Warms my heart. Clicking ad-infested bullshit articles and wasting many minutes trying to find the line where the answer lies was the worst internet experience of the last decade. I am glad crappy ad-blogging is dying.
AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
751–760 of 872 posts
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#752I don't like having both AI overview and search results in the same page. I am looking for either one and not both usually...
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#753Earlier quoted context omitted.
YouTube is 20 years old now. Either the encrapification is very slow or they landed on a decent ad model. Plus there is a subscription that eliminates ads. I think it’s a great experience for users. Many creators also seem to do well too. I think this should be the model for a new generation of search. Obviously there will be ads/sponsored results. But there should be a subscription option to eliminate the ads. The k…
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…
I've paid for Youtube Premium for a decade, use adblock in my browser, have no issues with performance on Youtube.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#754I pay 20$/mo for chatGPT. I find searching through websites for information feels very outdated. I have some websites I specifically visit (e.g. aggregators like HN, journalism like WSJ), but if I want information I am going to have chatGPT present it to me in a manner tailored to my specific investigation. I do still google things when I want to find a particular thing, such as a product link, but for general information I am going to use an LLM.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#755Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Alas, there does seem to be a strong tradition of that on HN. The car example is apropos, though instead it's more like "why do you own a car? I live in a hyper dense urban utopia and never drive anywhere!"
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#756But hey, I'm sure Google's quarterly earnings are doing just fine
They were fine, though.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#757Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then the part where you have to create an account to read past the SEO filler :( It's so sad, cause it drags down good pages. I recently did a lot of research for camping and outdoor gear, and of course I started the journey from Google. But a few sites kept popping up, I really liked their reviews and the quality of the items I got based on that, so I started just going directly to them for comparisons and revie…
Outdoor Gear Lab is great, it’s true.
Nailed it :D
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#758Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In the 1950s when Cable started in the US, there were no Cable channels. Cable was literally renting a pipe to a big antenna instead of your own small antenna in your house, so you got broadcast with better signal strength.
The first Cable channel was HBO. The second was TBS, it had ads from the beginning.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#759I feel like there should be two modes - search and answer. It's helpful to get an AI summarize answer like 90% of the time. But the other 10%, I am searching for something specific.
I use Perplexity's Comet browser part-time now. I feel like what makes me annoyed about AI overview summaries is that sometimes I really just need to get the actual site itself and not a summary. For example, I needed to find EC2 pricing information and Perplexity's default search gave me a summary answer. I was looking for Vantage.sh's instance info site.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#760Earlier 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.
A lot of them have sponsors which pay more than the ads, or are on Patreon, or are also on other platforms that pay them a higher proportion or allow videos that risk demonetisation on Youtube, or sell merch, or something else.
Sure, and if you're a patreon supporter, or support them on a non-YouTube platform, great. But if they're monetized and you're just watching them on YouTube, which probably 90% of people do, then running an adblocker is preventing them from earning money they would otherwise have earned. Whether or not they're _also_ earning money via other means is irrelevant.