Google shuffles the search deck
With a new Knowledge and Information chief and a new home for Gemini, can the company hit the reset button?
This week, a Hard Fork listener pointed me to a curious search result. Ask for the “difference between a sauce and a dressing,” he found, and Google would present you with one of its AI overviews. “The main difference between a sauce and a dressing is their purpose,” it stated. “Sauces add flavor and texture to dishes, while dressings are used to protect wounds.”
After I dug around a bit, I saw that people had been sharing this query on social media for a month, and that it had gone viral on X last week. It is not the most embarrassing AI overview I’ve seen — “dressing” is a perfectly acceptable word to call a bandage that protects a wound.
What sent the AI overview viral, I suspect, is the way Google’s large language model collapsed the various meanings of “dressing” into one. A photograph of “dressing” in the AI overview was clearly a salad dressing, and the description conflated the two. “A dressing should be large enough to completely cover the wound, with a safety margin of about 2.5 cm on all sides,” the AI overview stated. “A standard serving size for salad dressing is two tablespoons.”
