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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

#741

Post by throwaway290 »

lelanthran wrote: post #625
throwaway290 wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't tell when a big expensive llm is subliminally grooming you to like/dislike something or is selective with information then another (probably small and cheaper) llm somehow can? Arms race?

> If you can't tell when a big expensive llm is subliminally grooming you to like/dislike something or is selective with information I mean, I can tell when a page contains advertisements, but I still use an ad-blocker. The point was not to help me detect when a response is ad-heavy, but to stop me seeing those ads at all. > Arms race? Possibly. Like with ad-blockers, this race can't be won by the ad-pusher LLM if th…

> I mean, I can tell when a page contains advertisements, but I still use an ad-blocker

Yep, because why let people make money from their work right? You should just get content for free!

> this race can't be won by the ad-pusher LLM if the user uses the ad-blocker LLM.

As per my comment it literally can.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#742

Post by ygjb »

golergka wrote: post #646
WaxProlix wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, I had YouTube's paid offering for a few years (I used the service a lot and want to support non ad-based revenue streams). But they changed something a while back that started giving me a degraded experience, and eventually made the site unusable. Did some digging and it turns out they were detecting my adblock and intentionally making my experience bad despite being a paid customer. I submitted a ticket…

Why would you use Adblock if you pay for premium?

Because Adblock doesn't just block ads, it also blocks invasive trackers that I consider malware.

Paying to remove Ads means I don't want ads, it doesn't mean I consent to all of the other invasive tracking they do.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#743

Post by Planktonne »

bee_rider wrote: post #137
Nursie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find it amazing, having observed the era when Google was an up-and-coming website, that they’ve gotten so far off track. I mean, this must have been what it felt like when IBM atrophied. But, they hired the best and brightest of my generation. How’d they screw it up so bad?

Did they hire the best and brightest or did they hire a subset of people

- willing to work on ads - who were successful in their process

and everyone just fell for the marketing?

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#744

Post by lelanthran »

toenail wrote: post #212
ripped_britches wrote: post #203

Why is this being framed as a problem? People are obviously happier with the new feature, duh Of course they need to make the AI overviews suck less, but saying it’s unfair to sites is crazy talk because your site now just generates less value than an AI response if that’s what stopped you from going If you have content better than Gemini I will still go to your site

Some people are against all kinds of progress. They don't understand that their life depends on progress that was made in the past.

> Some people are against all kinds of progress. They don't understand that their life depends on progress that was made in the past.

Not all change is progress. You can't point at some random change and declare "Progress!".

This is a change. It likely is progress, but at this point there's still a chance that it is not progress.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#746

Post by mushroomba »

tim333 wrote: post #651
rurp wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent taking of people's content for AI training might be the most blatant example of rich well connected people having different rules in our society that I've ever witnessed. If a random person copied mass amounts of IP and resold it in a different product with zero attribution or compensation, and that product directly undercut the business of those same IP producers, they would be thrown in jail. Normal peop…

The trouble is what the LLMs do is effectively read a lot of articles and then produce a summary. What human writers do is quite similar - read a lot of stuff and then write their own article. It's quite hard to block what people have usually done because it's done by an LLM rather than a human. I mean even if you want to ban LLMs, if an article goes up how can you tell if it's 100% written by a human or the human us…

Sometimes, things that are fine become problems when done at scale.

Fishing, for example, is not terrible when it's you and your dad with a rod and bait. But we have the technology to create ships that dredge the ocean and exterminate all life. The scale is the problem.

To borrow a phrase, quantity has a quality all its own.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#747

Post by lelanthran »

cm2187 wrote: post #260

What I don't understand is how do you square that with google still reporting growth in ads revenues. Surely google's business should tank by that much (not even taking into account the additional cost of processing a seach with AI).

> What I don't understand is how do you square that with google still reporting growth in ads revenues.

Advertiser sees fewer hits from ad campaign, assumes it's their competitors, then raises their budget slightly to better compete in the ad auction.

Multiply that by about 300m businesses.

The signals that Google's customers (the advertisers) get is not "Your ad was ignored after we answer the user's query directly", it's "Your ad was ignored". The advertisers cannot tell why the ad was ignored.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#748

Post by deadbabe »

chasd00 wrote: post #690
deadbabe wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the future will be:

1. Someone prompts 2. Server searches for equivalent prompts, if something similar was asked before, return that response from cache. 3. If prompt is unique enough, return response from LLM and cache new response. 4. If user decides response isn’t specific enough, ask LLM and cache.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#749

Post by delecti »

tartoran wrote: post #643
marcellus23 wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using an adblocker certainly won't help smaller creators and niche interests. If you don't want ads but want to support creators, pay for Premium.

I have a question. How much do small creators get for views from Premium users? Say they get a few thousand views per video, would they get anything from Premium users?

I've seen some breakdowns, and (depending on the content, because different ad segments can be more or less lucrative) view time from Premium users tends to be worth more, and often way more.

As I understand it, a chunk of your membership fee is divided amongst all monetized creators you watch on a monthly basis, proportional to your watch time. A different chunk of your membership fee is divided between the creators and record labels, for your watch/listen time of Shorts and Youtube Music.

So the size of the creator is only relevant insofar as it can determine whether the channel is eligible for monetization. View time is not worth a different amount depending on the size of the creator.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#750

Post by grishka »

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…

On desktop I have one of those one-click JS toggle extensions, so the moment I see any attempts to interfere with me reading the goddamn article, that website gets its privilege of client-side interactivity revoked due to abuse.

Some annoyed me so much I even disabled JS for them on my phone. I do that more rarely because of how unnecessarily convoluted that setting is in Chromium browsers on Android. You have to navigate 4 levels deep in the settings and enter the domain you want to block into a text field!

For example, I have JS disabled on everything Substack (and it really annoys me when I end up on Substack hosted on a custom domain).

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