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AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

arstechnica.com

171–180 of 872 posts

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#171
First they came for the stackoverflow comments, and I said nothing, for stackoverflow is notorious for being full of jerks.

Then they came for the search engine clicks, and I said nothing, because monetised search contributed heavily to the enshittification of the internet.

Great so far. Can AI kill off social media and internet surveillance next?

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#172
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny story, I used that to know the cooked temperature of burgers, it said medium-rare was 130. I proceeded to eating it and all, but then like half way through, I noticed the middle of this burger is really red looking, doesn't seem normal, and suddenly I remembered, wait, ground beef is always supposed to be 160, 130 medium-rare is for steak. I then chatted that back to it, and it was like, oh ya, I made a mistake…

Do you actually put a thermometer in your burgers/steaks/meat when you’re cooking? That seems really weird. Why are people downvoting this? I’ve literally never seen anyone use a thermometer to cook a burger or steak or pork chop. A whole roasted turkey, sure.

Many people wing dishes that they've prepared 100s of times. Others rarely make the same recipe twice. Neither are correct or incorrect, but the latter is very much going to measure everything they're doing carefully (or fail often).

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#173
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny story, I used that to know the cooked temperature of burgers, it said medium-rare was 130. I proceeded to eating it and all, but then like half way through, I noticed the middle of this burger is really red looking, doesn't seem normal, and suddenly I remembered, wait, ground beef is always supposed to be 160, 130 medium-rare is for steak. I then chatted that back to it, and it was like, oh ya, I made a mistake…

Do you actually put a thermometer in your burgers/steaks/meat when you’re cooking? That seems really weird. Why are people downvoting this? I’ve literally never seen anyone use a thermometer to cook a burger or steak or pork chop. A whole roasted turkey, sure.

For something safety critical like a burger, yes.

For whole meats, it's usually safe to be rare and you can tell that by feel, though a thermometer is still useful if you aren't a skilled cook or you are cooking to a doneness you aren't familiar with.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I’m gonna give an AI agent my credit card and complete autonomy with my finances so it can hallucinate me a new car. I love getting findommed.

It can still give you an overview with a few choices and a link to the prepared checkout page, and you enter your CC details yourself.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#176

I've seen blatantly wrong stuff in that overview too many times, I just ignore it now.

I am not sure how everyone is ignoring that or just getting along with it. I've had it return that the earth population is 10bn which is blatantly wrong and infuriating. It hallucinates harder than regular LLMs which are already bad for getting reliable answers.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#177

In a sense this is similar to what Amazon has been doing in few countries. Find top selling products, get them cheaper from somewhere, rebrand them, rank them higher and sell them. They don't need to invest in market research like their competetors, they get all data from Amazon.com At big tech scale, this is clearly anti-compete and piracy IMHO.

Except in this case they still rely on people to create content to train their AI on.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#178
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find it amazing, having observed the era when Google was an up-and-coming website, that they’ve gotten so far off track. I mean, this must have been what it felt like when IBM atrophied. But, they hired the best and brightest of my generation. How’d they screw it up so bad?

The capitalist system is broken. Incentives to maximise stockholder values will maximise stockholder values very well. Everything else will go to shit. This is true about everything from user experience to the environment to democracy.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#179

Of course slow, shitty web sites also cause a massive drop in clicks, as soon as an alternative to clicking emerges. It's just like on HN, if I see an interesting title and want to know what the article is about, I can wince and click the article link, but it's much faster and easier to click the HN comments link and infer the info I want from the comments. That difference is almost entirely from the crappy overdesig…

I do the same thing, but it's not because of format. To me, blogs and other articles feel like sales pitches, whereas comments are full of raw emotion and seem more honest. I end up seeking out discussions over buttoned up long-form articles.

This is not strictly logical but I have a feeling I'm not alone.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#180
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, a small group of highly tech-literate people are wary of this. Your personal bubble is wary of this. So is some of mine. "People" don't care and will use the packaged, corporate, convenient version with the well-known name. People who are aware of that and care enough to change consumption habits are an inconsequential part of the market.

I don't know, a bunch of the older people from the town I grew up in avoided using LLMs until Grok came out because of what they saw going on with alignment in the other models (they certainly couldn't articulate this but listening to what said it's what they were thinking.) Obviously Grok has the same problems but I think it goes to show the general public is more aware of the issue than they get credit for. You com…

Maybe Grok was just pushed by their political influencers. It’s a republican, anti-woke LLM after all.
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