Google made major changes to its search algorithm and spam filters earlier this year to get rid of low-quality content -- but the effects have proved devastating to some smaller websites.

Online businesses have been left considering layoffs and even site closures after Google's massive upgrade in March and April caused catastrophic drops in traffic.

Gisele Navarro is one of the unlucky ones whose website got caught up in Google's dragnet.

Frustrated by their Google searches, people are funneling their queries to a site that isn’t a search engine at all: Reddit. Earlier this month, that included me.

Reddit, which went public in March, is a social network with 82.7 million daily active users who gather and usually post anonymously in groups called subreddits. Users can “upvote” or “downvote” what others contribute, surfacing what are considered the best responses.

PragerU announced on Friday that Google took down its app from the Google Play Store, accusing the organization of “hate speech” over its documentary Dear Infidels: A Warning to America.

PragerU published a screenshot of message from Google, in which the tech giant notified the organization of its suspension due to content on its app “asserting that a protected group is inhuman, inferior or worthy of being hated.” 

It’s been less than two weeks since Google debuted “AI Overview” in Google Search, and public criticism has mounted after queries have returned nonsensical or inaccurate results within the AI feature — without any way to opt out.

AI Overview shows a quick summary of answers to search questions at the very top of Google Search. For example, if a user searches for the best way to clean leather boots, the results page may display an “AI Overview” at the top with a multistep cleaning process, gleaned from information it synthesized from around the web.

Google’s shift toward using AI to generate a written answer to user searches instead of providing a list of links ranked algorithmically by relevance was inevitable. Before AI Overview — introduced last week for US users — Google had Knowledge Panels, those information boxes that appear toward the top of some searches, incentivizing users to get their answers directly from Google, rather than clicking through to a result. 

Imagine this: you’ve carved out an evening to unwind and decide to make a homemade pizza. You assemble your pie, throw it in the oven, and are excited to start eating. But once you get ready to take a bite of your oily creation, you run into a problem — the cheese falls right off. Frustrated, you turn to Google for a solution.

“Add some glue,” Google answers. “Mix about 1/8 cup of Elmer’s glue in with the sauce. Non-toxic glue will work.”

If you use Google regularly, you may have noticed the company's new AI Overviews providing summarized answers to some of your questions in recent days. If you use social media regularly, you may have come across many examples of those AI Overviews being hilariously or even dangerously wrong.

Google’s AI-generated search results are already being slammed as a “disaster” that “can no longer be trusted,” the New York Post reports.

Absurd “AI Overview” glitches began right as Google began rolling out the feature to U.S. users last week, with plans to offer it to 1 billion users by the end of 2024.

Its bizarre recommendations include adding 1/8 of a cup of non-toxic glue to tomato sauce to help cheese stick to pizza, along with the health benefits of tobacco for kids.

Sixteen companies at the forefront of developing Artificial Intelligence pledged on Tuesday at a global meeting to develop the technology safely at a time when regulators are scrambling to keep up with rapid innovation and emerging risks.

Google on Tuesday unveiled a major overhaul to its flagship search engine that uses AI-generated summaries to displace the links to news stories – a move that threatens to deprive traditional media companies of much-needed revenue.  

The new feature, “dubbed AI Overviews,” will debut in the US this week and provide answers to queries like “How to fix my toilet?” or “What is the best way to clean leather boots” — pushing down the set of links related to the search.