Google Search's intelligent agent has been significantly upgraded, but has the AI gone on a direct "strike"?
Unexpectedly, after using the agent, the world's largest search engine "stopped working".
At this week's I/O Conference, Google launched a brand - new search experience in the era of agents (Agent), claiming it to be the first major update to its search engine in 25 years.
Just when everyone was full of expectations and started using it extensively, a series of bugs were discovered.
For example, if you enter the word "disregard" in Google Search, you will now see such results.
The AI says, "Okay, then I'll disregard the previous prompt and start from scratch. What can I help you with?"
As a large - scale model, it sounds reasonable, right? But you're a search engine now.
Google has been widely criticized on social media for obvious reasons. You'll find that the link to the Merriam - Webster dictionary that would appear in the original search results still exists, but you have to scroll past a large blank area on the page before there is normal content.
For a search engine, when searching for the word "disregard", the AI's response is worthless. It's simply a useless tool, which makes netizens so angry that they curse.
Of course, this is not an isolated case. As people make more attempts, more and more large - scale model "prompts" are developed. In the end, it turns out that the problematic ones are not some special terms: it's not like when inputting < think > in DeepSeek and getting large - scale model hallucinations, but some common words for which the search engine can't output normal results.
Just think about whether you use these words in daily life:
In addition, when searching for "remember", the AI will also mistakenly think it's an instruction to "remember something".
The root cause of the problem lies in the "prompt injection" of the large - scale model. The AI overview function misinterprets some common prompts used in daily conversations with AI as instructions from users to the system, rather than ordinary queries.
In contrast, here are the results of the same search on Microsoft's Bing. Although Bing's AI summary function is not perfect, it still contains some useful information.
It highlights the artificial intelligence summary and moves the traditional "10 blue links" to the bottom of the page. Now, the upgraded Google Search is a tool used by hundreds of millions of users around the world every day, yet they don't seem to have considered many special situations.
Some people say, after all these years, I've never seen Bing search results more valuable than Google's. Truly, there's always a first time for everything.
As the core of the product line upgrade, Google's upgrade of the search this time aims to transform this information - finding tool into an "agent - driven tool" that can understand complex intentions and actively help people handle affairs. In an ideal state, it will completely change the traditional keyword input method, support inputting long sentences and asking questions in natural language, and also allow uploading pictures, videos, files, and even Chrome tabs as search conditions, with the AI helping you understand and integrate information.
Not to mention that Google also plans to provide people with the ability to build exclusive AI agents directly from the search box. In the future, you may not even need a "helper", and the search agent can handle tasks for you 24/7.
However, the "disregard" bug has undoubtedly poured cold water on people.
Netizens have started to spontaneously look for ways to bypass the AI Overview. One of the simplest and most straightforward "crude methods" is to add - ai after the keyword in the Google search box. This can basically filter out the AI summary and restore more traditional search results, but it's not 100% effective.
A Google spokesperson quickly admitted the problem, saying, "We know that the AI overview is misinterpreting some queries related to 'actions'. We're working hard to fix it and will roll out an update as soon as possible."
We just tested it, and currently, the above - mentioned problems have basically been fixed.
Reference content:
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/22/you-can-no-longer-google-the-word-disregard/
https://x.com/heysaik/status/2057888311876968807?s=20
This article is from the WeChat official account "Machine Intelligence" (ID: almosthuman2014). The author is someone who follows AI. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.