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

Post by adrian_b » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #33

gumboshoes wrote: post #24

I have permanent prompts in Gemini settings to tell it to never include videos in its answers. Never ever for any reason. Yet of course it always does. Even if I trusted any of the video authors or material - and I don't know them so how can I trust them? - I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time. Text is superior to video 99% of the time in my experience.

That's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an article faster than they can watch a video with the same level of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it were true there would be no role for things like univ…

Post by JumpCrisscross » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

abixb wrote: post #14

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 o…

Post by lambdaone » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

ThinkingGuy wrote: post #47

Google AI (owned by Meta) favoring YouTube (also owned by Meta) should be unsurprising.

Post by adrian_b » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

ffsm8 wrote: post #37

jeffbee wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an article faster than they can watch a video with the same level of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it were true there would be no role for things like univ…

YouTube has almost no original knowledge. Most of the "educational" and documentation style content there is usually "just" gathered together from other sources, occasionally with links back to the original sources in the descriptions. I'm not trying to be dismissive of the platform, it's just inherently catered towards summarizing results for entertainment, not for clarity or correctness.

Post by quantumwoke » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #35

quantumwoke wrote: post #16

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…

The vast majority of journal articles are not available freely to the public. A second problem is that the business of scientific journals has destroyed itself by massive proliferation of lower quality journals with misleading names, slapdash peer review, and the crisis of quiet retractions.