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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17949 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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since all search engines have turned into LLMs

Google appears to have actually dropped their full Boolean search functionality, I assume because of this.

It's going to become a huge problem (or, at a minimum, extremely annoying), particularly in parts of my line of work.

Google appears to have actually dropped their full Boolean search functionality

Well, crap. I may now be finally forced to shift to a different search engine because of this, but they all seem to be rushing full tilt like the Gadarene swine into AI-ifcation.

My expression right now: 😠

I may have overstated the problem - I need to test it more, I was having problems with the exact search function and it seems Google has a "verbatim mode" that might assuage my concerns - but I definitely am not happy with the overall trajectory.

Re-endorsing Kagi, another search engine

Thank you!

Apparently it's somewhat vulnerable to prompt injection as well.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2026/05/22/google-search-bar-ai-broken-disregard-ignore-dismiss/90219026007/

Darkly amusing to imagine LLMs putting me out of a job, not because they are better at what I do, but because Google for some reason decided to gouge out their own eye.

I guess their quality has been slipping for some time, but the other day it started giving me screwy results when I was hunting for specific phrases. I guess I will have to make sure that "verbatim mode" is switched on whenever I search for an exact phrase, now...and then hope they don't get rid of that, too.

I was trying to google whatever happened to that guy who ran down a Christmas parade. I remembered almost no details about it. Not the name, location, etc. Google's LLM was adamant that no black man had ever done anything like that, and explicitly said only white people had. It was only displaying search results about Charlottesville, and how the guy who did it got what was coming to him. I was trying to put together a rebuttal to a post last week or two on the Charlottesville Unite the Right incident. I think Google somehow knew that, because all the LLM summaries were preemptive rebuttals to the information I was attempting to find.

It made me highly skeptical of the narrative being pushed by the OP's "exhaustive" research. Especially when my own search attempts were so heavily guard railed to keep me on narrative.

I fucking hate this brave new world.

I did eventually find the information, and now for whatever reason it comes up readily. It was Darrell Brooks and he attacked a Waukesha Christmas Parade. He got the book thrown at him.

Google's LLM was adamant that no black man had ever done anything like that

No, you see, that's because if you remember the reporting at the time, it was the vehicle what done it, the evil machine. The car or truck took it into its head to just run out of the driver's control and charge into a parade all on its own initiative.

There was some mockery of the phrasing about this on social media, if you read the right websites. Brooks insisted on being his own representative at trial which led to some very entertaining moments.

The information shows up as the first search result. You say "For whatever reason" it shows up now, but what is your theory here- the Google AI somehow knew that you, specifically, were looking for wrongthink and tried to foil your attempts, but then elected not to do that for anyone else? I'd be curious to know exactly what your query was. You searched for something like "black guy who drove a car into a parade" and the AI summary posted text saying this never happened and only white people have ever driven cars into crowds? How very odd.

My guess is their LLM over indexes on the recent search history and what you click on. So likely WhiningCoil vaguely described the incident with perhaps incorrect info and with the low information query Google returned bad results. He clicked on them to see if they were the thing he was thinking of and the LLM got that irrelevant stuff stuck in its context. I have similar issues when using OpenAI models professionally and personally.

Searching "black guy who drove a car into a parade" returns the wiki article on the attack as the first result and has the same info in the AI box.

You should read until the end of my post.

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