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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

#551

Post by ekianjo »

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…

> If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance.

ad-free? For now. That's just a matter of time.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#552

Post by bogdan »

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.

What sort of world you must live in to find using a food thermometer "really weird"

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#553

Post by ToucanLoucan »

jdietrich wrote: post #315
tmountain wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a market where nobody has a particularly deep moat and most players are charging money for a service. Open weight models aren't too far behind proprietary models, particularly for mundane queries. The cost of inference is plummeting and it's already possible to run very good models at pennies per megatoken. I think it's unreasonably pessimistic to assume that dark patterns are an inevitability.

You do realize of course that every service that now employs all these dark patterns we're complaining about was already profitable and making good money, and that simply isn't good enough? Revenue has to increase quarter-to-quarter otherwise your stock will tank.

It's not simply enough that a product "makes money" it must "make more money, every quarter, forever" which is why everything, not even limited to tech, but every product absolutely BLOWS. It's why every goddamn thing is a subscription now. It's why every fucking website on the internet wants an email and a password so they can have you activate an account, and sell a known active email to their ad partners.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#554

Post by BSOhealth »

DanielKehoe wrote: post #532

I've written high-quality technical how-tos for many years, starting with PC World magazine articles (supported by ads), a book that helped people learn Ruby on Rails (sales via Amazon), and more recently a website that's good for queries like "uninstall Homebrew" or "xcode command line tools" (sponsored by a carefully chosen advertiser). With both a (small) financial incentive and the intrinsic satisfaction of doing…

Novel content will continue to require human creators. So, if you are at the frontier of some idea space, whether that’s using Homebrew or baking brownies, your input will be rewarded to some extent. But, we won’t need 1000 different Medium blogs about installing Rails or 1000 baking websites pitching the same recipe but with a different family story at the top.

Yes, maybe a small amount of people ultimately contributing but if their input is truly novel and “true” then what’s the downside?

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#555

Post by sfmz »

vidarh wrote: post #501
fl0id wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just a general explainer of subscription models. As of right now VC money is necessary for just existing. And they can never stop training or researching. They also constantly have to buy new gpus unless there’s at some point a plateau of ‘good enough’

The race to continue training and researching, however, is drive by competition that will fall away if competitors also can't raise more money to subsidise it. At that point the market may consolidate and progress slow, but not all providers will disappear - there are enough good models that can be hosted and served profitably indefinitely.

Seems like there can never be good enough models; the user will want it up-to-date models with respect to news and culture.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#556

Post by bgwalter »

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…

If nobody writes "content" any more, there will be nothing to summarize. Google is stealing the clicks from real websites that try to make a living.

This is naturally not addressed in the US "AI" Action Plan, same as copyright theft.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#557

Post by deadbabe »

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.

To combat this, maybe we can cache AI responses for common prompts somehow and make some kind of website where people could search for keywords and find responses that might be related to what they want, so they don’t have to spend tokens on an AI. Could be free.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#558

Post by n4r9 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #531
simonklitj wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you going to prompt the AI overview?

Why would I use Google for this use case “There's a library I use with extensive documentation- every method, parameter, event, configuration option conceivable is documented.” This is the perfect use case for ChatGPT with web search. Besides aside from Google News, Google has been worthless to find any useful information for years because of SEO.

The fact that you personally would use a different tool is surely neither here nor there. It's like wading into a conversation about car problems and telling everyone that you ride a motorbike.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#559

Post by languid-photic »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #430
gorbypark wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an attempt to kinda have these things documented for AIs, called llms.txt, which are generally hosted on the web. In theory, an AI should be able to fetch the llms.txt for every library and have an actual authoritative source of documentation for the given library. This doesn't work that great right now, because not everyone is on board, but if we had llms.txt actually embedded in software libraries...it coul…

> In theory, an AI should be able to fetch the llms.txt for every library and have an actual authoritative source of documentation for the given library. But isn't the entire selling point of the LLM than you can communicate with it in natural language and it can learn your API by reading the human docs?

Yes, but I think part of the reason for llms.txt is optimize context. eg beyond content, the human docs often have styling markup which wastes tokens.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#560

Post by twodave »

There is (IMO) still a lot of value in having a searchable Internet index. If AI summaries were the only option it would be very difficult to know whether something is influencing the AI.

The problem is, of course, that we've already lost that battle with Google and other search providers. We know they're influencing the results. There is no open Internet anymore, but at least we can check the different search indices against each other. Checking different AI summaries against each other seems a pretty fruitless endeavor.

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