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

theguardian.com

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

#161

Post by bflesch »

trympet wrote: post #135
zamadatix wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until you get a group of nerds talking about keyboards - suddenly it'll sound like there is no such thing as a keyboard worth buying either. I think the main problems for Google (and others) from this type of issue will be "down the road" problems, not a large and immediately apparent change in user behavior at the onset.

> Just wait until you get a group of nerds talking about keyboards Don’t get me started on the HHKB [1] with Topre membrane keyswitches. It is simply put the best keyboard on the market. Buy this. (No, Fujitsu didn’t pay me to say this) [1] - https://hhkeyboard.us/hhkb/

That thing is missing a whole bunch of ctrl keys, how can it be the best keyboard on the market?

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

#162

Post by chasd00 »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #132
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…

> A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability This is one of the last things I would expect to get any reasonable response about from pretty much anyone in 2026, especially LLMs. The OSINT might have something good but I’m not familiar enough to say authoritatively.

yeah that's a very difficult question to answer period. If you had the details on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability the CIA would be very interested in buying you coffee.

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

#163

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

freediver wrote: post #158
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a recent hn post about how chatgpt mentions Grokpedia so many times. Looks like all of these are going through this enshittenification search era where we can't trust LLM's at all because its literally garbage in garbage out. Someone had mentioned Kagi assistant in here and although they use API themselves but I feel like they might be able to provide their custom search in between, so if anyone's from Kagi…

Correct, Kagi Assistant uses Kagi Search - with all modifications user made (eg blocked domains, lenses etc).

Thanks for your response! This does look great to me!

Another minor question but I found out that Kagi uses API for assistants and that did make me a little sad because some are major companies with 30 days logs and others so no logs iirc on kagi assistant or people referring it so felt a bit off (yes I know kagi itself keeps 0 logs and anonymizes it but still)

I looked at kagi's assistants API deals web page (I appreciate Kagi for their transparency) and it looks like iirc you ie. Kagi have a custom deal with Nebius which isn't disclosed.

Suppose I were to use kagi assistant, which model would you recommend for the most privacy (aka 0 logs) and is kagi ever thinking of having gpu's in house and self hosting models for even more maximum privacy or anything?

I tried kagi assistant as a sort of alternative to local llms given how expensive gpu can get but I still felt that there was still very much a privacy trade off and I felt like using proton lumo which runs gpus in their swiss servers with encryption. I am curious to hear what kagi thinks

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

#164

Post by masfuerte »

iammjm wrote: post #100
panki27 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ourobouros - The mythical snake that eats its own tail (and ingests its own excrement)

The image that comes to my mind is rather a cow farm, where cows are served the ground up remains of other cows. isnt that how many of them got the mad cows disease? ...

Perhaps Gemini has Clanker Autocoprophagic Encephalopathy.

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

#165

Post by trympet »

bflesch wrote: post #161
trympet wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just wait until you get a group of nerds talking about keyboards Don’t get me started on the HHKB [1] with Topre membrane keyswitches. It is simply put the best keyboard on the market. Buy this. (No, Fujitsu didn’t pay me to say this) [1] - https://hhkeyboard.us/hhkb/

That thing is missing a whole bunch of ctrl keys, how can it be the best keyboard on the market?

It uses a Unix keyboard layout where the caps lock is swapped out with the ctrl key. I think it’s much more ergonomic to have the ctrl on the home row. The arrow keys are behind a fn modifier resting on the right pinky. Also accessible without moving your fingers from the home row. It’s frankly the best keyboard I ever had from an ergonomic POV. Key feel is also great, but the layout has a bit of a learning curve.

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

#167

Post by al_borland »

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.

While there is a lot of low-effort content, there is also some pretty involved stuff.

The investigation into Honey’s shenanigans[0] was investigated and presented first on YouTube (to the best of my knowledge). The fraud in Minnesota was also broken by a YouTuber who just testified to Congress[1]. There are people doing original work on there, you just have to end up in an algorithm that surfaces it… or seek it out.

In other cases people are presenting stuff I wouldn’t otherwise know about, and getting access to see it at levels I wouldn’t otherwise be able to see, like Cleo Abram’s[0] latest video about LIGO[1]. Yes, it’s a mostly entertaining overview of what’s going on, not a white paper on the equipment, but this is probably more in depth than what a science program on TV in the 80s or 90s would have been… at least on par.

There are also full class lectures, which people can access without being enrolled in a school. While YouTube isn’t the original source, it is still shared in full, not summarized or changed for entertainment purposes.

[0] https://youtu.be/vc4yL3YTwWk (part 1 of 3)

[1] https://youtu.be/vmOqH9BzKIY

[2] https://youtu.be/kr3iXUcNt2g

[3] https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/learn-more

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

#168

Post by al_borland »

danudey wrote: post #117
adrian_b wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube has a lot of junk, but there are also a lot of useful videos that demonstrate various practical skills or the experiences of using certain products, or recordings of certain natural environments, which are original, in the sense that before YouTube you could not find equivalent content anywhere, except by knowing personally people who could show you such things, but there would have been very small chances to…

It's difficult for an AI to tell what information from YouTube is correct and reliable and which is pseudoscience, misinformation, or outright lies. In that context, I think excluding YouTube as a source makes sense; not because YT has no useful content, but because it has no way of determining useful content.

This argument can be used for excluding 90% of the Internet from training data.

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

#169

Post by mikkupikku »

shevy-java wrote: post #137
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…

> 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. Yeah. This has really become a problem. Not for all videos; music videos are kind of fine. I don't listen to music generated by AI but good music should be good music. The rest has unfortunately really gotten worse. Go…

I've seen remarkably little of this when browsing youtube with my cookie (no account, but they know my preferences nonetheless.) Totally different story with a clean fresh session though.

One that slipped through, and really pissed me off because it tricked me for a few minutes, was a channel purportedly uploading videos of Richard Feynman explaining things, but the voice and scripts are completely fake. It's disclosed in small print in the description. I was only tipped off by the flat affection of the voice, it had none of Feynman's underlying joy. Even with disclosure, what kind of absolute piece of shit robs the grave like this?

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

#170

Post by RobotToaster »

Aurornis wrote: post #145
jppope wrote: post #143

Naïve question here... personally, I've never found Webmd, cdc, or Mayo clinic to be that good at fulfilling actual medical questions. why is it a problem to cite YouTube videos with a lot of views? Wouldn't that be better?

Medical topics are hard because it's often impossible to provide enough information through the internet to make a diagnosis. Although frustrating for users, "go see a doctor" is really the only way to make progress once you hit the wall where testing combined with years of clinical experience are needed to evaluate something. A lot of the YouTube and other social media medical content has started trying to fill this…

>it's often impossible to provide enough information through the internet to make a diagnosis

Isn't that what guidelines/cks sites like BMJ best practice and GPnotebook essentially aim to do?

Of course those are all paywalled so it can't cite them... whereas the cranks on youtube are free

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