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

Posted by motbus3 1 day ago

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.

Comments

Comment by Discover1492 13 hours 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)

Comment by motbus3 1 hour 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

Comment by carless_whisper 18 hours 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)

Comment by motbus3 2 hours ago

Yes! That is fricking annoying!

Comment by mrseb 18 hours 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

Comment by Sleazus 15 hours 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

Comment by eliotrw 22 hours 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.

Comment by n1xis10t 19 hours 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?

Comment by xwat 8 hours ago

Same on iOS

Comment by n1xis10t 19 hours ago

What does the icon look like?

Comment by motbus3 2 hours ago

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

Comment by nesa_techs 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by ontfhjd 1 day ago

[dead]