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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

#821

Post by ssernikk »

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…

I know it won't fix the core issue, but you can try (at least on android) Firefox with uBlock Origin (with filter lists for cookies and annoyances enabled). It makes the web usable on mobile for me.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#822

Post by Expurple »

fsflover wrote: post #819
Expurple wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, Safari is a bigger competitor than Firefox, and it's actually independent from Google. But it's not like it's better for the user...

> independent from Google Not really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38253384

Unlike Firefox, Safari has another huge corporate backer (Apple). Apple is drowning in cash. They don't need Google's money to keep developing Safari. It's "just" a good, low-effort deal for them. Apple doesn't have a competing search engine, or an intention to develop one, or an intention to promote a free web and "save" their users from a search engine monopoly.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#823

Post by AlecSchueler »

mushroomba wrote: post #746
tim333 wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's true but the GP comment was making a qualitative argument rather than a quantitative one.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#824

Post by AlecSchueler »

benrutter wrote: post #373

A lot of the comments here are along the lines of "websites are often hostile, and AI summaries are a better user experience" which I agree with for most cases. I think the main thing to be worried about is that this model is undermining the fundamental economic model the internet's currently based on. If I create content like recipes, journalism etc, previously I had exclusive rights to my created content and could…

> Previously, if I wanted to take a recipe from "strawberry-recipes.cool" and published it on my own website with a better user experience, that wouldn't have been allowed because of copyright rules

This is not true, you absolutely could have republished a recipe with your own wording and user experience.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#825

Post by AlecSchueler »

omnicognate wrote: post #779
pasc1878 wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sol…

The point is that the AI just gives you the answer without you having to concern yourself with what measurement system they use in the US.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#826

Post by AlecSchueler »

ncallaway wrote: post #249
zahlman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been finding that the proliferation of AI slop is at its worst on recipe/cooking/nutrition sites, so....

Please find a trusted source of information for food safety information. It's genuinely harder than it's ever been to find good information on the internet, but when you're dealing with food safety information, it's really worth taking the extra minute to find a definitive source. https://www.foodsafety.gov/food-safety-charts/safe-minimum-i...

The site you linked to is published by the American government who are actively anti-science, removing access to research and cutting funding for ideological reasons, denying widely accepted climate and medical facts etc. I wouldn't trust that source at all.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#827

Post by edwin2 »

people forget why users search - to find what they are looking for. as the saying goes, “No one wants a drill, they want a quarter inch hole.”

the first time i realized Google had a problem was when i used ChatGPT to search for Youtube videos, and compared to Youtube’s search, it was an order of magnitude easier to find the exact videos i was looking for.

Hallucinations are not a problem in a query like this, because i have what i need to evaluate the results: did i find interesting Youtube videos to watch? did i find what i was looking for?

generally speaking, users seek to minimize the effort required to achieve their goals.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#828

Post by cobbaut »

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…

> The web page source seems full of Easter eggs

Indeed... click the video play button :)

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#829

Post by netdevphoenix »

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…

> If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance.

Now. Nothing stopping them from injecting ads in their summary. And chances are that they will eventually

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#830

Post by omnicognate »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #825
omnicognate wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sol…

The point is that the AI just gives you the answer without you having to concern yourself with what measurement system they use in the US.

As I said, it routinely gives incorrect data so it can't be relied on for something that matters, like a safe cooking temperature.

Note that we're talking about the Google AI Summary here, not AI in general. Whatever magical capabilities you think your favoured model has or will soon have, the Google AI Summary is currently utter garbage and routinely spouts nonsense. (Don't try and persuade me otherwise. I have to use Google at work so I see its lies first hand every day.)

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