Google AI Mode will reinvent Search. I’m worried — and you should be, too

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AI Mode will reinvent Search. I’m worried — and you should be, too

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
What is AI Mode for

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Search?
A rich history of risks
This is not the Search evolution I seek

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is pushing forward with more AI into how internet search works. Remember AI Overviews, which essentially summarizes the content pulled from websites, and presents it at the top of the

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Search page?

That error-prone feature is now

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to the US market, powered by the new Gemini 2.0 AI models. It no longer requires a

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account sign-in, and has opened to users across all age groups. While that is a risky move in itself,

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is giving a similar blanket treatment to the whole Search page with a new AI Mode.

Currently available as a Lab experiment, AI Mode essentially turns the traditional

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Search experience with website links into a conversational dialogue, just the way AI chatbots give you answers. It’s a delicious convenience, but could prove to be dramatically erroneous, if history of AI Overviews is anything to go by.

What is AI Mode for

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Search?

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The overarching idea is to give users all the information they need — pulled from indexed websites — and save the hassle of clicking on sources and reading through webpages to find the answers. You can ask follow-up queries in a natural language format, instead of a keyword-stuffed search, and even provide the details that would otherwise require a few more follow-up search requests.

“It uses a “query fan-out” technique, issuing multiple related searches concurrently across subtopics and multiple data sources and then brings those results together to provide an easy-to-understand response,” explains the company.

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, however, warns that it may not always get it right with AI mode, even though its internal tests have delivered encouraging results. In scenarios where the AI Mode is not confident about the summarized response, it will simply show a list of web search results, like the traditional

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Search experience.

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In its current avatar, it can provide answers as a wall of text or neatly formatted tables, but down the road, images and videos will also be included. AI mode is currently available only for

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One AI Premium subscribers, and will roll out as an opt-in experience.

It’s a bad omen for any person reliant on

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Search, especially if we are talking about accuracy. Here’s an example. I looked up whether we are living in the year 2025.

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’s AI Overview said it is the year 2024. The first source it cited for that information was

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, which explicitly says the current year is 2025.

A rich history of risks

The idea behind AI Mode for

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Search is theoretically rooted in user convenience. However, the fundamental tech stack behind it is still dealing with a few problems that the entire AI landscape is yet to fix. One of them is AI hallucinations, which is essentially an AI tool making up information and confidently presenting it as a fact.

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’s AI Overviews are the best example of those missteps, and the mistakes continue to pop up to this day. Take for example this

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, which was shared merely a few hours ago on

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, in which the AI Overview confidently lied about a right-side driving rule in India.

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/ Digital Trends

That’s a false statement, and yet, at no point, the language of the AI Overview text suggests that the user should fact-check this information. “It’s so inaccurate and so buggy that I’m surprised it even exists,” says another

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detailing its sheer inaccuracy.

AI Overviews only appear as a condensed nugget of information, served at the top of the

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Search page. Now, imagine a whole page that is presented to users as a long presentation, with a few source links interspersed through the wall of text.

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says AI Overviews will excel at “coding, advanced math and multimodal queries.” Yet, not too long ago, it fumbled facts and turned history on its head, especially with the kind of natural language queries that are being hyped for AI mode.

When

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whether astronauts met cats on the moon, it confidently agreed that it was true, adding that astronauts even took care of those lunar cats. Virginia Tech digital literacy expert, Julia Feerrar,

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that AI doesn’t actually know the answers to our questions, citing an example where

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AI overview confidently mentioned Barack Obama as the first ******* President.

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— SG-r01 (@heavenrend)

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The consequences of AI misinformation could be disastrous, especially when it comes to health and wellness-related queries. In an analysis of over 30 million Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs),

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found that health-related search is the most popular category where AI Overviews appear.

This is the same tool that

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a person should eat at least one rock per day, adding one-eighth cup of glue to pizza, drinking ****** to pass out kidney stones, and

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that a baby elephant can fit in a human palm as of 2025.

This is not the Search evolution I seek

Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

Despite

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’s assertions about how the AI models have evolved, the situation hasn’t improved dramatically. Less than a day ago,

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spotted AI Overviews confidently claiming that MJ Lenderman has won 14 Grammy awards.

It even got the year wrong, when I asked something as simple as “is it 2025” in the

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Search box. ”No, it is not currently the year 2025. The current year is 2024,” said the AI Overview.

Going a step further, it explained how 2025 is a common year that starts on a Wednesday, adding a bunch of non-related information discussing everything from national celebrations to UN declarations that have absolutely nothing to do with my query.

Now, I am not entirely against AI. On the contrary, I extensively use tools like Gemini Deep Research, and often rely on the latest Gemini 2.0 Flash AI model for creative ideas when my brain cells are not firing off at peak capacity.

However, pushing an error-prone AI overhaul to a source of information as indispensable as

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Search is a risky proposition. Digital Trends has reached out to

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and will update this story once we get a response.

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#

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#Mode #reinvent #Search #worried

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