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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

#111

Post by ndespres »

esafak wrote: post #67
brianwawok wrote: post #35

Earlier 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.

Plenty of search overview results I get on Google report false information with hyperlinks directly to the page in the vendor documentation that says something completely different, or not at all.

So don’t worry about writing that documentation- the helpful AI will still cite what you haven’t written.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#112

Post by [deleted] »

sothatsit wrote: post #82
ncallaway wrote: post #65

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#113

Post by SteveNuts »

esafak wrote: post #107
recursive wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need to make up any.

Given how LLMs work, hallucinations still occur. If you don't want them to do so, give them the facts and tell them what (not) to extrapolate.

How to draw an owl:

1. Start by drawing some circles.

2. Erase everything that isn't an owl, until your drawing resembles an owl.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#114

Post by sothatsit »

al_borland wrote: post #109
sothatsit wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Creating better datasets would also help to improve the performance of the models, I would assume. Unfortunately, the costs to produce high-quality datasets of a sufficient size seem prohibitive today.

I'm hopeful this will be possible in the future though, maybe using a mix of 1) using existing LLMs to help humans filter the existing internet-scale datasets, and/or 2) finding some new breakthroughs to make model training more data efficient.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#115

Post by nneonneo »

h4kunamata wrote: post #100

Not any AI tho. I have replaced SEO with Perplexity AI only. It isn't a chatbot but it actually search for what you are looking for and most importantly, it shows all the sources it used. Depending on the question I can get anywhere from 10 to 40 sources. No other AI service provides that, they use the data from their training model only which in my experience, is full of errors, incomplete, cannot answer or altogeth…

Google's AI overviews gives you sources. The sources don't always say what Google AI thinks it says. Or, Google will mix up two sources that are talking about totally different things, assume they're the same thing, and then show you nonsense generated from the mix.

I don't immediately assume that Perplexity will be any better off. Citing sources is great, but I'd rather just read the sources myself rather than assuming that the AI did anywhere a good job of actually summarizing them properly. At that point, what does the AI actually usefully bring to the table?

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#116

Post by gundmc »

thewebguyd wrote: post #5
skywhopper wrote: post #2

Which is of course Google’s short-sighted goal. See also their push to switch to full “AI mode” search which doesn’t show results at all.

It's a weird goal to me. Like, what's their end game here? Offer to manipulate the AI responses for ad money? Product placement in the summaries? I would hope those placements have to be disclosed as advertising, and it would immediately break trust in anything their AI outputs so surely that would only continue to harm them in the long run, no? ~57% of their revenue is from search advertising. How do they plan on re…

I'm pretty sure their endgame right now is just "don't lose all of your market share to companies that _will_ use LLMs".

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#117

Post by nneonneo »

privatelypublic wrote: post #66
x0x0 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

appending a -"fuck google #{insert slur of choice here}" to my search results has improved them. Then I wonder why I do this to myself and ponder going back to kagi.

Jesus dude. Just use the udm options instead of practicing slurs.

I wish there was a good udm option for "what you used to show me before AI took over". For example, I like seeing flight updates when I punch in a flight number, which udm=14 does not show.

That said, udm=14 has still been a huge plus for me in terms of search engine usability, so it's my default now.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#118

Post by al_borland »

peacebeard wrote: post #94
ghushn3 wrote: post #14

I 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.

Thanks for the suggestion. I try nonstandard search engines now and then and maybe this one will stick. Google certainly is trying their best to encourage me.

After about a year on Kagi my work browser randomly reverted to Google. I didn’t notice the page title, as my eyes go right to the results. I recoiled. 0 organic results without scrolling, just ads and sponsored links everywhere. It seems like Google boiled the frog one degree at a time. Everyone is in hell and just doesn’t know it, because it happened so gradually.

I’ve also tried various engines over the years. Kagi was the first one that didn’t have me needing to go back to Google. I regularly find things that people using Google seem to not find. The Assistant has solved enough of my AI needs that I don’t bother subscribing to any dedicated AI company. I don’t miss Google search at all.

I do still using Google Maps, as its business data still seems like the best out there, and second place isn’t even close. Kagi is working on their own maps, but that will be long road. I’m still waiting for Apple to really go all-in, instead of leaning on Yelp.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#119

Post by jjani »

h4kunamata wrote: post #100

Not any AI tho. I have replaced SEO with Perplexity AI only. It isn't a chatbot but it actually search for what you are looking for and most importantly, it shows all the sources it used. Depending on the question I can get anywhere from 10 to 40 sources. No other AI service provides that, they use the data from their training model only which in my experience, is full of errors, incomplete, cannot answer or altogeth…

Huh? All of the other AI service provide that. Geminii, Claude, GPT.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#120

Post by al_borland »

outlore wrote: post #47
ghushn3 wrote: post #14

I 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.

is there a way to make safari search bar on iOS show the kagi search term rather than the URL?

Maybe with Orion instead of Safari?

Apple really needs to update Safari to let people choose their search engine, instead of just having the list of blessed search engines to choose from.

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