I think they had no choice but to release that AI before it was ready for prime time. Their search traffic started dropping after ChatGPT came out, and they risked not looking like a serious player in AI.

A couple months ago things were different. Try their stronger models. Gemini recently saved me from a needle in a haystack problem with buildpacks and Linux dependencies for a 14-year-old B2B SaaS app that I was solving a major problem for, and Gemini figured out the solution quickly after I worked on it for hours with Claude Code. I know it's just one story where Gemini won, and I have really enjoyed using Claude Code, but Google is having some success with the serious effort they're putting into this fight.

They recently replaced “define: word” (or “word meaning”) results with an “ai summary” and it’s decidedly worse. It used to just give you the definition(s) and synonyms for each one. Now it gives some rambling paragraphs.

My google gives me the data from oup for word meaning, and doesn't show any AI. It opens up the translator for word meaning language. It is really fast and convenient.