When did Google get so weird?

The writer searched Google for "hes never coming over dario" — the phrase is a shibboleth from a mid-2010s Philadelphia 76ers fan joke about Dario Saric, drafted in 2014 while playing professionally in Turkey, who said he'd finish his contract abroad and wouldn't join the team for a couple of years. The intent was simply to resurface old tweets and Reddit posts from that era, or to confirm the exact phrasing; the author expected either no results or links to the original 2010s posts.

What Google returned instead, in the author's telling, was an AI Overview that read the query as the lament of someone spurned by a man named Dario and responded as an empathetic digital friend, offering consolation rather than links. Expanding the overview surfaced a fuller version of the same consoling answer, which the author found baffling — Google is a search engine without human emotions, and a chat-style Gemini app might make such a response tolerable, but a search engine should not.

Scrolling a few hundred pixels past the AI output, Google did in fact have exactly what the author was looking for. That the useful results were buried beneath the robotic sympathy is the crux of the complaint: the author frames it as the frog finally noticing the water boiling, and questions how this squares with Google's stated mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The post asks whether users are now expected to be in a constant parasocial dialogue with their computers, and whether it is so hard to accept that some parts of search were already fine before LLMs.