Live data from Hacker News

AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

arstechnica.com

841–850 of 872 posts

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#841

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…

AI models will continue to improve, but open source models are, right now, good enough for plenty of tasks. If I'm searching "how to get an intuitive understanding of dot product and cross product", any open source model right now will do a perfectly fine job. By the time that the ad-pocalypse reaches AI answers, the models I mention will be at the point of being able to be run locally using consumer hardware. Probab…

> AI models will continue to improve…

[citation needed]

My intuitive sense—informed by media coverage, behaviors exhibited by AI companies and their investors, and a very foundational understanding of how it all works—is that AI models have largely hit a wall and have struggled to improve at all, in some very public cases the newer versions perform worse than their predecessors. The fact that most of the benchmarks are hardly more than internal tests designed to highlight very narrow performance metrics has made getting any reliable sense of the state of the art rather difficult. They do indeed have some extremely useful purposes, but I have yet to see anything that broadly justifies the expense of it all (in plain economic terms, but also in sociopolitical and environmental terms) and a lot of indications that they have recently reached some very firm limits.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#842
post #802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you've never seen it and I see it all the time, I don't think it's me.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does not imply that future progress is a good thing, nor does it imply that future progress will even be useful to the majority. It boggles my mind how some people make the logical inference that "all progress is good" based on "some past progress was useful".

Do you think that having fast, distraction-free access to relevant information is not useful?

I think it's too much information to handle, and that information can interfere with the enjoymnet of what we already have. It might be useful in an economic sense, but its usefulness to life is questionable.

Personally, I think it's not such a good thing after all.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#844
post #816

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.

Lol, if you want to support them pay their patreon. The few cents they get from you paying premium won't support them.

I don't understand what point you're attempting to make. Yes, of course if you pay someone $5 a month on Patreon, they'll be getting more money from you than if you just used Premium or disabled your adblocker. And if you paid them $100/month, that would be more than $5. So?

Why does that make it okay to use an adblocker?

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI models will continue to improve, but open source models are, right now, good enough for plenty of tasks. If I'm searching "how to get an intuitive understanding of dot product and cross product", any open source model right now will do a perfectly fine job. By the time that the ad-pocalypse reaches AI answers, the models I mention will be at the point of being able to be run locally using consumer hardware. Probab…

> AI models will continue to improve… [citation needed] My intuitive sense—informed by media coverage, behaviors exhibited by AI companies and their investors, and a very foundational understanding of how it all works—is that AI models have largely hit a wall and have struggled to improve at all, in some very public cases the newer versions perform worse than their predecessors. The fact that most of the benchmarks a…

I certainly agree that we're at diminishing returns but I suspect there are a lot of data sources left untapped; audio recordings, etc, that would improve the models. Or just some other math improvement.

But in a world where they do not improve, that actually just strengthens the point I made in the rest of my original comment :)

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#846
post #274
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to phrase it as a question; just append a ?, which is an operator telling it you want a generated answer.

Yes. That is exactly what my answer demonstrates.

Your answer is helpful, but "phrasing your queries as a question" might reasonably be interpreted as implying a full natural language question is required to trigger the LLM response -- especially since your example is a full sentence.

I'm trying to expand on your point by clarifying that "roger rabbit?" will also trigger the LLM response.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

I think the point is that the convenience outweighs the accuracy for now! I just look it up with AI then overcook it to be safe.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mmm, I see this cutting both ways -- generally, I'd agree; safety critical things should not be left to an AI. However, cooking temperatures are information that has a factual ground truth (or at least one that has been decided on), has VERY broad distribution on the internet, and generally is a single, short "kernel" of information that has become subject to slop-ifying and "here's an article when you're looking for…

I don’t know. I searched for how many chapters a popular manga has on Google and it gave me the wrong answer (by an order of magnitude). I only found out later and it did really piss me off because I made a trek to buy something that never existed. I should’ve known better. I don’t think this is substantively different from cooking temperature, so I’m not trusting that either.

Eh I think it is. Arcane things -- sure, that might be a bit of a stretch. My general rule of thumb is that if I would expect ~10% of people to know the information factually, I can likely trust what an LLM tells me.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#849
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I’m gonna give an AI agent my credit card and complete autonomy with my finances so it can hallucinate me a new car. I love getting findommed.

It can still give you an overview with a few choices and a link to the prepared checkout page, and you enter your CC details yourself.

That’s basically what any halfway decent e-commerce site is today

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take all the money for themselves by turning their 10 blue links into 5 blue ads at the top of the search results. Adsense is just for little hobby websites, no actual businesses use it. They all use header bidding, which is (mostly) not controlled by Google.

> Before header bidding, publishers sold ad space through a “waterfall” method, offering the space to one ad exchange at a time, typically prioritizing whichever had previously offered the highest prices. But Google made it so that its AdX got “first look” access through DFP by calling it to submit a real-time bid before other exchanges got the chance to take part in an auction. That meant AdX could buy up any invent…

I'm aware of that stuff. That's why I said "mostly". That stuff is bad, but only somewhat impedes the effectiveness of header bidding. There still is bidding going on, there still are many bids being won by companies besides Google, and there's only so much that Google can do about that even with these shenanigans. It's a far cry from all ads being sold directly through Google like on AdSense, where they can simply take a giant cut off the top and call it a day.
Post reply on HN