Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

Google AI overviews are often bad, yes, but why is youtube as a source necessarily a bad thing? Are these researchers doctors? A close relative is a practicing surgeon and a professor in his field. He watches youtube videos of surgeries practically every day. Doctors from every field well understand that YT is a great way to share their work and discuss w/ others.

Before we get too worked up about the results, just look at the source. It's a SERP ranking aggregator (not linking to them to give them free marketing) that's analyzing only the domains, not the credibility of the content itself.

This report is a nothingburger.

Heavy Gemini user here, another observation: Gemini cites lots of "AI generated" videos as its primary source, which creates a closed loop and has the potential to debase shared reality.

A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability, and it wrote a very convincing response, except the video embedded at the end of the response was an AI generated one. It might have had actual facts, but overall, my trust in Gemini's response to my query went DOWN after I noticed the AI generated video attached as the source.

Countering debasement of shared reality and NOT using AI generated videos as sources should be a HUGE priority for Google.

YouTube channels with AI generated videos have exploded in sheer quantity, and I think majority of the new channels and videos uploaded to YouTube might actually be AI; "Dead internet theory," et al.

It's crazy to me that somewhere along the way we lost physical media as a reference point. Journals and YouTube can be good sources of information, but unless heavily confined to high quality information current AI is not able to judge citation quality to come up with good recommendations. The synthesis of real world medical experience is often collated in medical textbooks and yet AI doesn't cite them nearly as much as it should.

> Oh, you mean like removing scores of covid videos from real doctors and scientists which were deemed to be misinformation

The credentials don't matter, the actual content does. And if it's misinformation, then yes, you can be a quadruple doctor, it's still misinformation.

In France, there was a real doctor, epidemiologist, who became famous because he was pushing a cure for Covid. He did some underground, barely legal, medical trials on his own, and proclaimed victory and that the "big bad government doesn't want you to know!". Well, the actual proper study finished, found there is basically no difference, and his solution wasn't adopted. He didn't get deplatformed fully, but he was definitely marginalised and fell in the "disinformation" category. Nonetheless, he continued spouting his version that was proven wrong. And years later, he's still wrong.

Fun fact about him: he's in the top 10 of scientists with the most retracted papers, for inaccuracies.

> Google’s search feature AI Overviews cites YouTube more than any medical website when answering queries about health conditions

It matters in the context of health related queries.

> Researchers at SE Ranking, a search engine optimisation platform, found YouTube made up 4.43% of all AI Overview citations. No hospital network, government health portal, medical association or academic institution came close to that number, they said.

> “This matters because YouTube is not a medical publisher,” the researchers wrote. “It is a general-purpose video platform. Anyone can upload content there (eg board-certified physicians, hospital channels, but also wellness influencers, life coaches, and creators with no medical training at all).”