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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

#801

Post by littlecranky67 »

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…

YouTubes content moderation guidelines / removal of videos that have any content just the slightest topic they don't want to see discussed is kind of a no-go why they don't get my money.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#802

Post by what »

habinero wrote: post #252
what wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think your reference pool is just small. I absolutely use it for meat and especially for ground meat, which has a much higher chance of contamination.

So your reference pool is you and mine is everyone I’ve ever seen cook a burger or steak or pork chop. Which one is smaller?

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#803

Post by what »

bogdan wrote: post #552
what wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

It’s definitely weird. People cook food until it looks done, they don’t neurotically measure the temperature.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#804

Post by ripped_britches »

arrowleaf wrote: post #737
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

For the past ten years I've run a side project that estimates the word count of books and how long it takes to read them. Maintaining and improving this requires tens of hours a month, and a few hundred dollars in RDS, ECS, etc. costs. Two years ago I was at least breaking even on affiliate income, so the cost put into it was purely my own time and effort which I enjoy. These days my total traffic numbers are about 1…

Why are you not using a CDN or edge worker? This boggles my mind that you don’t just have something that can scale to billions of requests for pennies

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#805

Post by bombela »

com2kid wrote: post #761
bombela wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP. I did pay, for 10y. But the video quality kept slowly degrading (lower bitrate). And ads in the video content kept increasing. YouTube also increased advertising some paying shows, YouTube shorts, and more. No way to say no, only "yes forever" or "no thanks not right now". And it comes back in a few weeks. It also constantly sneakily lowers the video quality. So I stopped paying. I combine ad block and sponso…

YT premium has higher bit rates and sponsor block built in, but they don't call it that or advertise that it even exists. Instead they say it allows you to "skip commonly skipped segments of video" but basically it is sponsor block.

It's the bitrate we used to have before they made it a premium plus all star plus+ feature and downgraded the rest.

Netflix did the same. In fact they even silently downgraded us from 4k HDR surround sound during a software update. And nothing can get us back the max quality anymore. I stopped paying all together.

So you know what doesn't buffer, has the absolute best quality (like 4x the bitrate etc), all the languages and what not? pirated content.

It's just stupid how much easier it is to obtain predictable quality without stutter by downloading rather than actually paying a streamer service.

Plus the ads and other UX dark patterns are through the roof.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#806

Post by heavyset_go »

pjc50 wrote: post #387
heavyset_go wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies don't own the AI outputs, but I wonder if they could be found to be publishers of AI content they provide. I really doubt it, though. I expect courts will go out of their way to not answer that question or just say no.

> I wonder if they could be found to be publishers of AI content they provide. I don't see how it could be otherwise - who else is the publisher? I'm waiting for a collision of this with, say, English libel law or German "impressum" law. I'm fairly sure the libel issue is already being resolved with regexes on input or output for certain names. The real question of the rest of the 21st century is: high trust or low t…

> I don't see how it could be otherwise - who else is the publisher?

I agree, I just don't see courts issuing restrictions on this gold rush any time soon.

Platforms want S230-like protections for everything, and I think they'll get them for their AI products not because it's right, but because we currently live in hell and that makes the most sense.

To answer your latter question: there's a lot of value in destroying people's ability to trust, especially formally trusted institutions. We aren't the ones that capture that value, though.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#807

Post by nomel »

recursive wrote: post #106
nomel wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll need to make less up, so still worth it.

It doesn't need to make up any.

It does, since that's a fundamental reality of the current architecture, that most everyone in AI is working to reduce.

If you don't want hallucinations, you can't use LLM, at the moment. People are using LLM, so having giving it data, to hallucinate less, is the only practical answer to the problem they have.

If you see another, that will work within the current system of search engines using AI, please propose it.

Don't take this as me defending anything. It's the reality of the current state of the tech, and the current state of search engines, which is the context of this thread. Pretending that search engines don't use LLM that hallucinate data doesn't help anyone.

As always, we work within the playground that google and bing give us, because that's the reality of the web.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#808

Post by nomel »

recursive wrote: post #538
pixl97 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use a database if you want something that doesn't make things up, not a neural net.

I'm on your side. Good advice for everyone.

But completely irrelevant to this thread, unrelated to the reality of search engines, and does nothing to help the grandparent.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#809

Post by ClimaxGravely »

SoftTalker wrote: post #784
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…

I do subscribe so I don't see ads. My complaints with YouTube are: I don't want "Shorts" in my suggestions, and yes they recently added the option to remove them but it's only temporary. They always come back and I always say "don't show me this" and they say "got it, we won't show you Shorts anymore" but in a few weeks they always come back. Do they think I forgot? And they have some kind of little games now, which…

For me the text has changed from "don't show me this" to "show less of this" and they come back about once a week now. I also have no option to remove them from the subscriptions feed.

I think a similar thing is happening with their crappy games too. They keep coming back (the games still say "don't show me this" though).

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#810

Post by sothatsit »

FredPret wrote: post #732
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem is that SEO has made it hard to find trustworthy sites in the first place. We should remember that's partly Google's fault as well. They decided SEO sites were OK.

Well, they decided which sites were OK, and then people SEO'd a bunch of crap into Google's idea of a good website. I'm no fan of Google but it's not so simple to figure out what's relevant, good content on the scale of the internet, while confronted by an army of adversarial actors who can make money by working out what you value in a site.

It is a game of whack-a-mole in some sense, but Google also isn't swinging the mallet very fast.
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