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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

#51

Post by Polizeiposaune »

bgwalter wrote: post #4

You can apparently disable these annoying and useless "AI" overviews by cursing in the query: https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/01/just-give-me-the-fing...

It's relatively straightforward to create a firefox alternate search engine which defaults to the "web" tab of Google search results which is mostly free of Google-originated LLM swill.

Instructions are here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-custom-search-engin...

The "URL with %s in place of search term" to add is:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&client=firefox-b-d&udm=14

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#52

Post by brookst »

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)"

Safe Temperatures for Pork

People have been eating pork for over 40,000 years. There’s speculation about whether pork or beef was first a part of the human diet.

(5000 words later)

The USDA recommends cooking pork to at least 145 degrees.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#53

Post by Melatonic »

standardUser wrote: post #21
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.

I'm more interested now than ever. A lot of my time spent searching is for obscure or hard-to-find stuff, and in the past smaller search engines were useless for this. But most of my searches are quick and the primary thing slowing me down are Google product managers. So maybe Kagi is worth a try?

It's awesome - highly recommend trying it

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#54

Post by ImaCake »

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)"

Not only that, it includes a link to the USDA reference so you can verify it yourself. I have switched back to google because of how useful I find the RAG overviews.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#55

Post by wat10000 »

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)"

It’s only useful if you can trust it, and you very much cannot.

I know you can’t necessarily trust anything online, but when the first hit is from the National Pork Board, I’m confident the answer is good.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#56

Post by thejohnconway »

throaway5454 wrote: post #38
Jare wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the actual results are often even worse. I'm pretty sure we're close to the point where our favorite AI prompt replaces classic googling. While it will get a lot of the answer wrong, it will lead to the right result faster than plain searches. If nothing else, because refining our search at the AI prompt will be way easier than in classic google. Google knows and needs to stay on top of this paradigm chan…

Ai used in this way is going to replace gui as we know it. Why click when you can just tell ai what you want to to do.

Because I usually don’t want to talk to computers in front of other people? It isn’t that it feels silly, but that it’s incredibly distracting for everyone to hear every interaction you have with a computer. This is true even at home.

Maybe we can type the commands, but that is also quite slow compared with tapping/clicking/scrolling etc.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#57

Post by wat10000 »

ImaCake wrote: post #54
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)"

Not only that, it includes a link to the USDA reference so you can verify it yourself. I have switched back to google because of how useful I find the RAG overviews.

The link is the only useful part, since you can’t trust the summary.

Maybe they could just show the links that match your query and skip the overview. Sounds like a billion-dollar startup idea, wonder why nobody’s done it.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#58

Post by Nursie »

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…

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 discussion of something to do with management, it directly contradicted the legislation and official government guidance.

I can't imagine how frustrating it must be for business-owners, or those providing information services to find that their traffic is intercepted and their potential visitors treated to an inaccurate version on the search page.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#59

Post by Nursie »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #24

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.

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.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#60

Post by Nursie »

Jare wrote: post #17
HPsquared wrote: post #8

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

To be fair, the actual results are often even worse. I'm pretty sure we're close to the point where our favorite AI prompt replaces classic googling. While it will get a lot of the answer wrong, it will lead to the right result faster than plain searches. If nothing else, because refining our search at the AI prompt will be way easier than in classic google. Google knows and needs to stay on top of this paradigm chan…

Sometimes search results don't contain the info you need, sometimes they are SEO-spam, or a major topic adjacent to what you need to know about floods the results.

But they're not often confidently wrong like AI summaries are.

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