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Google’s Generative Search Experience is failing its users

AI Snapshots are misleading for the most vulnerable users.

Daley Wilhelm
UX Collective
5 min readJun 20, 2024
A photo from Google’s I/O conference showing a screen reading “bold and responsible AI.”
Bold, yes… but responsible? Image from — https://uxplanet.org/how-google-changes-the-future-of-ux-forever-with-ai-snapshots-b2fa31a18a87

A year ago, I wrote about Google’s shiny new experiment: the Generative Search Experience (GSE) and how it smoothed out some of the friction associated with the typical search engine experience. That typical search experience is one you might be familiar, and frustrated, with: sponsored links and irrelevant information bury what you’re really looking for.

An illustration comparing the search results of Google “then” which displays only “the thing you want” vs “now” which has several sponsored results, products, things people have also asked, and finally “the thing you want” at the very bottom.
A typical Google experience without the new AI Overview. Image by — https://twitter.com/chazhutton

GSE was meant to cut through all that clutter and provide a “smarter” answer to more complicated queries like, “good bikes for commuting” via an AI Snapshot. This AI Snapshot, now called an AI Overview, would do the research for the user, eliminating the need to open countless tabs and scroll past copy that intentionally buries the lede when it comes to key information.

An AI Overview displayed on a phone showing Google’s suggestions for cleaning a fabric sofa in an organized list.
AI Overviews compile an answer to a query, even a more complicated question like “how to clean a fabric sofa?” Image from — https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2024/05/17/google-ai-overview-search/73728192007/

Unfortunately, it looks like this particular experiment is failing.

#Googenough: AI told me to eat rocks

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Daley Wilhelm

A fiction writer turned UX writer dedicated to crisp copy, inclusive experiences, and humanizing tech.

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