Earlier quoted context omitted.
Write documentation and don't block crawlers.
It’ll still make shit up.
It'll need to make less up, so still worth it.
AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
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Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#102I subscribe to Kagi. It's been worth it to have no ads and the ability to uprank/downrank sites. And there's no AI garbage sitting in the top of the engine.
It’s useless. Worse than Google and no AI summary.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#103Conversely, it's useful to get an immediate answer sometimes 6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?" was a few clicks, long SEO optimised blog post answers and usually all in F not C ... despite Google knowing location ... I used it as an example at the time of 'how hard can this be?' First sentance of Google AI response right now: "Pork is safe to eat when cooked to an internal temperature of 145°F (63°C)"
This is the first search result for me: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/general-food...
It doesn't take long to find SEO slop trying to sell you something:
When our grandmothers and grandfathers were growing up, there was a real threat to their health that we don’t face anymore. No, I’m not talking about the lack of antibiotics, nor the scarcity of nutritious food. It was trichinosis, a parasitic disease that used to be caught from undercooked pork.
The legitimate worry of trichinosis led their mothers to cook their pork until it was very well done. They learned to cook it that way and passed that cooking knowledge down to their offspring, and so on down to us. The result? We’ve all eaten a lot of too-dry, overcooked pork.
But hark! The danger is, for the most part, past, and we can all enjoy our pork as the succulent meat it was always intended to be. With proper temperature control, we can have better pork than our ancestors ever dreamed of. Here, we’ll look at a more nuanced way of thinking about pork temperatures than you’ve likely encountered before."
Sorry, what temperature was it again?
Luckily there's the National Pork Board which has bought its way to the top, just below the AI overview. So this time around I won't die from undercooked pork at least.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#104The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed. Google AI has been listing incorrect internal extensions causing departments to field calls for people trying to reach unrelated divisions and services, listing times and dates of events that don't exist at our addresses that people are showing up to, and generally misdirecting and misguiding people who really need correct information from a truth source like o…
I still find it amazing that the world's largest search engine, which so many use as an oracle, is so happy to put wrong information at the top of its page. My examples recently - - Looking up a hint for the casino room in the game "Blue Prince", the AI summary gave me details of the card games on offer at the "Blue Prince Casino" in the next suburb over. There is no casino there. - Looking up workers rights during a…
For years, a search for “is it safe to throw used car batteries into the ocean” would show an overview saying that not only is it safe, it’s beneficial to ocean life, so it’s a good thing to do.
At some point, an article about how Google was showing this crap made it to the top of the rankings and they started taking the overview from it rather than the original Quora answer it used before. Somehow it still got it wrong, and just lifted the absurd answer from the article rather than the part where the article says it’s very wrong.
Amusingly, they now refuse to show an AI answer for that particular search.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun. I have people asking ChatGPT support question about my SaaS app, getting made up answers, and then cancelling because we can’t do something that we can. Can’t make this crap up. How do I teach Chat GPT every feature of a random SaaS app?
Write documentation and don't block crawlers.
There's a library I use with extensive documentation- every method, parameter, event, configuration option conceivable is documented.
Every so often I get lost in the docs trying to do something that actually isn't supported (the library has some glaring oversights) and I'll search on Google to see if anyone else came up with a similar problem and solution on a forum or something.
Instead of telling me "that isn't supported" the AI overview instead says "here's roughly how you would do it with libraries of this sort" and then it would provide a fictional code sample with actual method names from the documentation, except the comments say the method could do one thing, but when you check the documentation to be sure, it actually does something different.
It's a total crapshoot on any given search whether I'll be saving time or losing it using the AI overview, and I'm cynically assuming that we are entering a new round of the Dark Ages.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#106Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#107Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#108The tricky thing for Google will be to do this and not kill their cash cow ad business.
Ads inside LLMs (e.g. pay $ to boost your product in LLM recommendation) is going to be a big thing. My guess is that Google/OpenAI are eyeing each other - whoever does this first. Why would that work? It's a proven business model. Example: I use LLMs for product research (e.g. which washing machine to buy). Retailer pays if link to their website is included in the results. Don't want to pay? Then redirect the user t…
Forget links, agents are gonna just go upstream to the source and buy it for you. I think it will change the game because intent will be super high and conversion will go through the roof.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dear lord please don’t use an AI overview answer for food safety. If you made a bet with your friend and are using the AI overview to settle it, fine. But please please click on an actual result from a trusted source if you’re deciding what temperature to cook meat to
The problem is that SEO has made it hard to find trustworthy sites in the first place. The places I trust the most now for getting random information is Reddit and Wikipedia, which is absolutely ridiculous as they are terrible options. But SEO slop machines have made it so hard to find the good websites without putting in more legwork than makes sense a lot of the time. Funnily enough, this makes AI look like a good…
AI is being influenced by all that noise. It isn’t necessarily going to an authoritative source, it’s looking at Reddit and some SEO slop and using that to come up with the answer.
We need AI that’s trained exclusively on verified data and not random websites and internet comments.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#110Liberating me from "search clicks" is not a bad thing at all. I suspect many of us though don't even go to anyway but ask an LLM directly.
I'm intrigued as to why someone, presumably tech-savvy, would do that? We know they aren't oracles and come up with a lot of false information in response to factual questions.
Google searches also come up with a lot of false information (well, it's where LLMs get their learnin' from — the Internet).
I'm never asking LLMs anything super critical like, "Do my taxes for me." This morning (as an example) I asked: "Is there talk of banning DJI drones in the U.S.?"
Later: "Difference between the RSE20 and RSS20 models of Yamaha electric guitars?"
And "Is there an Eco-Tank ink-jet suitable for Dye-Sub inks that can print Tabloid?"
1) None of the above are "critical".
2) All would have been a slight pain using Google and generated a lot of ... noise. LLMs eat the noise, do a decent job of giving me the salient points that answer my question.
3) All are easily verifiable if, for example, I decided to make a purchase based on what the LLM told me.
Or put another way, my disappointment in LLMs pales in comparison to my disappointment in search.
Or maybe I am just sick of search engines and want to "stick it to them".