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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

#771

Post by BalinKing »

brokencode wrote: post #562
pembrook wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is the experience on virtually every content website that used to be tolerable or even good. But this is because there is no viable monetization model for non-editorial written word content anymore and hasn’t been for a decade. Google killed the ecosystem they helped create. Google also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take…

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…

The YouTube search has been unusable for me for about the last year or so (maybe longer?), since every ~5 results are interrupted with clickbait only barely related to my query (and then, past a certain point, they all become unrelated).

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#772

Post by jorl17 »

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…

My "favorite" Google dark-pattern, for which the dreamy kid in me hopes they get fucking sued to oblivion for how offensive it is[1]:

1. Open safari

2. Type something so that it goes search google

3. A web results page appears

4. Immediately a popup appears with two buttons:

- They have the same size

- One is highlighted in blue and it says CONTINUE

- The other is faint and reads "Stay in browser" (but in my native language the distinction is even less clear)

5. Clicking CONTINUE means "CONTINUE in the app", so it takes me to the Google App (or, actually, to the app store, because I don't have this app), but this does not end there!

6. If I go back to the browser to try to fucking use google on my fucking browser, as I fucking wanted to, I realize that doing "Back" now constantly moves me to the app (or app store). So, in effect, I can never get the search results once I have clicked continue. The back button has been highjacked (long pressing does not help). My only option is to NEVER click continue

7. Bonus: All of this happens regardless of my iPhone having the google app installed or not

So: Big button that says "CONTINUE" does not "CONTINUE" this action (it, of course, "CONTINUES" outside).

I just want to FUCKING BROWSE THE WEB. If I use the google app, then clicking a link presumably either keeps me in its specific view of the web (outside of my browser), or it takes me out of the app. This is not the experience I want. I have a BROWSER for a reason (e.g. shared groups/tabs...)

Oh! And since this happens even if I don't have the app, it takes me to the app store. If I install the app via the app store, it then DOES NOT have any mechanism to actually "Continue". It's a fresh install. And, of course, if I go back to the browser and hit "back", I can't.

So for users who DO NOT HAVE THE APP, this will NEVER LET THEM CONTINUE. It will PREVENT THEM FROM USING GOOGLE. And it will force them to do their query AGAIN.

Did the people who work on this feature simply give up? What. The. Fuck?

This behavior seems to happen on-and-off, as if google is gaslighting me. Sometimes it happens every time I open Safari. Some other times it goes for days without appearing. Sometimes in anonymous tabs, sometimes not. Logged in or not, I've seen both scenarios.

I can't be sure, but I genuinely believe that the order of the buttons has been swapped, messing with my muscle memory.

Basically it's this image: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1m76elp/how_do_i_st...

Except a still image cannot describe the excruciating process of dealing with it — especially realizing "oh, wait, I clicked the wrong button, oh wait, no no no, get out of the app store, oh oh oh what did I type again? Damn I lost it all!..."

[1]I would quit before implementing this feature. It disgusts me, and we're talking about google, not some run-of-the-mill company whom you have to work for to barely survive. This is absolutely shameful.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#773

Post by abustamam »

WaxProlix wrote: post #641
brokencode wrote: post #562

Earlier 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 only watch YouTube on my iPad or rarely my android TV, and there, the premium experience is worth it, since it's difficult to block ads on those platforms anyway.

If your experience with YouTube is primarily through browser then yeah I can see why that experience is shitty.

I'm fine with sites detecting adblock, in the sense that I will just not go to those sites. But if I already pay for an ad free experience then there's no reason for them to care about my adblock, unless they're just mad they can't track me, in which case, they can fuck all the way off.

And yes, I know that Google is in that camp, so they can indeed fuck all the way off.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#774

Post by Lammy »

jacquesm wrote: post #262
andrei_says_ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their goal has always been to be the gatekeeper.

I don't think that was true for Google in the first year. But after that it rapidly became their goal.

Google was that from the very beginning: https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#775

Post by jabjq »

showcaseearth wrote: post #678
const_cast wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big Mama's Best Brownie Recipe. Let's start at the beginning. I was born in 1956 in Chicago. My mother was a cruel drunk and the only thing my father hated more than his work was his family.

This is usually okay... what's not okay is that usually this narrative is broken up by ads, a constantly changing layout as you scroll, and eventually jumping so many times you can't resume scrolling, then eventually crashing because too many trackers/ads/etc overwhelmed the browser (on mobile).

No, it's not okay. I used google to look for a brownie recipe; I want a brownie recipe and nothing else.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#777

Post by 83 »

chasd00 wrote: post #480
pflenker wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recipe for Foo. Foo has always been my favorite dish. I fondly remember all the times my grandma made this for me. My grandma, who was born on August 2, 1946, as the daughter of… (10 more pages of text) To cook Foo the way my grandma did, you first need some Bar. Bar is originally native to the reclusive country of… (20 more pages of text)

Yeah recipes are the worst. I least the acknowledge themselves and give you a “jump to recipe” button most of the time. I sometimes hit the print button and just use the preview screen too.

Paprika (an app for storing recipes) can parse out the ingredient list and directions from a webpage. It's surprisingly good at it.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#778

Post by IrishTechie »

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…

If the AI summary was being posted as an article that sat and competed side-by-side with the content you wrote that might be one thing. What Google are doing is more like putting their article at the top of every search and yours and everybody else’s on the second page out of sight.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#779

Post by omnicognate »

pasc1878 wrote: post #770
omnicognate wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see the problem with F and C. As I mentioned, I always stick " C" on the end of temperature queries. It's 2 characters and the results always have the centigrade temps, on both Kagi and Google.

The OPs main complaint was lack of C when that is the temperature scale used in their country

Of course. What else would I think they were complaining about? I also live in a country that uses C. That's why I always stick " C" on the end of temperature queries.

It would be nice if they automatically prioritised those results, but that's a search engine improvement and nobody's working on those any more [1]. A half-arsed AI summary that can't be trusted to get the actual temperature right certainly doesn't solve it.

[1] Except Kagi, and even they're distracted by the AI squirrel.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#780

Post by mwigdahl »

kylebenzle wrote: post #611
brokencode wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for the subscription and don’t see any ads. It comes with YouTube Music. It’s great.

In the old days people would pay to host video content and now people pay Google to watch other people's hosted video content. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing. I'm still waiting for the first company to start selling bottled air next!

There are tons of companies selling bottled air. Here's a story from 7 years ago. There are lots more now: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/jan/21/fresh-air-for...
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