Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
The internet was never designed to exist in a capitalist hellscape. It was designed for the free sharing of information by people putting random servers on the network.
Technically it was invented by Xerox then developed for the military. The 1990s version of the internet was more akin to what you described but I wouldn't say it was designed with that in mind.
I think you're both right, but one of you is talking about the internet, and the other is talking about the world wide web. Both technologies were intended to facilitate ease of access of information, which is incompatible with robber baronism.
I wouldn’t say it was designed with that in mind
In a sense it very much was. Al Gore as a young congressperson was shown the military version (Arpanet) and then pushed a series of bills that expanded this to the civilian world and created what became knows as the Internet. His explicit goal was to create an "Information Superhighway" that would allow for the free exchange of - wait for it - information. This phrase (popularized by Gore but probably not originated by him) was so well-known in the '90s that it became a standard joke format: "{fill in the blank} Superhighway" was sure to get a laugh.
Incidentally, during the 2000 presidential election cycle, Gore gave an interview where he said he "took the initiative in creating the Internet", which was a perfectly true and reasonable statement for him to make. In fact, all he was doing was emphasizing an achievement that he was already well-known for. Months later, Bush advisor Karl Rove found this quote and mangled it into the "Al Gore claims he invented the Internet!" bullshit that so many people still think was real.
Search results are shit now.
Our only hope is this opens the door to some competitor, who'll provide actually useful search results. I know that would be very expensive to start.
For the longest time I didn't understand why people were saying Google search had gone to shit. Worked for me! Now it cancerous.
I can search for a YouTube video I know well, nada unless I go directly to YT. Google can't even find shit in their own space!
Kagi. Kagi is the answer. Been using it for 3-months and it's absolutely worth the $5 a month.
I'm at about half a year, and I thought for sure I'd be mixing in Google from time to time, but nope.
Same here. Never looked back. My search finally just works.
It'll be bing or something. The internet is too big nowadays for a small group to keep up. There's just too much new information streaming in.
Ecosia and Qwant are working on a European search index.
Brave search has its own index and it works for me. Pretty good way out of big tech for web search.
Google pushed out competitors using partnerships only they could afford, then intentionally made search worse so people would see more ads.
Enshittify search to the point of it being nearly useless. Then introduce a little bot to find it for you. Predictable.
Any hope this takes SEO out with it, or are we just going to get to a point of PR companies flooding AIs with data to benefit their clients?
The original Google algorithm was powered by establishing 'reputation' by the number of links to that page. Would be cool to see an algorithm that started with that analysis, but also weighed pages by their Erdős distance to your Fediverse account(think 6° of Kevin Bacon) - basically much higher scores for links from you, higher score for links by your friends, moderate boost for friends of friends, etc.
Some websites now are really shit. Won't load unless you allow JavaScript from 15 different domains, cookie consent, terrible privacy etc.
If I want to know things like what 10 kmpl in mpg, I often use DDG snippets.
12ft.io would like a word. Makes the internet usable again.
I’ve googled several things recently, the AI shit really sucks! It’s fine if you’re looking for something basic, like translations of words and what not. But if it’s something more specific it’ll easily bullshit you and claim it’s correct.
Yeah not using Google but duck.ai gave me some claim about a product I was looking up that had some categories. I asked how many of category x and it said 11 but the product only had 11 in total. Oh yeah oops I have actually no idea how many of category x there is out of 11. Cool, people who trust it would have just wasted money.
that's copium.
I see that google increase number of search ads, likely because people just stop scrolling and clicking entirely
right i stopped using "search" that muddles my answers with LLM so how would they get my clicks, they lost the customer
I've been liking kagi. Sucks you have to pay.
Kagi is worth it though. Been paying for 3-months and the ability to search, get info, click through quickly is a breath of fresh air. It's what Google USED to be. Plus it downranks pages with excessive trackers, you can prefer or omit websites from results based on personal preference, and it'll even alert you when websites have paywalled answers. The Kagi free trial is all I needed to be convinced.
I forsee a future where kagi subscriptions are bought by libraries and that's basically the only place to do internet searching for free.
If you aren't paying, you're the product.
What sucks is that I can't unbundle their AI shit from my subscription
same actually, Kagi is pretty solid
This study isn't about total clicks, or a drop in traffic to Google caused by people not liking the ai overview. It's about for each Google search that was executed, how often did someone click on a link. Without ai it was 15% and with ai it is 8%. So if anything its proving the customers like the ai overviews and believe they are getting enough from them to answer their query.
Sure there are probably a couple people who see the overview at the top and hate ai so much they leave Google without clicking anything, but those people will probably only do that once or twice before they stop using Google entirely or disable the feature, and thus wouldn't count much in the data about ai overview searches.
so i have to flip them off harder somehow 🤔
I've switched to startpage and have no complaints. Not that Google has deployed much of its latest crap in Europe, but it's been shit for quite some time anyway.
One final nail in the open web coffin, just hammer it in there real good. RIP.
Looks like search will be dead soon.
Cloudflare makes me not want to use your site too
But they are making up for the lack of real visits by increasing their scrapping
I'm reading comments on arstechnica and seeing people mad at... what exactly?
The reason I go to web search is to answer my questions. Now it's given to me at once, without need to go anywhere. Is it sometimes hallucinating? Of course it is, but have you really 100% trusted information on the Internet before anyways? I haven't.
You say that ads driven websites are going to stop receiving money. But have you really liked ads driven websites? The same ones whose main incentive is to keep you on the website as long as possible or, in fact, wasting as much your time as possible to sell it to ad companies? The ones that were really worth visiting already changed their business model.
Try and guess what happens when websites stop getting traffic.
At google scraping the internet, putting it in a blender then force-feeding us that goop while selling our eyeballs and data.
Thank you, I really don't understand all the complaints on this thread. It's like everyone became really pro advertising lol. If I want an answer to a question(say what internal temp do I need to cook chicken too), then I can easily get it without scrolling through a bunch of ads and articles about cooking chicken.
Will 'AI' give rise to Internet 2.0?
As intended.
First they're going to collapse the ad model by eliminating most clicks.
Then they're going to put all of the information they've been scraping from the now-bankrupt websites behind paywalls.
Joke's on them, I've already been working on that for decades. pats ublock This baby can bankrupt so many websites and I always hoped it could collapse the ad model completely.
In all seriousness, it's becoming increasingly clear that we're eventually going to have to build a new, free internet out of the wreckage of this one once the corporations are done with it. Technically it's already there, nascent but ever so slowly growing and taking root, hiding in plain sight. Like the so-called dark web of tor, it already exists in parallel to the existing structures of the internet. Call it the deep web, the indie web, nostalgia web, unsearchable web, I've heard countless terms and most of them aren't terribly accurate, but the web doesn't need ads and google search to exist, it never did. It just needs humans, which despite the best efforts of big tech many of us still are, communicating directly with one another and documenting our billions of lifetimes of diverse collective experiences and knowledge.
We are the wealth of information in the internet. Corporations don't own it. We are it.
Very much yes.
I have this great visual image of the corporate web, marked by neon signs and billboards and holographic ads, populated entirely by bots talking to each other while the humans sneak away, giggling and shushing each other.
I see your ublock and raise you Pihole.
The internet has always had ads, some of the most obnoxious were those mid to late 90s banner ads with sound. I’ll never forget loading a random page and my speakers screaming: Helllllloooooooooo.
I've been wondering how we can build a new underground net that is just the internet of 2002, but with more bandwidth. Somewhere normies can't access easily and with a bad ui so they don't want to.
Yes. The secret to telling what a search engine wants you to do is whatever is on top of the search results.
You and I might scour the results to find the exact best results, but most people simply look at the very first thing they're presented with and call it a day.
When I saw all of the search engines putting AI answers first, I knew they were intentionally trying to stop people from clicking through.
I'm not sure I fully understand the play here. Like, what's the grand vision? Fewer click-throughs == less ad impressions, no? They just want you to see the AdWords ads only? I'm not sure it's a fully-baked idea. I'm not convinced they can really create a moat around all information on the web
Would welcome any additional insights
Why would they do that, when they can charge advertisers to bias the LLM? How much do you think Adidas would pay to have their products advantages mixed into any response about sports gear, undetectable?
CC: @mesamunefire@piefed.social