When did Google get so weird?
At What Point Did Google Become This Bizarre?
By Sancho Panza's Thoughts Published: September 27, 2026
I recently encountered a Google search result so profoundly surreal that it brought my entire browsing session to a grinding halt. To understand why this was so unsettling, you first need a bit of context regarding a specific, niche basketball meme from the mid-2010s.
The Backstory: The Legend of Dario
Back in 2014, the Philadelphia 76ers drafted a player named Dario Saric, who was playing professionally in Turkey at the time. Saric decided to honor his existing contract in Turkey, which meant he wouldn't actually join the Sixers in the US for several years.
This led to a running gag among the fanbase:
"He's never coming over."
This phrase became a sort of shibboleth—a secret handshake of sorts—for a specific segment of the 76ers community.
The Search Experiment
After seeing Saric's name in a recent NBA article, I felt a wave of nostalgia. I wanted to track down those old, hilarious tweets from a decade ago. My approach was simple; I entered the following query into the search bar:
hes never coming over dario
My Expectations vs. The Reality
| My Expectation | Google's 2026 Reality |
|---|---|
| A list of old Reddit threads | An AI-generated "Overview" |
| Archive of funny 2010s tweets | Emotional counseling |
| A digital shoulder to cry on |
The "Empathetic" AI
While I've grown mostly tolerant of AI Overviews—they can be useful occasionally—this one was different. Google, a piece of software devoid of human emotion, looked at my query and made a wild assumption: it decided I had been dumped by a man named Dario.
Instead of providing information, Google decided I needed an empathetic digital companion.
if query == "hes never coming over dario":
return "I'm so sorry you're hurting. It's hard when someone leaves..."
# Error: User was actually looking for basketball memes.
When I expanded the AI overview to read the full response, I was left wondering: What in the world is happening?
The Boiling Frog Syndrome
I think this was the exact moment I realized the "pot" had been boiling for a long time, and I was the frog. I began questioning the fundamental role of a search engine:
- Since when is it Google's responsibility to console me?
- Why is it acting as an empathetic listener instead of a retrieval tool?
- How does this align with their mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"?
If I had intentionally opened a Gemini chat interface, this behavior might be acceptable. But I was using a search engine.
The Search Logic Flow
The Irony of the Result
The most frustrating part? If I scrolled down a few hundred pixels past the "AI slop," Google had actually found exactly what I was looking for. The information was there; it was just buried under a layer of artificial empathy.
Search Engine Requirements Checklist
- Index the web
- Provide relevant links
- Stop trying to be my therapist
- Stop hallucinating emotional trauma
Final Thoughts
Regardless of your stance on LLMs, this is just plain weird. We have reached a point where we are forced into a parasocial dialogue with our hardware just to find a joke from 2014.
Is it really so impossible to imagine a world where search functioned perfectly well before the integration of Large Language Models? I suppose I'll just go have a chat with my "friend" Google—after all, it's always so nice to me.