When did Google get so weird? A blogger on AI answers nobody asked for

In a recent essay on his Bear Blog, the developer and writer Sancho describes a routine Google search that unsettled him enough to write about it. He wanted a handful of old links; the search engine, in his words, offered him an empathetic digital friend instead.

A search for an old basketball meme

The query was deliberately obscure. The Philadelphia 76ers drafted the basketball player Dario Saric in 2014, when he was playing professionally in Turkey and had said he intended to finish his contract there before moving to the United States. Fans turned that wait into a running joke, the phrase "he's never coming over", and for part of the fanbase it became a kind of shibboleth. After seeing Saric's name in a recent NBA article, Sancho typed "hes never coming over dario" into Google, hoping to recover a few funny posts from the mid-2010s.

He expected one of two outcomes: nothing at all, if he had misremembered the wording, or the old tweets and Reddit threads he was after.

The answer Google chose instead

Google returned an AI Overview. Sancho notes that he has largely made peace with such summaries and sometimes finds them useful, but this one read his query as a relationship problem. By his account, the overview assumed he had been spurned by a man named Dario and answered with consolation, as if soothing a friend after a breakup, rather than pointing him to the material he had asked for. Expanding the summary only made the reply longer.

The results were there, just lower down

The search results Sancho originally wanted had not disappeared. A few hundred pixels below the AI Overview, which he calls "AI slop", Google listed exactly the old material he had gone looking for. That detail sits at the centre of his argument: the underlying index still worked, it had simply been pushed down the page.

A search engine that wants to be a friend

The essay asks in what universe it is Google's job to console users rather than find what they are looking for, and how a comforting reply serves the company's stated mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". He concedes that a chat product such as Gemini might be a reasonable home for that behaviour, but argues a search engine is not. He also asks whether users are now expected to hold a permanent parasocial conversation with their computers, and whether parts of search were simply fine before large language models arrived. He does not claim to know how to feel about it, and ends with a joke at Google's expense.