181–190 of 872 posts
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?
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…
This is a pretty apt analogy: why settle for the original article when you can read the outrage infused summary of an opinionated troll in a hurry? It has little to do with overdesign or load times.
I feel like the discussion here is missing the point. It doesn't matter if the AI overview is correct or not, it doesn't matter if you can turn it off or not. People are using it instead of visiting actual websites. Google has copied the entire World Wide Web into their LLM and now people not using the web anymore! We have bemoaned the fact that Facebook and Twitter replaced most of the web for most people, but now i…
Is there an appreciable difference between a company that controls what information is surfaced via pagerank and one that does so via LLM? Remember the past scandals with google up/downranking various things? This isn't a new problem. Wrt how the average person gets information google doesn't really have more control because people aren't clicking through as much.
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Meanwhile, in Germany, you can get raw pork with raw onions on a bread roll at just about every other bakery. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett When I searched for the safe temperature for pork (in German), I found this as the first link (Kagi search engine) > Ideally, pork should taste pink, with a core temperature between 58 and 59 degrees Celsius. You can determine the exact temperature using a meat thermometer…
I was just thinking that EU sources might be a good place to look for this sort of thing, given that we never really know what basic public health facts will be deemed political in the US on any given day. But, this reveals a bit of a problem—of course, you guys have food safety standards, so advice they is safe over there might not be applicable in the US.
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Which is the stupidest position ever if Google wants to exist long term. Unfortunately there are no workable alternatives. DDG is somehow not better, though I use it to avoid trackers.
DDG is just serving you remixed bing and yandex results. There’s basically no alternative to GBY that do their own crawling and maintain their own index.
Liberating 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.
It's fundamentally self-destructive though. In time, the sites which rely on search clicks for revenue will essentially cease to be paid for their work, and in many cases will therefore stop publishing the high-quality material that you're looking for.
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I was at an event where someone was arguing there wasn't an entry fee because chatgpt said it was free (with a screenshot of proof) then asked why they weren't honoring their online price.
A good time to teach a hard lesson about the trustworthiness of LLM output
The venue organizers also ended up with a shit experience (and angry potential customer) while having nothing to do with the BS.
The 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…
Conversely, 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)"
Related, but to whichever PM put the "AI Mode" on the far left side of the toolbar, thus breaking the muscle memory from clicking "All" to get back from "Images", I expect some thanks for unintentionally boosting your CTR metrics.
That decision probably paid someone's new car. The KPIs will be excellent. Who cares about what the users might have wanted to do with their clicks.