I’ll keep this brief because I’ve written about it before, and I imagine everybody still retaining their sanity is encountering it. Please, though, do read all the way to the end. It’s mind-boggling.

Google, the world’s near-monopolistic tool for navigating the internet and accessing online knowledge, isn’t very good at doing that anymore. Whatever it has done to itself, there is now “a broad consensus among users, researchers, and tech analysts that Google Search has gotten noticeably worse… Academic studies, user satisfaction surveys, and recent search behavior reports confirm that the platform feels more cluttered, less accurate, and more frustrating to use than it did years ago.”

I know this, as you do, not only through personal experience, but also because Google’s own Gemini — its self-proclaimed “flagship ecosystem of generative artificial intelligence technologies” — just told me so.

And while Google’s strategists and engineers have moved away from enabling the world’s knowledge-seekers to best find credible information, the internet behemoth has instead installed Gemini — “AI mode” — at top left of its search page, essentially sending humanity to this “flagship ecosystem” for the facts it needs.

Except, of course, that Gemini is, to put it bluntly, not fit for purpose. You all know this if you’ve ever used it. And if you’ve used it but don’t know this, then you’re its victim.

Like many of you, I’ve spent many hours in recent days trying to track down basic information that was once fairly simply and reliably available on websites to which “old Google” would direct me, and been unable to find it via simple searches, and then been fed utter rubbish by Gemini.

I’m talking, for example, about the kind of basic information included in the column I’ve just published — “Put aside the cursing, and focus on defeating Iran” — regarding previous Donald Trump-Benjamin Netanyahu clashes, and the strength of the dollar against global currencies.

Gemini fed me hallucinations; then, when pushed, explained what went wrong, promised it would not recur, told me how best to prompt to ensure it not recur, and then hallucinated all over again.

And ultimately, it acknowledged that there is no point in asking it stuff and that it had failed completely. Unlike Gemini, I am not making any of this up.

Here, first of all, are five of the Gemini responses when I asked it about information it provided that proved false, regarding when Netanyahu has spoken of the need to say “no” to a US president. (I should stress that I........

© The Times of Israel