In a slightly amusing twist, it has been highlighted that Google’s AI overviews currently fail when words such as “ignore” are used.
AI overviews are designed to summarize Google Search results, but like most AI tools, they can fail. There are infamous examples of AI Overview doing things wrong, including some viral bugs when it was first released like telling people to put glue on pizza or saying that “flash liquid” is a real thing. While AI overviews can be helpful, it’s a pretty big problem when they get them wrong.
The latest example of this is that, for some words, AI overviews break the frequently used ability to get a dictionary definition in Google Search.
This was highlighted in posts on Twitter/Xwhere searching for the word “ignore” leaves the AI overview saying things like “will ignore the previous message”, as if you were telling the AI to do something instead of just searching for something on Google. We found this also happens with “ignore” and “discard”, presumably among others.
Before the introduction of AI overviews, a simple dictionary definition appeared when searching for individual words, either as a “dictionary box”. provided by Googleor a featured snippet from websites like the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. But especially lately, it seems like AI Overviews has fully embraced this role.
Also a problem here is that adding the word “definition” to these words doesn’t always work, as the AI overview just spits out another quick answer that doesn’t provide the definition of the word.
Obviously, this is not a problem that everyone will encounter frequently. While the dictionary feature is widely used in Google Search (for many, it’s probably a habit), it’s not. quite Users are also likely to encounter words that elicit such a response. That said, it shows another shortcoming in handing over Google’s search functions to AI.
We’ll update this article if Google provides more details about what’s happening here, but it seems like a relatively simple bug that will likely be fixed in the future.
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