Default AI Search: Engineering Concerns and Opportunities

Last week, while reviewing test cases for a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline, I stumbled upon an interesting phenomenon: the labeled dataset we use to evaluate answer accuracy is sourced directly from Google search results. A colleague on the testing team half-jokingly asked if this counts as using Google's answers to validate our own, especially since Google's answers are increasingly AI-generated. I froze for a second, then realized it wasn't a joke—it's a serious engineering issue.