Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 872 posts

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#681

Post by jdiff »

zahlman wrote: post #660
quectophoton wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who want to experience it: https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ The only inaccurate thing of that meme page is that you only need to uncheck 5 cookie "partners", when in reality there should be at least a few hundred.

The web page source seems full of Easter eggs and I'm not sure how intentional that is. The generic labels and descriptions of content as "useless" make sense, but then I noticed things like multiple redundant tags and this script comment: src: "https://js.monitor.azure.com/scripts/b/ai.2.min.js", // The SDK URL Source crossOrigin: "anonymous", // When supplied this will add the provided value as the cross origin att…

Firefox for Android can handle uBlock Origin, probably NoScript as well. It's the one thing keeping me on Android at this point.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#682

Post by latortuga »

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…

Ugh this just makes me wonder how long it will be before we start seeing responses to AI chat like "please watch this 30s ad / drink a verification can to get your answer". I have to believe that ads are coming.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#683

Post by zahlman »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #345
arkh wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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

Even the routine posts about uv seem to have settled down from that, honestly. The "written in Rust" fanfare is mostly contained to GitHub READMEs now. I still get the sense that it occupies quite a bit of mindshare in the background, though.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#684

Post by neaden »

dingnuts wrote: post #654
afavour wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking as if video content has no intrinsic value of its own. Of course it does. "Now people pay cable companies to watch TV shows. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing."

I mean, when it launched the point of paying for cable instead of getting TV for free via broadcast was no ads Now cable has ads and costs a fortune; I didn't know anyone who has it. I do still watch a little broadcast though, the price is right even if the programming isn't great. If there's nothing on I turn it off and look at my phone

I don't think there was a time Cable didn't have ads, certain channels like HBO yeah, but never cable as a whole. The attraction was just having way more content.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#685

Post by AshleyJanssen »

As one of the creators whose entire business relied on website clicks for long-form, high-quality content, which is now being amalgamated into AI slop, I can confirm that search clicks are WAY down. I write a free bi-weekly newsletter/blog, which has been the primary lead gen for my consulting business. No particular effort at SEO, but up until 6 months ago, I was highly ranked on many terms. Now, my newsletter signups and leads are almost at a standstill.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#686

Post by recursive »

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.

Simpler: if you don't want them to do so, don't engage the LLM.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#687

Post by Workaccount2 »

quectophoton wrote: post #467
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…

For those who want to experience it: https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ The only inaccurate thing of that meme page is that you only need to uncheck 5 cookie "partners", when in reality there should be at least a few hundred.

Unfortunately it only has ~3 domains running JS on it's example site.

I needs to have 15+ to really capture that modern web experience.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#688

Post by Drew_ »

nosianu wrote: post #424
cornholio wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The majority of the linked articles is waaayyyyy too long for what they have to say, and they reveal the subject only many paragraphs in. From reading one or a few short comments I at least know what the linked article is about, which the original headline often does not reveal (no fault of those authors, their blogs are often specialized and anyone finding the article there has much more context compared to finding…

Strongly agree with this. Many authors and video creators have interesting, valuable things to say, but they don't exercise restraint or respect for their audience's time.

If something is overwhelmingly long, especially considering the subject matter, I just skip to the comments or throw it in an LLM to summarize.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#689

Post by zahlman »

seszett wrote: post #302
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK we've got amazing National Health Service informational websites[1], and regional variations of those [2]. For some issues, you might get different advice in the Scottish one than the UK-wide one. So, if you've gone into labour somewhere in the remote Highlands and Islands, you'll get different advice than if you lived in Central London, where there's a delivery room within a 30 minute drive. Google's AI ov…

> ignores the high-quality NHS care delivery websites, and presents you with stuff from US sites Weird because although I dislike what Google Search has become as much as any other HNer, one thing that mostly does work well is localised content. Since I live in a small country next to a big country that speaks the same language, it's quite noticeable to me that Google goes to great lengths to find the actually releva…

But what if I don't want the search engine company to know where I am?

(I mean, I don't generally make a big secret of it. But still.)

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#690

Post by chasd00 »

deadbabe wrote: post #557
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.

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.

I would be curious to see what would happen if you could write every query/response from an LLM to an HTML file and then serve that directory of files back to google with a simple webserver for indexing.
Post reply on HN