Here is the specific reason I find Google so actively unpleasant to use today: we have all been trained for literally decades on how to “speak Google” by typing space-separated lists of keywords and phrases into the famous search bar, and then using the resulting page of “hits” to either find what we need, or to iteratively refine our search query. And you can still use Google like that, more or less. But, in many-perhaps-most cases, the top search results get preempted by the “AI Overview” answer, which reads your query completely differently.

The attached screenshot shows a detail of my trying to locate the particular Tom the Dancing Bug comic strip that I wanted to hyperlink to from my previous ’Twas This post. The first actual hit took me straight there, in remarkably classic Google fashion. But before that, I had to have the AI respond to me as if I had rolled up to a chatbot and said “Duhhh, Tom the Dancing Bug… twelve years old?!” out loud, barely able to string words together. Because I wasn’t trying to string words together! I was typing in a search query! Into a search engine! Which is not a chatbot!

But that’s why I once again got a bizarrely insulting answer from Google’s AI Overview treating me like a grunting simpleton. Today I apparently wanted to know about a 12-year-old named ‘Tom the Dancing Bug’, and so it assured me no such person exists—ho ho, that’s the name of a comic strip, not a real child, silly human!—and suggested other 12-year-olds I might have been looking for instead.

Maybe Google wants us to stop using Google like Google and just type in complete sentences now, ending in question marks. Is this how everyone on earth already uses it except for me, my narrow band of friends, and William Riker? Maybe! I don’t know! But if not, I feel like Google needs to, I dunno, put some re-training information out there or something.