Ask HN: Something fishy is going on with Google feed on my Android

8 points by motbus3 21 days ago | 12 comments

Hello folks. I want to know if this is something only happening to me.

I noticed on the past few days something weird going on with Google feed on Android (when you swipe left from home main screen)

I started receiving deceiving news with some "shocking" headlines like: "Contagious cancer found in fresh water fish". Android says it was published by "Forbes" but the icon is weird. That caught my attention and I used share button to check the URL and for my suprise the target link is "discover.aigc/?id=.........." (I removed the number just in case)

I used some search engines and I found no relevant related domain. Pinging the domain also returns nothing.i tried accessing it from an isolated environment and the domain seems really offline now.

I'm sure I saw other suspicious links, some had related titles some did not.

It does look like a clickbait based campaign for something "fishy" (pun intended).

I should have taken notes of the other news and domains which i crossed paths with but I did not because at first I thought it would be some mistake or unintentional but it has been so frequent that I could not ignore.

Discover1492 21 days ago |

Hi,

Adding some context since I stumbled upon this thread looking for the same non existing domain:

The platform this appears on is Google Discover. It's native on android, available via the google app on iOS and desktop in some countries. It's a recommendation engine that learns about the user interests and (aims to) suggest the best fit.

AIGC is indeed an acronym for AI generated content. We already saw AI overviews on Discover, where several news were grouped under a cluster. This also happens on Google news.

Here, it seems like a Google experiment (or rather bug) where they used an internal or virtual domain, discover.aigc, that the devices can't resolve.

This domain appeared on Discover (and many different locales) days ago, and more concerning, is gaining visibility fast. It's now a few percent of the visibility, which is really a lot in terms of absolute numbers.

Disclosure: I work for a service that monitors Google Discover, why I saw this domain rising and dug. We wrote a first article here https://1492.vision/experiments/discover.aigc?lng=en with a bit more data, now waiting to see how long Google will take to fix it and what is supposed to be delivered behind that link (my take: a list of real publishers cards)

motbus3 20 days ago | |

I wonder if this is more ingenious than it appears because the image always load but nothing from the domain does. I wonder if it only answers one specific type of request.

I wonder if that could be used a some sort of osint

hunter2_ 20 days ago |

I just had this happen, and this HN post was the first result when searching "what is discover.aigc" on google. The specific Discover Feed entry that led me to see this domain (within an ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED error) would've been (if the link actually worked) an Allrecipes article entitled "Over 12,000 pounds of bacon recalled" which, in my case is not not some shock-value nonsense (like I assume is the case for OP's experience) because there is, indeed, this Allrecipes article [0] along with this .gov article [1].

[0] https://www.allrecipes.com/maple-leaf-foods-bacon-recall-jul...

[1] https://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls-alerts/maple-leaf-foods-in...

carless_whisper 21 days ago |

Seeing this too, mine was on a link to a bbc story, it redirected via share.google (aside: also super annoying) to the discover.aigc address (not found)

motbus3 20 days ago | |

Yes! That is fricking annoying!

mrseb 21 days ago |

I am also getting these on my mobile Chrome new tab/discover feed.

This one is for an Ars Technica story about Neuromancer… https://discover.aigc/?id=12944643404484710755

Sleazus 21 days ago |

Mine has a little world symbol, the article was "restricted eating hours may protect brain health" supposedly by the guardian posted 15 hours ago.

There is an article about that by the guardian but has a different title and posted 3 hours ago

eliotrw 21 days ago |

No this is also happening to me as well

Many links on Google Now or whatever they call it these days (sodebar on android) dont work. I have Brave browser set to have shields off an my pihole dns is not blocking. It acts like a dead domain.

n1xis10t 21 days ago | |

Such a weird thing. .aigc isn’t a real toplevel domain, and when I searched for it I found that apparently TikTok uses it as an abbreviation for “ai generated content”. That fits with the fake headlines. I was going to suggest checking /etc/hosts to see if some lines had been put in there by malware to make fake domain names capable of resolving, but you say the links don’t work. So that’s weird.

So is this just something wrong with Google?

n1xis10t 21 days ago |

What does the icon look like?

motbus3 20 days ago | |

Just a letter F because it says it is Forbes But it is the first letter of whatever it says it is

xwat 20 days ago |

Same on iOS