect of the SEO arms race vs maybe it’s genuinely getting harder to deliver good simple search results with LLMs acting as SEO agents?

What I do know is: “AI Mode” delivers more useful information than the old style page link list does these days. The pages linked from the AI Mode results tend to be relevant and useful more than the top page of page links. Hallucinations are way down from where they were 2+ years ago, even better than “top results” misses used to be, IMO. If you’re not getting enough sources in your first AI mode response, ask for more - it delivers.

As was true since the first days of the internet: trust nothing. This is random junk people stick on the web for their own purposes, you have been warned.

That’s really interesting. I’ve never really thought about it in this light, but a search engine’s job is generally just to point you at a bunch of information that could be what your looking for. But they don’t generate any content, so as a result they aren’t really liable or in any way responsible for what you find, they aren’t telling you anything.

But a generative AI, well those are very much their words, they don’t have any link to hide behind, they are absolutely responsible for anything their AI tells you. This explicitly exposes them to legal risk in a way that they never were before.

I hope that in the rest of the world our courts can all make similar rulings. When people search for information you should not be allowed to generate something and provide them that answer as if it were a fact, without taking responsibility for it.

Kagi? Add a “?” if you want to invoke summary, otherwise just get search

Yeah, they have to fight it tooth and nail, because it threatens how they want to do business on a conceptual level. But I also cannot see how they would argue this case.

If another webpage said those publishers are a right cunt (written by AI), that would be defamation for sure. So far, Google was allowed to say those publishers are a right cunt, because they were quoting another webpage.
If they’re not doing that anymore, if they’re not even paraphrasing what another webpage said, but just making own claims, then that’s their own responsibility.

In theory, I could imagine a ruling that says that paraphrasing doesn’t have to be accurate at all times, but in practice, this would be absolute bedlam. Any webpage could publish the wildest misinformation and just say that, oops, they were paraphrasing.
So, even if they can get such ruling through, there would need to be law changes sooner or later, which explicitly make it illegal again.

So ads basically? You mean ads?

We don’t need AI search, we need agnostic search. We need a search that isn’t biased and doesn’t rely on SEO money. With Google failing miserably at search and flailing with Ai BS, the field is ripe. There are some competitors but i think there’s a lot of room for an even better option here.

Search engines are trash by design to keep you using the search engine longer. Its entirely their fault, and its not a valid excuse to push AI.