In May 2024, Google rolled out AI Overviews (the AI-generated summaries that sit atop search results) to all US users. Within weeks, screenshots went viral: users were advised to add glue to pizza and eat rocks daily for minerals. A short blog titled When Did Google Get So Weird? circulated this week on Lobsters and Hacker News, stringing these images into a single thread—the article concludes that Google has lost the ability to make its product narrative coherent. This matters to us because Google still controls the email, calendars, documents, and search that most white-collar workers rely on daily.
What this is
This is a short critique from an individual developer, cataloging Google's recent anomalies in AI products over the past year:
- AI Overviews produced wrong and even dangerous suggestions within a month of launch (such as adding glue to pizza and eating rocks daily for minerals), triggering public backlash
- Gemini image generation once refused to render white figures (including historical scenes like 1940s German soldiers), was criticized for "overcorrection," then over-corrected in the opposite direction
- Google search results have been polluted by SEO farms and AI-generated content, with many queries returning low-quality pseudo-original content at the top
- The Workspace, Cloud, and Search AI product lines are confusingly named—even internal employees can't keep them straight
The author's core thesis: Google no longer has a coherent product proposition; it's more like it's being pushed around by competitors like OpenAI and Perplexity.
Industry view
In Hacker News and Lobsters discussions, developers broadly agreed with the diagnosis but diverged on the cause:
- One camp sees this as the fate of big companies. The ad business is still printing money, with no incentive to do the hard work of building a "coherent strategy"
- The other camp points out that Google delivered real innovation over the past decade—Search, Maps, Android, Chrome, TensorFlow. Today's strangeness is a reaction to ChatGPT-style existential threats, not a new normal
- Risk note: Shorting Google has been the most unprofitable hobby of the past 15 years. The company has survived missteps in mobile, social, and cloud. The AI round may genuinely be different, but "this time is different" has historically been the hardest bet to place
Impact on regular people
- For enterprise IT: Defaulting to Google Workspace is a bet that Google's AI roadmap will eventually cohere. That's not an easy bet to make right now
- For individual careers: The Gmail, Docs, and Search we use daily are getting noisier—SEO spam, AI summaries, denser ads. Real productivity gains come from filtering—or switching
- For consumer markets: For the first time in a decade, "just Google it" is no longer the default answer. Perplexity, ChatGPT, and even a return to human-curated newsletters are all siphoning traffic. The default is being rewritten