I don’t find your logic persuasive. If guessing your question wrong makes people upset, then there should be a huge penalty on guessing. Unless your guess has a high enough change of being right, you’d be chasing people away.
No, I think it’s more that Google has found a way to guess questions that people don’t mind so much. Or, at least, it had before it added the AI shelf. It will show a list of questions that you can click on to expand and see answers. And it would guess maybe one Answer if it’s sure.
Google also follows the policy trying to return something. The idea is that saying “no results” is a wasted page, as the user will always have to then try something else. If you can guess what that something else is, it might save them a click.
But you have to be careful with this, and not make it look like the search engine is bad. You need to be very explicit that you are trying a different search because there were no results for the regular search. But Google has historically been good at this.
That said, I’ve seen some annoyances, including when they seemingly used “AI” to guess questions you wanted to ask. (You can tell because they’d put the pink background behind them.) And then it would return a whole page of results for that question, before moving to yet another question. These questions would also be very far off from what I typed.
It’s having seen stuff like that which makes me think the OP is not talking about the usual, less bothersome attempts to guess questions. Google has been doing more annoying things now that it tries to inject its LLM into things.
The Google AI is annoying enough that I’ve tried to find a way to prevent it from being included in my searches (and so far I’ve come up empty).
It’s not a big deal on my PC, but when I search on my phone it’s an issue because this big AI blurb thing covers a large part of my screen with something useless, and if I accidentally tap it (which is very easy, the whole thing turns into a giant link) it takes me out of my browser into the app store where it wants to install a Google AI program on my phone. Fucking A. Or, I guess I should say fucking AI.
If it only happened now and then it would be one thing, but now it’s almost every time I try to search for something on my phone.
Google is a de facto monopoly. They know there is no alternative that works 10% as well as they do. You aren’t leaving. I’m not leaving. We are a captive audience.
At least in the near term. They could loose their commanding lead after enough years of enshittification and aggressive competition from betters. Witness Yahoo’s trajectory from King of the 'Net to Boomer trivia answer. But it takes a LOT of enshittification fort a long time and they’re just getting started.
Note I don’t have a particular hate for Google. They’ve been enormously valuable to the growth and pervasiveness of the WWW. But they stopped making deposits into their consumer goodwill account about 5-10 years ago and it’s been all withdrawals since.
If you don’t guess what peoples’ questions are, then you can never answer any of them. A search engine that never answers anyone’s questions gets absolutely zero traffic. You have to guess what users want. You just need to make the best guess you can. And the guesses they’re making right now do better, overall, than the guessed based on the assumption that people are asking the right questions. Yes, that’s annoying for those of us who are asking the questions we actually intend to ask, but we’re a minority, and we’re also less likely to give up quickly. For comparison, look at most of the other question-and-answer sites online, and see what kinds of questions people ask: That’s who Google is trying to accommodate, because there are a lot of those folks.
It’s been my homepage for years. I don’t think I’ve used ‘regular Google’ for a decade or more. (They do put small versions of the Google Doodle on GAS, so I don’t miss out on that.)
That said, some of the annoyances people have posted about in this thread do show up with Advanced Search, too.
I’m sure it’s my imagination but it feels like both google and youtube search results are coming up with more and more “matches” that are totally unrelated to my queries. Very frustrating.
Bullshit. If Google wanted to try to give me what I want it wouldn’t drop words in my request in an attempt to make my request fit what they want to sell.
Fundamentally it comes down to two separate but tightly coupled issues.
As @Czarcasm just almost said, you’re the product not the customer and so feeding you anything is better than feeding you nothing.
Not the same thing but sorta kinds connected …
Most people are the common clay of the new West. You know: morons. They could not formulate a coherent sentence much less a well-formed Boolean query. Giving them what they asked for would be “no results found” most of the time.
Those of us more capable are … different.
The Google engineers charged w keeping the product (the public) happy enough to keep coming back clearly understand who they’re stuck dealing with: morons.
So their algorithm amounts to: Just keep ignoring more and more of the query until enough paying sponsors are happy to be shown as part of the results and the fool “product” won’t even notice they’ve been scammed.