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AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

arstechnica.com

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Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#341

Post by Cthulhu_ »

dirkc wrote: post #329

At some stage Google will need to be accountable for answers they are hosting on their own site. The argument of "we're only indexing info on other sites" changes when you are building a tool to generate content and hosting that content on your own domain. I'm guilty of not clicking when I'm satisfied with the AI answer. I know it can be wrong. I've seen it be wrong multiple times. But it's right at the top and tells…

> The argument of "we're only indexing info on other sites" changes when you are building a tool to generate content and hosting that content on your own domain.

And yet, "the algorithm" has always been their first defense whenever they got a complaint or lawsuit about search results; I suspect that when (not if) they get sued over this, they will do the same. Treating their algorithms and systems as a mysterious, somewhat magic black box.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#342

Post by PetahNZ »

what wrote: post #146
didibus wrote: post #125

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.

Why wouldn't I? It takes a few seconds and my thermometer just sits on fridge.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#343

Post by kriro »

brianwawok wrote: post #35
washadjeffmad wrote: post #30

The 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…

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?

I'm waiting for someone to sue one of the AI providers for libel over something like this, potentially a class action. Could be hilarious.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#344

Post by jacquesm »

LinXitoW wrote: post #328
jacquesm wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you need is good information and AI tools are giving you information without you knowing whether or not it is any good. You may think it is good, but unless you know more about the answer to your query than what you needed to create it you won't be able to tell the difference. If you did then you would not have been asking in the first place. Effectively you are now believing in an oracle.

Which is different from believing the information on an ad and dark pattern infected website how? Since the AI is trained on the data on the websites below the AI summary, the summary quality is basically lock step with the quality of the websites.

It is different because the AI is 'Google' branded and not 'ad and dark pattern infected website' branded. That proximity to Google's branding conveys trust, but it just whitewashes the content from that ad and dark pattern infected website. Only now you don't know about it.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#345

Post by Cthulhu_ »

arkh wrote: post #307
visarga wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Me too. That is why sometimes I take the raw comment thread and paste it into a LLM, the result is a grounded article. It contains a diversity of positions and debunking, but the slop is removed. Social threads + LLMs are an ama…

Why even bother linking to an article or blogpost: use a shock title, maybe associate it with some specific news source. No article to read, just a title and a comment section. Harvest said comments and create a 1h, 1d, 1 week, all time digest.

That reminds me of this webpage some years ago (idk if I can link it, it was very cynical) that summarized the week on HN with a lot of cynicysm and snark, it was a great, "grounding" read, a cynical break from the HN techbro overhyping of e.g. Rust.

(I don't know if Rust is overhyped, it's calmed down again but at one point a recurring post on HN was "solved problem X... but written in Rust!", where the latter was the main selling point instead of e.g. the 10x performance boost that a lot of applications get from a rewrite to a lower-level language)

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#346

Post by bdelmas »

tmountain wrote: post #279
littlecranky67 wrote: post #233

Here is the experience when clicking a link on mobile: * Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent * If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only". When unlucky I need to click "manage options" and first see how to reject all tracking * There is a sticky banner on top/bottom taking 20-30% of my screen upselling me a subscription or asking me to install their app. U…

AI is following the drug dealer model. “The first dose is free!” Given the cost incurred, lots of dark patterns will be coming for sure.

Well maybe not. Thanks that we have Gemini now to compete with ChatGPT. Competition may avoid dark patterns. But without competition yes definitely

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#347

Post by hereonout2 »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #233

Here is the experience when clicking a link on mobile: * Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent * If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only". When unlucky I need to click "manage options" and first see how to reject all tracking * There is a sticky banner on top/bottom taking 20-30% of my screen upselling me a subscription or asking me to install their app. U…

You forgot the part about when you actually get to the content, there's usually about 5 paragraphs of SEO filler text before it actually gets onto answering the topic of the post.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#348

Post by jacquesm »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #340
jacquesm wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that was true for Google in the first year. But after that it rapidly became their goal.

You think? For several years they definitely kept out the way and provided links to get to the best results fast. By the time they dropped "don't be evil" they certainly were acting against users. It started well, agreed. But my recollection is the good Google lasted several years.

Maybe. I think that companies change the moment diffusion of responsibility happens because then decisions that are bad are broken up into so many little steps that everybody can credibly claim 'it wasn't them' that made the bad decisions.

For Google that moment came very rapidly. Launch was in 1998. When Schmidt took over in 2001 they already had 300 employees, their 59th employee or so was a chef.

Somewhere between those two Schmidt became a viable contender for the CEO spot.

I figure that happened somewhere in 1999, but maybe you are right and they kept it together until Schmidt took over. But just the fact that you would hand your 'do no evil' empire to a guy like Schmidt means you have already forgotten that motto.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#349

Post by WA »

Several factors are at play here, which are somewhat contradictive:

1. Publishers feel entitled to traffic, because Google send them traffic in recent years. See [1] for example:

> "Google's core search engine service is misusing web content for Google's AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss," the document said.

> "Publishers using Google Search do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested for Google's AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google's general search results page," the complaint said.

I have zero pity for these publishers.

2. Not all traffic is created equal. Does a business really lose customers, just because traffic goes down? Maybe that traffic wouldn't have converted anyways. This is basically the old piracy discussion revamped with businesses arguing that every single copy of a movie or a game would've been a customer. It's idiotic.

3. But: Google is now a content provider and different rules apply for those than being merely on a comparable level like an ISP. This has been discussed for years with social networks in minds. Hence, Google needs to be held accountable for providing harmful information (such as in another story here: the temperature for heating pork and when food safety is affected).

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/googles-ai-overview...

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#350

Post by kriro »

mtkd wrote: post #50

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)"

On Google: """what temp in C is pork safe at?"""

AI: 63C

First result: Five year old reddit thread (F only discussion, USDA mentioned).

Second result: ThermoWorks blog (with 63C).

Third result: FoodSafety.gov (with 63C)

Forth result: USDA (with 63C)

Seems reasonable enough to scan 3-4 results to get some government source.

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