It’s been a couple of weeks sinceGoogle rolled out its earliest public preview of SGE, or Search Generative Experience. It’s the most boring name you could select for a product the company claims will revolutionize search results, bringing generative AI elements into the vast majority of the queries you face every day. After a couple of weeks of testing it out, I find myself with the same opinion as nearly every other early tester — it’s impressive, butobviously not ready for primetime, with some seriousquestions surrounding both plagiarismand its overall accuracy.
Even putting those problems aside, however, I found SGE failed to outperform what’s become one of theweb’s most popular search tricksover the last several years. If you use Google on a daily basis — and I’m guessing you do — you know exactly what I’m talking about: adding the word “reddit” to your search so you’ll get real, useful results from forum users, andnotend up on some spammy blog that cares more about SEO than actually answering your question.
There’s no doubt Google knows all about the internet’s growing reliance on Reddit users to provide actual answers to questions, problems, and more. Type in any common troubleshooting prompt, and you’ll no doubt see “reddit” appear as an autocomplete suggestion. Generally speaking, this is a problem of Google’s own creation. As SEO-focused websites have effectively spammed search, regular users have started looking for solutions elsewhere, relying on individual experiences for everything from PS5 error codes to restaurant recommendations.
In theory, SGE could deliver that level of experience when searching. Using AI, Google could pull in information not just from guides across the internet, but also from user reviews on Yelp, or, yes, highly rated comments on Reddit. But right now, it’s only looking at assortment of random websites and from other internal data, like Maps. Some of this is helpful, and some of this is, well, not.
Take, for example, a prompt like “best hiking trails in Buffalo.” My partner and I have been trying to go on more hikes this summer, and I performed a search just like this back last month to start building a list of spots to check out. Google delivers plenty of trails familiar to me, but its results are shallow and — in some ways — misleading. The North Buffalo and Tonawanda Rails to Trails options are actually the same path (just between two townships), and while they’re fine for Saturday afternoon walks, they’re really designed with cyclists in mind.
Options like the Tifft Nature Preserve and Unity Island are better choices for hikers, but they’re also a little uninspired, and no matter how I searched, nearly every prompt gave these same ideas. And because Google doesn’t seem to extend its options much farther than a couple of miles outside the actual city limits, it doesn’t know to suggest obvious options, like Devils Hole near Niagara Falls (30-odd minutes north), or Eighteen Mile Creek in Hamburg (30-odd minutes south).
You know where you may find those suggestions, though?This Reddit thread from April, along with other suggestions a little further out of the way. Google’s approach doesn’t seem to consider that most hikers would be willing to go out of the city to hit nature trails; even expanding the search to “best hiking trails in Western New York” didn’t deliver anything better, nor did asking for follow-up prompts to give me something further outside city limits.
Okay, let’s try another example, this time one that Google is — in theory — in a better place to answer. Searching for “Steam can’t connect to internet” returns an extensive list of 25 different solutions to this particular problem. It’s actually not a particularly helpful list, since throwing so many options at someone without context can lead to more confusion (what is WinSock and how do I reset it? Why is disabling my antivirus and firewall on here twice?), but Reddit isn’t much help, either.
Adding “reddit” to this query brings up a few results, but many of them are from eight years ago, meaning whatever solutions lie within are likely outdated or unhelpful. Those posts that are more recent aren’t worth much either, since skimming through the comments, it becomes apparent that these posts appeared due to Steam outages, with the only solution being “it eventually came back online.”
In this case, neither Google nor Reddit is able to actually solve the issue, but at least Google’s list does have some good — if underexplained — suggestions. Plus, the ability to ask a follow-up prompt, such as “how do I run Steam as an admin,” does deliver relatively easy-to-follow instructions. Though, hilariously, at least one of these sources was right from Epic Games, Valve’s main competition in the PC gaming space.
Being unable to compete with Reddit results in its existing, early state might be forgivable —ifSGE were particularly trustworthy. However, none of this excuses the factual problems Google is facing with this current implementation. When I got access to this experiment two weeks ago, asking forbudget Android phone recommendationswould list theGalaxy A54 5Gas the top choice — even as the information it delivered was actually pulled from a different, older 4G-only smartphone. At the time, Google’s blurb about the device described it as lacking 5G compatibility completely (a pretty big miss, consideringit’s in the name of the phone).
Now, two weeks later, Google simply suggests thatsomesay it doesn’t support 5G or NFC, which is, again, completely wrong; these results are simply sourcing incorrect data. But it shifts accountability away from SGE and instead places it on “some” nebulous source, whatever that might be.
And, honestly, this entire discussion isn’t even getting into Google’s problems with plagiarism. On that same budget Android phones list, I felt like the notes for theGalaxy A14 5Glooked awfully familiar — because I wrote them!
None of this is to say that searching Reddit for your answers doesn’t involve problems of its own. You might find outdated or wrong information, or your taste in food might be completely different from someone who swears they found the best restaurant in town. But, at the very least, there’s someone on the other side of that keyboard doing their best to give you (or someone in the same boat as you) an actual answer to their prompt. Generative AI, meanwhile, can only pull from whatever data already exists out there somewhere — and itcertainlycan’t tell you its favorite hiking trail.
It’s entirely possible — likely, even — that a future version of SGE starts pulling in results directly from Reddit threads. Right now, Google’s sources are primarily made up of the same SEO-focused content that drove people to start relying on Reddit more than guides on actual websites. But until then, it’s unclear how SGE is supposed to offer a better experience than the one savvy searchers have already crafted for themselves. And evenifGoogle ends up using Reddit threads as sources, you’ll still need those user-powered forums to exist for generative search to provide any help in the first place. AI may be very impressive, but it’s still people who are the real problem-solvers.
