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Google results insist a Bugsnax sequel is coming out next month, but there's one small problem: Its devs aren't making one (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Getting your game noticed is a tricky business when you have to punch through the noise of the more than 10,000 new Steam games releasing each year. Young Horses, the developer of Bugsnax and Octodad, have found itself in an even trickier spot: Thanks to Google, people are expecting a Bugsnax sequel that doesn't exist.

"We are not working on a Bugsnax sequel right now and I need AI bs to stop telling kids we are based on a wiki ideas fanfic," Young Horses co-founder and president Philip Tibitoski tweeted earlier today. It turns out, through the wonders of algorithmic search result curation, Google's featured snippets have been informing people that Bugsnax 2 will be releasing in October 2024, despite the fact that neither Young Horses or any other developer are making it.

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[–] [email protected] 99 points 4 days ago (8 children)

I'll be real, I think this is more of a problem with Fandom than Google. Fandom has been abusing the fuck out of their SEO lately, and manage to push their shitty site to the top results on almost any fiction media-related search you do now.

Yeah, Google's AI got the preview wrong, but it probably wouldn't have happened if Fandom wasn't constantly injecting themselves into every single search. They allow users to post anything they want, without any vetting, and then push those inaccurate posts to the search engines.

Half the time, the page on Fandom is a 100% copy/paste of the page from Wikipedia, except with a thousand ads littering the page. Guess which one shows up first in the search results, though?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 days ago

On the one hand, yes, and Fandom is a blight on the internet.

On the other hand, AI like ChatGPT are wrong some 53% of the time. The fact that this is another "use nontoxic glue to keep your cheese from falling off of pizza" situation doesn't mean that Google isn't equally culpable for doing nothing to prevent these sorts of occurrences even when the sources are right (AI is as likely to make things up that aren't even in its cited sources as it is to actually give you info from them).

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