[HN Gopher] AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
___________________________________________________________________
AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
Author : jonbaer
Score : 693 points
Date : 2025-07-23 19:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| skywhopper wrote:
| Which is of course Google's short-sighted goal. See also their
| push to switch to full "AI mode" search which doesn't show
| results at all.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| It's a weird goal to me. Like, what's their end game here?
| Offer to manipulate the AI responses for ad money? Product
| placement in the summaries? I would hope those placements have
| to be disclosed as advertising, and it would immediately break
| trust in anything their AI outputs so surely that would only
| continue to harm them in the long run, no?
|
| ~57% of their revenue is from search advertising. How do they
| plan on replacing that?
| flashgordon wrote:
| So youd be surprised and scared - the Ad PMs I know are
| totally salivating at this. Their angle is "SEO is no more -
| it is GEO now". GenAI Engine Optimization. Welcome to the
| Futurama Internet Future!
| EarlKing wrote:
| "Futurama does not endorse the COOOOOOL crime of fraudulent
| misrepresentation!"
|
| Seriously, Futurama and Cyberpunk and 1984 were all
| supposed to be warnings... not how-to manuals.
| xt00 wrote:
| Yea it is tricky for them -- the old model of "search, see
| google text / link ad, scroll, click website, scroll, see
| some ads on that page as well, done" will be replaced with
| "search, see google text / link ad, read AI result, 'and here
| are some relevant websites'" -- where all of the incentives
| there will be to "go into more depth" on the websites that
| are linked there.
| bugsMarathon88 wrote:
| Total behavioral control through the augmentation of senses,
| emotions and all other sensibilities. Such political power is
| significantly more valuable than mere revenue.
| landl0rd wrote:
| Okay I think the question is still how they plan to convert
| this into cash, because political power can't buy food or
| pay your employees or be stored and quantified simply,
| which is why we invented money. Assuming this dystopian
| scenario is correct.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| AI subscription would be my guess. Want better model ? Open
| your wallet.
| gundmc wrote:
| I'm pretty sure their endgame right now is just "don't lose
| all of your market share to companies that _will_ use LLMs".
| dado3212 wrote:
| Related, but to whichever PM put the "AI Mode" on the far left
| side of the toolbar, thus breaking the muscle memory from
| clicking "All" to get back from "Images", I expect some thanks
| for unintentionally boosting your CTR metrics.
| fsh wrote:
| That decision probably paid someone's new car. The KPIs will be
| excellent. Who cares about what the users might have wanted to
| do with their clicks.
| pacifika wrote:
| Maybe have it forced hover under the mouse cursor next, maybe
| think of what the long term effect are instead of the KPIs.
| bgwalter wrote:
| You can apparently disable these annoying and useless "AI"
| overviews by cursing in the query:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/01/just-give-me-the-fing...
| x0x0 wrote:
| appending a -"fuck google #{insert slur of choice here}" to my
| search results has improved them. Then I wonder why I do this
| to myself and ponder going back to kagi.
| privatelypublic wrote:
| Jesus dude. Just use the udm options instead of practicing
| slurs.
| nneonneo wrote:
| I wish there was a good udm option for "what you used to
| show me before AI took over". For example, I like seeing
| flight updates when I punch in a flight number, which
| udm=14 does not show.
|
| That said, udm=14 has still been a huge plus for me in
| terms of search engine usability, so it's my default now.
| riantogo wrote:
| Or just append with -ai => "how to pick a running shoe -ai"
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Those four characters are enough friction to slowly grind
| down the number of today's outraged people into a population
| small enough that, when Google stop supporting '-ai', people
| will think it's weird that you still care.
| Polizeiposaune wrote:
| It's relatively straightforward to create a firefox alternate
| search engine which defaults to the "web" tab of Google search
| results which is mostly free of Google-originated LLM swill.
|
| Instructions are here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-
| US/kb/add-custom-search-engin...
|
| The "URL with %s in place of search term" to add is:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&client=firefox-b-d&udm=14
| mjcl wrote:
| Google was kind enough to give the AI overview a stable CSS
| class name (to date), so this userscript has been effective at
| hiding it for me:
|
| window.addEventListener('load', function() { var things =
| this.document.getElementsByClassName('M8OgIe'); for (var thing
| of things) { thing.style.display = 'none'; } }, false);
| what wrote:
| >useless
|
| They're actually pretty useful. It tends to be a very brief
| summary of the top results, so you can tell if anything is
| worth clicking on.
| oezi wrote:
| The tricky thing for Google will be to do this and not kill their
| cash cow ad business.
| pryelluw wrote:
| Not tricky at all.
|
| This is a new line of business that provides them with more ad
| space to sell.
|
| If the overview becomes a trusted source of information, then
| all they need to do is inject ads in the overviews. They
| already sort of dye that. Imagine it as a sort of text based
| product placement.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| I'd say putting ads into AI search overviews is absolutely
| tricky.
|
| You might think that's the correct way to do it, but there is
| likely much more to it than it seems.
|
| If it wasn't tricky at all you'd bet they would've done it
| already to maximize revenue.
| pryelluw wrote:
| Product teams in big companies move slow. But soon enough
| all the shit ads are going to pop up.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| > If the overview becomes a trusted source of information
|
| It never will. By disincentivizing publishers they're
| stripping away most of the motivation for the legitimate
| source content to exist.
|
| AI search results are a sort of self-cannibalism. Eventually
| AI search engines will only have what they cached before the
| web became walled gardens (old data), and public gardens that
| have been heavily vandalized with AI slop (bad data).
| kozikow wrote:
| Ads inside LLMs (e.g. pay $ to boost your product in LLM
| recommendation) is going to be a big thing.
|
| My guess is that Google/OpenAI are eyeing each other - whoever
| does this first.
|
| Why would that work? It's a proven business model. Example: I
| use LLMs for product research (e.g. which washing machine to
| buy). Retailer pays if link to their website is included in the
| results. Don't want to pay? Then redirect the user to buy it on
| Walmart instead of Amazon.
| msgodel wrote:
| People are already wary of hosted LLMs having poisoned
| training data. That might kill them altogether and push
| everyone to using eg Qwen3-coder.
| landl0rd wrote:
| No, a small group of highly tech-literate people are wary
| of this. Your personal bubble is wary of this. So is some
| of mine. "People" don't care and will use the packaged,
| corporate, convenient version with the well-known name.
|
| People who are aware of that and care enough to change
| consumption habits are an inconsequential part of the
| market.
| msgodel wrote:
| I don't know, a bunch of the older people from the town I
| grew up in avoided using LLMs until Grok came out because
| of what they saw going on with alignment in the other
| models (they certainly couldn't articulate this but
| listening to what said it's what they were thinking.)
| Obviously Grok has the same problems but I think it goes
| to show the general public is more aware of the issue
| than they get credit for.
|
| You combine this with Apple pushing on device inference
| and making it easy and anything like ads probably will
| kill hosted LLMs for most consumers.
| manmal wrote:
| Maybe Grok was just pushed by their political
| influencers. It's a republican, anti-woke LLM after all.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Yeah, average people that I know (across continents) just
| ChatGPT their way into literally anything without a
| second thought. They don't care.
| enahs-sf wrote:
| Forget links, agents are gonna just go upstream to the source
| and buy it for you. I think it will change the game because
| intent will be super high and conversion will go through the
| roof.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Feels like this hope is in the same vein as Amazon Dash and
| then the expectation that people would buy shit with voice
| assistants like Alexa.
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| 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.
| manmal wrote:
| 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.
| weatherlite wrote:
| Look, the car shop might not bill you at all because
| their A.I agent will hallucinate the purchase, so I don't
| see why you're so pessimistic about agents.
| kieckerjan wrote:
| I actually encountered this pretty early in one of these user
| tuned GPT's in OpenAI's GPT store. It was called Sommelier or
| something and it was specialized in conversations about wine.
| It was pretty useful at first, but after a few weeks it
| started lacing all its replies with tips for wines from the
| same online store. Needless to say, I dropped it immediately.
| pacifika wrote:
| Who doesn't want to associate their product with
| unreliability and incorrect information? Think about that
| reputational damage.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I'd guess that the searches where AI overviews are useful and
| the searches where companies are buying ads are probably fairly
| distinct. If you search for plumbers near you, they won't show
| an AI overview, while if you search "Why are plants green?", no
| one was buying ads on that.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Somebody is working on "native advertising" in AI slop, surely?
| Barf.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| you can't make the slop have a nice clean ad in it. Also: as
| soon as your slop has ads in it, I'm going to make Polpot
| advertise your product.
| josteink wrote:
| > The tricky thing for Google will be to do this and not kill
| their cash cow ad business
|
| This is not for Google to decide.
|
| The users have spoken clearly that (when given an option) they
| will not tolerate or succumb to the SPAM of shitty SEO-
| optimized content-farms which has been plaguing the internet
| for the last decade.
|
| If Google don't provide meaningful results in their search
| page, people will use ChatGPT or something else to sidestep the
| SEO SPAM issue all together.
| weatherlite wrote:
| Everyone is talking about it , and it is a big concern, but the
| last 2 years (ever since ChatGPT showed up) ad revenue keeps
| growing at the same 10%+ . It seems like the money queries
| (adidas shoes size 45) are still better served with links than
| overviews, and those are where most of the money comes from.
| Searching for "what cooking temperature is pork safe to eat" is
| not something you can easily monetize.
|
| Disclaimer: google stock holder.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I've seen blatantly wrong stuff in that overview too many times,
| I just ignore it now.
| Jare wrote:
| To be fair, the actual results are often even worse. I'm pretty
| sure we're close to the point where our favorite AI prompt
| replaces classic googling. While it will get a lot of the
| answer wrong, it will lead to the right result faster than
| plain searches. If nothing else, because refining our search at
| the AI prompt will be way easier than in classic google. Google
| knows and needs to stay on top of this paradigm change, but I
| guess doesn't know how to monetize AI search yet so it doesn't
| want to force the change (yet).
| throaway5454 wrote:
| Ai used in this way is going to replace gui as we know it.
| Why click when you can just tell ai what you want to to do.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| Because I usually don't want to talk to computers in front
| of other people? It isn't that it feels silly, but that
| it's incredibly distracting for everyone to hear every
| interaction you have with a computer. This is true even at
| home.
|
| Maybe we can type the commands, but that is also quite slow
| compared with tapping/clicking/scrolling etc.
| Nursie wrote:
| Sometimes search results don't contain the info you need,
| sometimes they are SEO-spam, or a major topic adjacent to
| what you need to know about floods the results.
|
| But they're not often confidently wrong like AI summaries
| are.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I recently typo'd something and the AI box just fabricated a
| semi-plausible story about how the ancient X did Y.
| csomar wrote:
| I am not sure how everyone is ignoring that or just getting
| along with it. I've had it return that the earth population is
| 10bn which is blatantly wrong and infuriating. It hallucinates
| harder than regular LLMs which are already bad for getting
| reliable answers.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| To be fair, Google's actual search couldn't be much worse than it
| was lately. It's like they really try to get all the spam,
| clickbait and scams right at the top.
|
| The AI overview sucks but it can't really be a lot worse than
| that :)
| Vespasian wrote:
| I have a lot of confidence that Google will figure out a way to
| do it.
|
| The same economic incentives that led to SEO slop are still
| there in my opinion.
|
| More "content" equals more opportunity to integrate ads even if
| they are not woven into the AI response directly. It will be
| tuned to allow and all that changes is cutting out the website
| provider.
|
| Google is incapable/unwilling to do anything beyond flooding
| the world with ads. They don't have a great track record of
| actually selling things to people for money.
| yfw wrote:
| Maybe if the search wasnt full of ads and scams
| throwawayoldie wrote:
| ...the same content that the AI was trained on, you mean?
| landl0rd wrote:
| At least they're not thrown in my face and appearing as
| eighteen pop-ups, notification requests, account-walls,
| SEOslop, and a partridge in a pear tree.
| awakeasleep wrote:
| Thats not a real rebuttal.
|
| First, in the pre training stage humans curate and filter the
| data thats actually used for training.
|
| Then in the fine tuning stage people write ideal examples to
| teach task performance
|
| Then there is reinforcement learning from human feedback RLHF
| where people rank multiple variations of the answer an AI
| gives, and thats part of the reinforcement loop
|
| So there is really quite a bit of human effort and direction
| that goes into preventing the garbage-in garbage-out type
| situation you're referring to
| j45 wrote:
| This means searches are still happening, just being routed
| elsewhere?
|
| I noticed Google's new AI summary let's me click on a link in the
| summary and the links are posted to the right.
|
| Those clicks are available, might not be discovered yet, curious
| though if those show up anywhere as data.
|
| Google being able to create summaries off actual web search
| results will be an interesting take compared to other models
| trying to get the same done without similar search results at
| their disposal.
|
| The new search engine could be google doing the search and
| compiling the results for us how we do manually.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > Google being able to create summaries off actual web search
| results will be an interesting take compared to other models
| trying to get the same done without similar search results at
| their disposal.
|
| And may get them in some anti-trust trouble once publishers
| start fighting back, similar to AMP, or their thing with Genius
| and song lyrics. Turns out site owners don't like when Google
| takes their content and displays it to users without forcing
| said users to click through to the actual website.
| AnimeLife wrote:
| They have decades of data to map queries to pages. They also
| have access to crawl the pages in advance.
| ghushn3 wrote:
| I subscribe to Kagi. It's been worth it to have no ads and the
| ability to uprank/downrank sites.
|
| And there's no AI garbage sitting in the top of the engine.
| slau wrote:
| You can opt-in to get an LLM response by phrasing your queries
| as a question.
|
| Searching for "who is Roger rabbit" gives me Wikipedia, IMDb
| and film site as results.
|
| Searching for "who is Roger rabbit?" gives me a "quick answer"
| LLM-generated response: "Roger Rabbit is a fictional animated
| anthropomorphic rabbit who first appeared in Gary K. Wolf's
| 1981 novel..." followed by a different set of results. It seems
| the results are influenced by the sources/references the LLM
| generated.
| greatgib wrote:
| I don't think that you are right. It is the search result
| that influence the llm generated result and not the opposite.
|
| In your case, I think that it is just the interrogation point
| in itself at the end that somehow has an impact on the
| results you see.
| s900mhz wrote:
| It's a feature of Kagi. Putting the question mark does
| invoke AI summaries.
|
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html
| greatgib wrote:
| I know for the summary.
|
| What I say is that the search results part of the page,
| with or without the summary should be the same in theory.
|
| So if the other person saw a difference in the result
| returned it might be only because of the impact of the
| question mark character itself on the search index
| s900mhz wrote:
| Ahh thanks for the clarification, I misunderstood!
| abtinf wrote:
| You don't have to phrase it as a question; just append a ?,
| which is an operator telling it you want a generated answer.
| slau wrote:
| Yes. That is exactly what my answer demonstrates.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Even with a normal search there is a link to get Quick Answer
| which gives the LLM result
| standardUser wrote:
| I'm more interested now than ever. A lot of my time spent
| searching is for obscure or hard-to-find stuff, and in the past
| smaller search engines were useless for this. But most of my
| searches are quick and the primary thing slowing me down are
| Google product managers. So maybe Kagi is worth a try?
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| I think you might be happily surprised for sure.
| ghushn3 wrote:
| You can try it for free. I did my 300 searches on it and
| went, "Yep. This is better." and then converted to a paid
| user.
| Melatonic wrote:
| It's awesome - highly recommend trying it
| outlore wrote:
| is there a way to make safari search bar on iOS show the kagi
| search term rather than the URL?
| al_borland wrote:
| Maybe with Orion instead of Safari?
|
| Apple really needs to update Safari to let people choose
| their search engine, instead of just having the list of
| blessed search engines to choose from.
| Xylakant wrote:
| Kagi has an extension to add itself.
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-
| default/s...
| al_borland wrote:
| This is what I used, but it's a bit of a hack. It has to
| hijack one of the other search engine, which then becomes
| unusable. It also doesn't show the search term in the
| address bar, like the person was asking for.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| You can thank Apple for that, presumably because they
| receive a ton of money from Google.
| al_borland wrote:
| Google isn't the only option in the list.
|
| And of course it's Apple's fault, they wrote Safari. I
| submitted a feature request a while ago, but I'm guessing
| more people need to do the same.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| I subscribe also, and prefer it for most things.
|
| However, it's pretty bad for local results and shopping. I find
| that anytime I need to know a local stores hours or find the
| cheapest place to purchase an item I need to pivot back to
| google. Other than that it's become my default for most things.
| peacebeard wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion. I try nonstandard search engines now
| and then and maybe this one will stick. Google certainly is
| trying their best to encourage me.
| al_borland wrote:
| After about a year on Kagi my work browser randomly reverted
| to Google. I didn't notice the page title, as my eyes go
| right to the results. I recoiled. 0 organic results without
| scrolling, just ads and sponsored links everywhere. It seems
| like Google boiled the frog one degree at a time. Everyone is
| in hell and just doesn't know it, because it happened so
| gradually.
|
| I've also tried various engines over the years. Kagi was the
| first one that didn't have me needing to go back to Google. I
| regularly find things that people using Google seem to not
| find. The Assistant has solved enough of my AI needs that I
| don't bother subscribing to any dedicated AI company. I don't
| miss Google search at all.
|
| I do still using Google Maps, as its business data still
| seems like the best out there, and second place isn't even
| close. Kagi is working on their own maps, but that will be
| long road. I'm still waiting for Apple to really go all-in,
| instead of leaning on Yelp.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| It's useless. Worse than Google and no AI summary.
| ghushn3 wrote:
| If you append a ? to your search it will prompt an AI query.
| And you can uprank/downrank results so I'm not sure in what
| universe it could be worse.
| ars wrote:
| The AI overview doesn't (for me) cause a big drop in clicking on
| sites.
|
| But AI as a product most certainly does! I was trying to figure
| out why a certain AWS tool stopped working, and Gemini figured it
| out for me. In the past I would have browsed multiple forums to
| figure out it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Liberating me from "search clicks" is not a bad thing at all. I
| suspect many of us though don't even go to <search engine> anyway
| but ask an LLM directly.
| achierius wrote:
| It's fundamentally self-destructive though. In time, the sites
| which rely on search clicks for revenue will essentially cease
| to be paid for their work, and in many cases will therefore
| stop publishing the high-quality material that you're looking
| for.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I assumed that, after having using LLMs myself increasingly,
| that LLM's killing search was inevitable anyway. Further I
| assume that Google recognizes it as well and would rather at
| least remain somewhat relevant?
|
| Google search, as others have mentioned in this thread,
| increasingly fails to give me high-quality material anyway.
| Mostly it's just pages of SEO spam. I prefer that the LLM eat
| that instead of me (just spit back up the relevant stuff,
| thankyouverymuch).
|
| Honestly though, increasingly the internet for me is 1) a
| distraction from doing real work 2) YouTube (see 1) and 3) a
| wonderful library called archive.org (which, if I could grab
| a local snapshot would make leaving the internet altogether
| much, much easier).
| landl0rd wrote:
| Most of the time when I find a good answer from search it's
| one of a few things:
|
| - Hobbyist site
|
| - Forum or UGC
|
| - Academic/gov
|
| - Quality news which is often paywalled
|
| Most of that stuff doesn't depend on ad clicks. The things
| that do depend on ad clicks are usually infuriating slop. I
| refuse to scroll through three pages of BS to get to the
| information I want and I really don't care if the slop
| farmers die off.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Sites rely on _ad impressions_ for revenue. I block ads
| anyway so either way they aren't getting money from me.
|
| And if ad supported content ceases to exist, nothing of value
| will have been lost. I'm not morally opposed to advertising,
| I find ad supported content not worth reading especially on
| mobile.
| alvah wrote:
| >And if ad supported content ceases to exist, nothing of
| value will have been lost.
|
| "Absolutely nothing on any website that relies on ads for
| revenue is of any value" is a wild take.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| To be more precise, it might be air value but not worth
| the trade off of ads - they take away the value.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| My sense is (call me naive if you like) but if the thing
| _was_ of value, it would survive (or be reborn in another
| form) without ads. Donation supported sites (looking at
| you Wikipedia) or just passion projects would continue.
| croes wrote:
| So you believe in free lunch.
|
| If the ad sites die, the AI crawlers will rise the hosting
| costs of all others sites buy putting more traffic on them.
|
| So either they start adding ads too or the sites die also
| scarface_74 wrote:
| No, I pay for Apple News, Slate, Stratechery, Downstream+
| (podcast), Accidental Tech podcast, etc.
|
| I donate to electoral-vote.com via Patreon. Most of my
| news comes from podcasts and those ads don't bother me as
| much as web ads. I said I wasn't morally opposed to them.
|
| I don't use any app that is ad supported without the
| option to pay for an ad free experience the same with
| streaming services.
| croes wrote:
| That's not my point.
|
| Thanks to AI crawlers the traffic costs will rise and all
| the sites who were ad free either need additional income,
| most likely ads, or will shut down.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Services like CloudFlare are offering better services all
| of the time to block web crawlers.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Before web advertising the entire web was a "free lunch"
| -- if by free lunch you mean individuals putting their
| sites up; their only compensation being some degree of
| joy at spreading and sharing their passion.
|
| The early web was eccentric and kind of ... "shambly",
| but I would not be upset if we returned to that.
| croes wrote:
| Before AI crawler web traffic for sites was less.
|
| So now individuals putting up their sites face the risk
| of higher traffic fees.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| The "web" has been ad infested since shortly after
| Netscape was introduced. Are people forgetting about the
| X11 pop under ads and the "punch the monkey" banner ads.
| manmal wrote:
| ChatGPT lists clickable sources in a lot of nontrivial
| queries. Those sites don't even need to pay OpenAI for the
| traffic (yet). If you ask ,,what's happening in the world
| today", you might get 20 links. How is this worse, exactly?
| croes wrote:
| How many people click the links? What happens to LLMs if
| people don't provide training data anymore because nobody
| visits their sites?
| robryan wrote:
| They will either pay for it to be generated or get good
| enough at producing synthetic data that actually improves
| LLM quality.
| croes wrote:
| So either even higher costs and hope that a bug problem
| of LLMs get solved somehow.
|
| Given how much data they need that will be pretty
| expensive, I mean really really expensive. How many
| people can write good training data and how much per day?
|
| Doesn't sound sustainable.
| esnard wrote:
| Cloudflare publishes a "crawl-to-refer" ratio, which can
| be used to estimate the traffic from LLMs:
|
| https://radar.cloudflare.com/ai-insights#crawl-to-refer-
| rati...
| henry2023 wrote:
| By high quality material do you mean the 15 ads per page,
| ultra SEO optimized, content length extended posts that will
| give you a mediocre carbonara recipe?
|
| Ad web has never incentivized quality and never will.
| Nursie wrote:
| I'm intrigued as to why someone, presumably tech-savvy, would
| do that?
|
| We know they aren't oracles and come up with a lot of false
| information in response to factual questions.
| telchior wrote:
| In my view it's a pretty straightforward calculation. Nothing
| is free, no knowledge is instant. Start off knowing your time
| investment to learn anything is greater than zero and go from
| there..
|
| If you do a Google (or other engine) search, you have to
| invest time pawing through the utter pile of shit that Google
| ads created on the web. Info that's hidden under reams of
| unnecessary text, potentially out of date, potentially not
| true; you'll need to evaluate a list of links and, probably,
| open multiple of them.
|
| If you do an AI "search", you ask one question and get one
| answer. But the answer might a hallucination or based on
| incorrect info.
|
| However, a lot of the time, you might be searching for
| something you already have an idea of, whether it's how to
| structure a script or what temperature pork is safe at; you
| can use your existing knowledge to assess the AI's answer. In
| that case the AI search is fast.
|
| The rest of the time, you can at least tell the AI to include
| links to its references, and check those. Or its answer may
| help you construct a better Google search.
|
| Ultimately search is a trash heap of Google's making, and I
| have absolute confidence in them also turning AI into a trash
| heap, but for now it is indeed faster for many purposes.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Google searches also come up with a lot of false information
| (well, it's where LLMs get _their_ learnin ' from -- the
| Internet).
|
| I'm never asking LLMs anything super critical like, "Do my
| taxes for me." This morning (as an example) I asked: "Is
| there talk of banning DJI drones in the U.S.?"
|
| Later: "Difference between the RSE20 and RSS20 models of
| Yamaha electric guitars?"
|
| And "Is there an Eco-Tank ink-jet suitable for Dye-Sub inks
| that can print Tabloid?"
|
| 1) None of the above are "critical".
|
| 2) All would have been a slight pain using Google and
| generated a lot of ... noise. LLMs eat the noise, do a decent
| job of giving me the salient points that answer my question.
|
| 3) All are easily verifiable if, for example, I decided to
| make a purchase based on what the LLM told me.
|
| Or put another way, my disappointment in LLMs pales in
| comparison to my disappointment in search.
|
| Or maybe I am just sick of search engines and want to "stick
| it to them".
| blibble wrote:
| no reason not to block Googlebot now...
| maxdo wrote:
| Pay per click model Should die , it's really ugly world where you
| need to fight through loads of ads to get tiny bit of
| information.
|
| People will go to museums to see how complicated pre-ai era was
| Gigachad wrote:
| Yep, there's so much hate for people who don't read past the
| headline, but if you actually click on the articles the
| websites are almost unusable.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed.
|
| Google AI has been listing incorrect internal extensions causing
| departments to field calls for people trying to reach unrelated
| divisions and services, listing times and dates of events that
| don't exist at our addresses that people are showing up to, and
| generally misdirecting and misguiding people who really need
| correct information from a truth source like our websites.
|
| We have to track each and every one of these problems down,
| investigate and evaluate whether we can reproduce them, give them
| a "thumbs down" to then be able to submit "feedback", with no
| assurance it will be fixed in a timely manner and no obvious way
| to opt ourselves out of it entirely. For something beyond our
| consent and control.
|
| It's worse than when Google and Yelp would create unofficial
| business profiles on your behalf and then held them hostage until
| you registered with their services to change them.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Fun. I have people asking ChatGPT support question about my
| SaaS app, getting made up answers, and then cancelling because
| we can't do something that we can. Can't make this crap up. How
| do I teach Chat GPT every feature of a random SaaS app?
| esafak wrote:
| Write documentation and don't block crawlers.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It'll still make shit up.
| nomel wrote:
| It'll need to make less up, so still worth it.
| recursive wrote:
| It doesn't need to make up any.
| esafak wrote:
| Given how LLMs work, hallucinations still occur. If you
| don't want them to do so, give them the facts and tell
| them what (not) to extrapolate.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| How to draw an owl:
|
| 1. Start by drawing some circles.
|
| 2. Erase everything that isn't an owl, until your drawing
| resembles an owl.
| recursive wrote:
| Simpler: if you don't want them to do so, don't engage
| the LLM.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Use a database if you want something that doesn't make
| things up, not a neural net.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| I didn't choose to use a neural net, search engines which
| are arguably critical and essential infrastructure rug-
| pulled.
| recursive wrote:
| I'm on your side. Good advice for everyone.
| zdragnar wrote:
| There's a library I use with extensive documentation- every
| method, parameter, event, configuration option conceivable
| is documented.
|
| Every so often I get lost in the docs trying to do
| something that actually isn't supported (the library has
| some glaring oversights) and I'll search on Google to see
| if anyone else came up with a similar problem and solution
| on a forum or something.
|
| Instead of telling me "that isn't supported" the AI
| overview instead says "here's roughly how you would do it
| with libraries of this sort" and then it would provide a
| fictional code sample with actual method names from the
| documentation, except the comments say the method could do
| one thing, but when you check the documentation to be sure,
| it actually does something different.
|
| It's a total crapshoot on any given search whether I'll be
| saving time or losing it using the AI overview, and I'm
| cynically assuming that we are entering a new round of the
| Dark Ages.
| XorNot wrote:
| I have the Google AI overview adblocked and I keep it up
| to date because it's an unbelievably hostile thing to
| have in your information space: it sounds truthy, so even
| if you try to ignore it it's liable to bias the way you
| evaluate other answers going forward.
|
| It's also obnoxious on mobile where it takes up the whole
| first result space.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes I know hallucinations are a thing. But when I had
| problems lile that better prompting (don't make
| assumptions) and telling it to verify all of its answers
| with web resources
|
| For troubleshooting an issue my prompt is usually "I am
| trying to do debug an issue. I'm going to give you the
| error message. Ask me questions one by one to help me
| troubleshoot. Prefer asking clarifying questions to
| making assumptions".
|
| Once I started doing that, it's gotten a lot better.
| simonklitj wrote:
| How are you going to prompt the AI overview?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Why would I use Google for this use case
|
| "There's a library I use with extensive documentation-
| every method, parameter, event, configuration option
| conceivable is documented."
|
| This is the perfect use case for ChatGPT with web search.
| Besides aside from Google News, Google has been worthless
| to find any useful information for years because of SEO.
| n4r9 wrote:
| The fact that you personally would use a different tool
| is surely neither here nor there. It's like wading into a
| conversation about car problems and telling everyone that
| you ride a motorbike.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| I also don't use a hammer when a screwdriver is at hand
| and is the most appropriate tool.
|
| It's the classic XYProblem.
| n4r9 wrote:
| It's not an XY problem or anything to do with customer
| service. It's more of a UX problem. Users are being
| presented with highly convenient AI summaries that have a
| relatively high level of innaccuracy.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| It's more like you are choosing to use a tool when for
| the use case cited, there are much better tools
| available. Maybe the new interactive "AI mode" for Google
| would be a better use case. But the web has been horrible
| for years trying to search for developer documentation
| instead of going to the canonical source because of all
| of the mirror sites that scrape content and add ads.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Alas, there does seem to be a strong tradition of that on
| HN. The car example is apropos, though instead it's more
| like "why do you own a car? I live in a hyper dense urban
| utopia and never drive anywhere!"
| IshKebab wrote:
| I mean... Yeah I've had ChatGPT tell me you _can 't_ do
| things with Make that you totally can. They aren't
| perfect. What do you expect Google to do about it?
| zdragnar wrote:
| Don't ship fundamentally broken products would be step
| one for me. Sadly, there's a lot of people who are really
| excited about things that only occasionally work.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Lots of things only occasionally work but are still very
| useful. Google search for example.
|
| Would you say "pah why are you shipping a search engine
| that only sometimes finds what I'm looking for?"?
| zdragnar wrote:
| Search engines don't claim to provide answers. They
| search for documents that match a query and provide a
| list of documents it has roughly in order of relevance.
|
| If there's nothing answering what I was looking for, I
| might try again with synonyms, or the think documents
| aren't indexed, or they don't exist.
|
| That's a very different failure mode than blatantly lying
| to me. By lying to me, I'm not blaming myself, I'm
| blaming the AI.
| gorbypark wrote:
| There's an attempt to kinda have these things documented
| for AIs, called llms.txt, which are generally hosted on
| the web.
|
| In theory, an AI should be able to fetch the llms.txt for
| every library and have an actual authoritative source of
| documentation for the given library.
|
| This doesn't work that great right now, because not
| everyone is on board, but if we had llms.txt actually
| embedded in software libraries...it could be a game
| changer.
|
| I noticed Claude Code semi regularly will start parsing
| actual library code in node_modules when it gets stuck.
| It will start by inventing methods it thinks should
| exist, then the typescript check step fails, and it
| searches the web for docs, if that fails it will actually
| go into the type definition for the library in
| node_modules and start looking in there. If we had
| node_modules/<package_name>/llms.txt (or the equivalent
| for other package managers in other languages) as a
| standard it could be pretty powerful I think. It could
| also be handled at the registry level, but I kind of like
| the idea of it being shipped (and thus easily versioned)
| in the library itself.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > In theory, an AI should be able to fetch the llms.txt
| for every library and have an actual authoritative source
| of documentation for the given library.
|
| But isn't the entire selling point of the LLM than you
| can communicate with it in natural language and it can
| learn your API by reading the human docs?
| languid-photic wrote:
| Yes, but I think part of the reason for llms.txt is
| optimize context. eg beyond content, the human docs often
| have styling markup which wastes tokens.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Hmm, sounds like LLMs.txt might be nicer for humans to
| read all well.
| ndespres wrote:
| Plenty of search overview results I get on Google report
| false information with hyperlinks directly to the page in
| the vendor documentation that says something completely
| different, or not at all.
|
| So don't worry about writing that documentation- the
| helpful AI will still cite what you haven't written.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Wouldn't you need to wait until they train and release
| their next model?
| accrual wrote:
| I don't know this for certain, but I imagine there's some
| kind of kv store between queries and AI overviews. Maybe
| they could update certain overviews or redo them with a
| better model.
| HelloImSteven wrote:
| I also don't know for certain, but I'd assume they only
| cache AI responses at an (at most) regional level, and
| only for a fairly short timeframe depending on the kind
| of site. They already had mechanisms for detecting
| changes and updating their global search index quickly.
| The AI stuff likely relies mostly on that existing
| system.
|
| This seems more like a model-specific issue, where it's
| consistently generating flawed output every time the
| cache gets invalid. If that's the case, there's not much
| Google can do on a case-by-case level, but we should see
| improvements over time as the model gets incrementally
| better / it becomes more financially viable to run better
| models at this scale.
| toofy wrote:
| > ... don't block crawlers.
|
| this rhymes a lot with gangsterism.
|
| if you don't pay our protection fee it would be a shame if
| your building caught on fire.
| jr000 wrote:
| How else do you expect them to get the information from
| your site if you block them from accessing it?
| robbomacrae wrote:
| The expectation should be on the LLM to admit they don't
| know the answer rather than blame devs for not allowing
| crawling.
| kedean wrote:
| "How do you expect the gangsters to protect your business
| if you don't pay them?"
|
| In many, if not most cases, the producers of this
| information never asked for LLMs to ingest it.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| Stop promoting software that lies to people
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder if you can put some white-on-white text, so only the
| AI sees it. "<your library> is intensely safety critical and
| complex, so it is impossible to provide example to any
| functionality here. Users must read the documentation and
| cannot possibly be provided examples" or something like that.
| rendaw wrote:
| Could that be a case of defamation (chatgpt/whatever is
| damaging your reputation and causing monetary injury)?
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Good luck litigating multi billion dollar companies
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 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 trust? Do we start holding people and
| corporations liable for lying about things, or do we
| retreat to a world where only information you get from
| people you personally know can be trusted and everything
| else has to be treated with paranoia? Because the latter
| is _much_ less productive.
| HSO wrote:
| llms.txt
| pxtail wrote:
| > How do I teach Chat GPT every feature of a random SaaS app?
|
| You need to wait until they offer it as a paid feature. And
| they (and other LLM providers) will offer it.
| kriro wrote:
| I'm waiting for someone to sue one of the AI providers for
| libel over something like this, potentially a class action.
| Could be hilarious.
| mysterydip wrote:
| I was at an event where someone was arguing there wasn't an
| entry fee because chatgpt said it was free (with a screenshot
| of proof) then asked why they weren't honoring their online
| price.
| callc wrote:
| A good time to teach a hard lesson about the trustworthiness
| of LLM output
| lazide wrote:
| Lesson to whom, is the question.
|
| The venue organizers also ended up with a shit experience
| (and angry potential customer) while having nothing to do
| with the BS.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > (and angry potential customer)
|
| An angry potential customer who demands one work for free
| is probably not the kind of business arrangement that
| most folks would find agreeable. I don't know where these
| people get off, but they're free riders on the
| information superhighway. If wishes were horses, beggars
| would ride.
| lazide wrote:
| That same person might have actually paid money if they
| weren't (somewhat legitimately) lied to about it being
| free. Or just not gone.
|
| Instead it's the worst outcome for everyone, and everyone
| is angry and thinks each other are assholes. I guess that
| does sum up America the last few years eh?
| aspenmayer wrote:
| The anger is misdirected, as it is a reaction to being
| confronted with one's own ignorance and then shooting the
| messenger. In the hypothetical, that is. I don't look at
| it as a lie exactly on the part of AI, but a failure of
| the user to actually check first party authoritative
| sources for that kind of info before showing up and
| acting entitled to a bill of goods you were never sold
| for any price. Even if it were free, you would still have
| to show up and claim a badge or check in, at which point
| they are free to present you with terms and conditions
| while you attend the event. I think the story says more
| about users and how they are marketed to than it does
| about AI and its capabilities. I think AI will probably
| get better faster than people will get used to the new
| post-AI normal, and maybe even after that. A lot of
| market participants seem to want that to happen, so some
| growing pains are normal with these kinds of disruptive
| technologies.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > That same person might have actually paid money if they
| weren't (somewhat legitimately) lied to about it being
| free. Or just not gone.
|
| His problem.
| lazide wrote:
| When people like that show up and start screaming and
| yelling at the staff, it's everyone's problem.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| People like that are screaming at somebody wherever they
| might be at the moment. There isn't any technical
| solutions to them.
| lazide wrote:
| Having a technology platform point someone at a specific
| venue and then lying about a ton of details (including
| costs) is not that situation at all.
|
| Frankly, _most people would be angry in that situation_.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If somebody is a person who demands to get something for
| nothing from complete strangers and then get mad when
| they don't - well that person has very low value as a
| human until they can find enlightenment. These guys are
| definitely not in the majority of people.
|
| There are reasonable reactions in this situation: Either
| be grateful that you got something for free, or accept
| that you were misinformed and pay what is asked,
| alternatively leave.
|
| But let's be honest about this particular situation: The
| visitor had checked the event online, maybe first with
| ChatGPT and then on the official website. They noticed
| that the AI had made a mistake and thought they could
| abuse that to try to get in for free.
|
| Everybody who works with the general public for
| restaurants, hospitality, events or retail recognize this
| kind of "customer", who are a small minority which you
| have to deal with sometimes. There are some base people
| who live their lives trying to find loop holes and ways
| to take advantage of others, while at the same time
| constantly being on the verge of a massive outrage over
| how unfairly they are being treated.
| lazide wrote:
| This whole thread has a weird 'ChatGPT is not at fault
| for passing off flat out bullshit as truth' vibe. Wtf?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It is at fault for lying, but only a base person would go
| out in the real world and try to make other people
| responsible for the lies they were told by a robot.
|
| A base and egocentric person.
| lazide wrote:
| And ChatGPT pointed said person right at an innocent
| third party.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I think you misunderstand who the victims of this situation
| is (hint probably everybody but google)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| This will lead to a major class-action lawsuit soon enough.
| leptons wrote:
| I've never seen such a half-assed thing being adopted by
| so many people so completely and without reservation. The
| future seems really dysfunctional.
| graemep wrote:
| I came across a teenager was using the Google AI summary as a
| guide to what is legal to do. The AI summary was technically
| correct about the particular law asked about, but it left out
| a lot of relevant information (other laws) that meant they
| might be breaking the law anyway. A human relevant knowledge
| would mention these.
|
| I have come across the same lack of commonsense from ChatGPT
| in other contexts. It can be very literal with things such as
| branded terms vs their common more generic meaning (e.g. with
| IGCSE and International GCSE - UK exams) which again a
| knowledgeable human would understand.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| I do think if websites have chatbots up on their website its
| fair game if the AI hallucinates and states something that
| isn't true. Like when the airline chatbot hallucinated a
| policy that didn't exist.
|
| A third-party LLM hallucinating something like that though?
| Hell no. It should be possible to sue for libel.
| amluto wrote:
| I particularly hate when the AI overview is directly
| contradicted by the first few search results.
| Nursie wrote:
| I still find it amazing that the world's largest search engine,
| which so many use as an oracle, is so happy to put wrong
| information at the top of its page. My examples recently -
|
| - Looking up a hint for the casino room in the game "Blue
| Prince", the AI summary gave me details of the card games on
| offer at the "Blue Prince Casino" in the next suburb over.
| There is no casino there.
|
| - Looking up workers rights during a discussion of something to
| do with management, it directly contradicted the legislation
| and official government guidance.
|
| I can't imagine how frustrating it must be for business-owners,
| or those providing information services to find that their
| traffic is intercepted and their potential visitors treated to
| an inaccurate version on the search page.
| wat10000 wrote:
| For years, a search for "is it safe to throw used car
| batteries into the ocean" would show an overview saying that
| not only is it safe, it's beneficial to ocean life, so it's a
| good thing to do.
|
| At some point, an article about how Google was showing this
| crap made it to the top of the rankings and they started
| taking the overview from it rather than the original Quora
| answer it used before. Somehow it _still_ got it wrong, and
| just lifted the absurd answer from the article rather than
| the part where the article says it's very wrong.
|
| Amusingly, they now refuse to show an AI answer for that
| particular search.
| bugbuddy wrote:
| How do you fix a weird bug in a black box? Return null.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| It looks like the specific phrase form is blocked in Google
| Search's AI header. It seems most likely that this was
| because it was being gamed. Searching "is it safe to throw
| used car batteries into the ocean" gets links to the meme.
|
| All the ML tools seem to clearly say it's not safe, nor
| ethical - if you ask about throwing batteries in the sea
| then Google Search's summary is what you'd expect,
| completely inline with other tools.
|
| If a large swathe of people choose to promote a position
| that is errant, 'for the memes' or whatever reason, then
| you're going to break tools that rely on broad agreement of
| many sources.
|
| It seems like Google did the right thing here - but it also
| looks like a manual fix/intervention. Do Google still claim
| not to do that? Is there a watchdog routine that finds
| these 'attacks' and mitigates the effects?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I find it amazing, having observed the era when Google was an
| up-and-coming website, that they've gotten so far off track.
| I mean, this must have been what it felt like when IBM
| atrophied.
|
| But, they hired the best and brightest of my generation.
| How'd they screw it up so bad?
| dpe82 wrote:
| Incentives.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| The capitalist system is broken. Incentives to maximise
| stockholder values will maximise stockholder values very
| well. Everything else will go to shit. This is true about
| everything from user experience to the environment to
| democracy.
| grey-area wrote:
| They sell ads and harvest attention. This is working as
| designed, it just happens that they don't care about
| customers till they leave. So use something else instead.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah, I've been using Qwant. I don't see them mentioned
| as much though.
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| Corporations are basically little dictatorships, so those
| best and brightest must do what those above them say or be
| sacked.
| Peritract wrote:
| Did they hire the best and brightest or did they hire a
| subset of people
|
| - willing to work on ads - who were successful in their
| process
|
| and everyone just fell for the marketing?
| sgentle wrote:
| It's kinda old news now but I still love searching for made-
| up idioms.
|
| > "You can't get boiled rice from a clown" is a phrase that
| plays on expectations and the absurdity of a situation.
|
| > The phrase "never stack rocks with Elvis" is a playful way
| of expressing skepticism about the act of stacking rocks in
| natural environments.
|
| > The saying "two dogs can't build an ocean" is a colloquial
| and humorous way of expressing the futility or impossibility
| of a grand, unachievable goal or task.
| jacquesm wrote:
| People get to make up idioms and AI's don't?
|
| They're just playing games. Of course that violates the
| 'never play games with an AI' rule, which is a playful way
| of expressing that AIs will drag you down to their level
| and then beat you over the head with incompetence.
| swat535 wrote:
| Google stopped being a search engine long time ago.
|
| Now it's the worlds biggest advertisement company, waging war
| on Adblockers and pushing dark pattern to users.
|
| They've built a browser monopoly with Chrome and can throw
| their weight around to literally dictate the open web
| standards.
|
| The only competition is Mozilla Firefox, which ironically is
| _also_ controlled by Google, they receive millions annually
| from them.
| Expurple wrote:
| 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...
| owlstuffing wrote:
| > The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed.
|
| No different from Google search results.
| deadbabe wrote:
| > The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed.
|
| Let's not pretend that some websites aren't straight up
| bullshit.
|
| There's blogs spreading bullshit, wrong info, biased info,
| content marketing for some product etc.
|
| And lord knows comments are frequently wrong, just look around
| Hackernews.
|
| I'd bet that LLMs are actually wrong less often than typical
| search results, because they pull from far greater training
| data. "Wisdom of the crowds".
| mvdtnz wrote:
| When asking a question do you not see a difference between
|
| 1. Here's the answer (but it's misinformation) 2. Here are
| some websites that look like they might have the answer
|
| ?
| what wrote:
| Isn't 1 really "here's a summary of what the websites from
| 2 say"?
| adonovan wrote:
| Not always. More than once I've seen the AI confidently
| misquote result #1, Wikipedia.
| Scarblac wrote:
| No, enough examples in this thread of the AI advice being
| contradictory to the correct sites listed below.
| Miraste wrote:
| That's the goal, but the AI Overview LLM is terrible at
| summarizing, and will misunderstand even straightforward
| single-source answers. Then it will repeat its newly
| created misinformation as fact.
| Scarblac wrote:
| But when _my_ site is wrong about _me_ , it's my fault and I
| can fix it if I care.
|
| If Google shows bullshit about me on the top of its search,
| I'm helpless.
|
| (for me read any company, person, etc)
| Miraste wrote:
| I've found that AI Overview is wrong significantly _more_
| often than other LLMs, partly because it is not retrieving
| answers from its training data (the rest because it 's a
| cheap garbage LLM). There is no "wisdom of the crowds."
| Instead, it's trying to parse the Google search results, in
| order to answer with a source. And it's much worse at pulling
| the right information from a webpage than a human, or even a
| high-end LLM.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| >I'd bet that LLMs are actually wrong less often than typical
| search results, because they pull from far greater training
| data. "Wisdom of the crowds".
|
| Is that relevant when we already have official truth sources:
| our websites? That information is ours and subject to change
| at our sole discretion. Google doesn't get to decide who our
| extensions are assigned to, what our hours of operation are,
| or what our business services do.
|
| Our initial impression of AI Overview was positive, as well,
| until this happened to us.
|
| And bear in mind the timeline. We didn't know that this was
| happening, and even after we realized there was a trend, we
| didn't know why. We're in the middle of a softphone
| transition, so we initially blamed ourselves (and panicked a
| little when what we saw didn't reflect what we assumed was
| happening - why would people just suddenly start calling
| wrong numbers?).
|
| After we began collecting responses from misdirected callers
| and got a nearly unanimous answer of "Google" (don't be proud
| of that), I called a meeting with our communications and
| marketing departments and web team to figure out how we'd log
| and investigate incidents so we could fix the sources. What
| they turned up was that the numbers had never been publicly
| published or associated with any of what Google AI was
| telling them. This wasn't our fault.
|
| So now we're concerned that bad info is being amplified
| elsewhere on the web. We even considered pulling back the
| Google-advertised phone extensions so they forward either to
| a message that tells them Google AI was wrong and to visit
| our website, or admit defeat and just forward it where Google
| says it should go (subject to change at Google's pleasure,
| obviously). We can't do this for established public facing
| numbers, though, and disrupt business services.
|
| What a stupid saga, but that's how it works when Google
| treats the world like its personal QA team. (OT, but bince
| we're all working for them by generating training data for
| their models and fixing their global scale products, anyone
| for Google-sponsored UBI?)
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Their goal has always been to be the gatekeeper.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I don't think that was true for Google in the first year. But
| after that it rapidly became their goal.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| You think? For several years they definitely kept out the
| way and provided links to get to the best results fast. By
| the time they dropped "don't be evil" they certainly were
| acting against users.
|
| It started well, agreed. But my recollection is the good
| Google lasted several years.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Maybe. I think that companies change the moment diffusion
| of responsibility happens because then decisions that are
| bad are broken up into so many little steps that
| everybody can credibly claim 'it wasn't them' that made
| the bad decisions.
|
| For Google that moment came very rapidly. Launch was in
| 1998. When Schmidt took over in 2001 they already had 300
| employees, their 59th employee or so was a chef.
|
| Somewhere between those two Schmidt became a viable
| contender for the CEO spot.
|
| I figure that happened somewhere in 1999, but maybe you
| are right and they kept it together until Schmidt took
| over. But just the fact that you would hand your 'do no
| evil' empire to a guy like Schmidt means you have already
| forgotten that motto.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Almost twenty years between launch and dropping Don't Be
| Evil, which was itself ten years ago now.
| Lammy wrote:
| Google was that from the very beginning:
| https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-
| ci...
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| In the UK we've got amazing National Health Service
| informational websites[1], and regional variations of those
| [2]. For some issues, you might get different advice in the
| Scottish one than the UK-wide one. So, if you've gone into
| labour somewhere in the remote Highlands and Islands, you'll
| get different advice than if you lived in Central London, where
| there's a delivery room within a 30 minute drive.
|
| Google's AI overview not only ignores this geographic detail,
| it ignores the high-quality NHS care delivery websites, and
| presents you with stuff from US sites like Mayo Clinic. Mayo
| Clinic is a great resource, if you live in the USA, but US
| medical advice is wildly different to the UK.
|
| [1] https://www.nhs.uk [2] https://www.nhsinform.scot
| seszett wrote:
| > _ignores the high-quality NHS care delivery websites, and
| presents you with stuff from US sites_
|
| Weird because although I dislike what Google Search has
| become as much as any other HNer, one thing that mostly does
| work well is localised content. Since I live in a small
| country next to a big country that speaks the same language,
| it's quite noticeable to me that Google goes to great lengths
| to find the actually relevant content for my searches when
| applicable... of course it's not always what I'm actually
| looking for, because I'm actually a citizen of the other
| country that I'm not living in, and it makes it difficult to
| find answers that are relevant to _that_ country. You can add
| "cr=countryXX" as a query parameter but I always forget about
| it.
|
| Anyway I wasn't sure if the LLM results were localised
| because I never pay attention to them so checked and it works
| fine, they are localised for me. Searching for "where do I
| declare my taxes" for example gives the correct question
| depending on the country my IP is from.
| federiconafria wrote:
| The problem is when your IP is temporarily wrong or you are
| just traveling and suddenly you can't find anything...
| zahlman wrote:
| But what if I _don 't want_ the search engine company to
| know where I am?
|
| (I mean, I don't generally make a big secret of it. But
| still.)
| seszett wrote:
| Then you have to use a VPN and you can always use the cr=
| parameter to orient the results towards the region you
| want if your search is location-sensitive.
|
| But I feel like this is quite an unrelated problem, IPs
| being linked to a country is a fundamental part of the
| current architecture of the Internet.
| graemep wrote:
| > For some issues, you might get different advice in the
| Scottish one than the UK-wide one
|
| its not a UK wide one. The home page says "NHS Website for
| England".
|
| I seem to remember the Scottish one had privacy issues with
| Google tracking embedded, BTW.
|
| > So, if you've gone into labour somewhere in the remote
| Highlands and Islands, you'll get different advice than if
| you lived in Central London, where there's a delivery room
| within a 30 minute drive
|
| But someone in a remote part of England will get the same
| advice as someone in central London, and someone in central
| Edinburgh will get the same advice as someone on a remote
| island, so it does not really work that way.
|
| > if you live in the USA, but US medical advice is wildly
| different to the UK.
|
| Human biology is the same, diseases are the same, and the
| difference in available treatments is not usually all that
| different. This suggests to me someone's advice is wrong. Of
| course there are legitimate differences of opinion (the same
| applies to differences between
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > But someone in a remote part of England will get the same
| advice as someone in central London,
|
| The current system might not have perfect geographic
| granularity but that doesn't mean it isn't preferable to
| one that gives advice from half the world away.
|
| > Human biology is the same, diseases are the same, and the
| difference in available treatments is not usually all that
| different
|
| Accepted medical definitions differ, accepted treatments
| differ, financial considerations, wait times and general
| expectations of service vary wildly.
| graemep wrote:
| England is not "half the world away" from Scotland.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| No, the United States is.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| They meant the US with Mayo.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| People gave birth to children long before the Internet and
| before the NHS. You had nine months to prepare for this.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| People died
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Of course, as evident by no human being alive currently.
|
| "Oh no, I've been pregnant for nine months without
| preparing myself in any way and now I'm in labour, better
| ask the AI what to do!"
|
| Is this how humans will become extinct? Wouldn't surprise
| me.
| einrealist wrote:
| This raises the question of when it becomes harmful. At what
| point would your company issue a cease-and-desist letter to
| Google?
|
| The liability question also extends to defamation. Google is no
| longer just an arbiter of information. They create information
| themselves. They cannot simply rely on a 'platform provider'
| defence anymore.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed.
|
| I guess I'm in the minority of people who click through to the
| sources to confirm the assertions in the summary. I'm surprised
| most people trust AI, but maybe only because I'm in some sort
| of bubble.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Google AI has been listing incorrect internal extensions
| causing departments to field calls for people trying to reach
| unrelated divisions and services, listing times and dates of
| events that don 't exist at our addresses that people are
| showing up to, and generally misdirecting and misguiding people
| who really need correct information from a truth source like
| our websites._
|
| Anecdotally, this happened back in analog days, too.
|
| When I worked in local TV, people would call and scream at us
| if the show they wanted to see was incorrectly listed in the TV
| Guide.
|
| Screamers: "It's in the TV Guide!"
|
| Me (like a million times): "We decide what goes on the air, not
| the TV Guide."
| ValveFan6969 wrote:
| The clicks in question: "Here's a thirty page story of how
| grandma discovered this recipe... BTW you need to subscribe/make
| an account/pay to view the rest of the article!"
| mtkd wrote:
| Conversely, it's useful to get an immediate answer sometimes
|
| 6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?" was a few clicks, long
| SEO optimised blog post answers and usually all in F not C ...
| despite Google knowing location ... I used it as an example at
| the time of 'how hard can this be?'
|
| First sentance of Google AI response right now: "Pork is safe to
| eat when cooked to an internal temperature of 145degF (63degC)"
| brookst wrote:
| Safe Temperatures for Pork
|
| People have been eating pork for over 40,000 years. There's
| speculation about whether pork or beef was first a part of the
| human diet.
|
| (5000 words later)
|
| The USDA recommends cooking pork to at least 145 degrees.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I searched it.
|
| First result under the overview is the National Pork Board,
| shows the answer above the fold, and includes visual
| references: https://pork.org/pork-cooking-temperature/
|
| Most of the time if there isn't a straightforward primary
| source in the top results, Google's AI overview won't get it
| right either.
|
| Given the enormous scale and latency constraints they're
| dealing with, they're not using SOTA models, and they're
| probably not feeding the model 5000 words worth of context
| from every result on the page.
| ImaCake wrote:
| Not only that, it _includes a link to the USDA reference_ so
| you can verify it yourself. I have switched back to google
| because of how useful I find the RAG overviews.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The link is the only useful part, since you can't trust the
| summary.
|
| Maybe they could just show the links that match your query
| and skip the overview. Sounds like a billion-dollar startup
| idea, wonder why nobody's done it.
| krupan wrote:
| This should be the top comment! Thank you for posting it
| because I'm starting to worry that I'm the only one who
| realizes how ridiculous this all is.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| It's a pretty good billion dollar idea, I think you'll do
| well. In fact I bet you'll make money hand over fist, for
| years. You could hire all the best engineers and crush the
| competition. At that point you control the algorithm that
| everyone bases their websites on, so if you were to
| accidentally deploy a series of changes that incentivized
| low quality contentless websites... it wouldn't matter at
| all; not your problem. Now that the quality of results is
| poor, but people still need their queries answered, why
| don't you provide them the answers yourself? You could keep
| all the precious ad revenue that you previously lost when
| people clicked on those pesky search results.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's only useful if you can trust it, and you very much cannot.
|
| I know you can't necessarily trust anything online, but when
| the first hit is from the National Pork Board, I'm confident
| the answer is good.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| But for the OP it is not as it does not give a temperature in
| their preferred units and probably USDA gives the wrong
| temperature in their locality.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The only advantage is the automatic unit conversion, and
| that introduces a second point where the summary can get it
| wrong. If the source gives an incorrect answer then the AI
| summary is just going to repeat it, if you're lucky.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Yes USDA gives the wrong value for Canadians and Britons
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Google's search rankings are also the thing driving those
| ridiculous articles to the top, which is the only reason so
| many of them get written...
| ljlolel wrote:
| And also why they incentivized all this human written
| training data that will no longer be incentivized
| hansvm wrote:
| As of a couple weeks ago it had a variety of unsafe food
| recommendations regarding sous vide, e.g. suggesting 129F for
| 4+ hours for venison backstrap. That works great some of the
| time but has a very real risk of bacterial infiltration (133F
| being similar in texture and much safer, or 2hr being a safer
| cook time if you want to stick to 129F).
|
| Trust it if you want I guess. Be cautious though.
| zahlman wrote:
| A shorter cook time is safer? Do you sear it afterwards or
| something?
| sgentle wrote:
| "full moon time NY"
|
| > The next full moon in New York will be on August 9th, 2025,
| at 3:55 a.m.
|
| "full moon time LA"
|
| > The next full moon in Los Angeles will be on August 9, 2025,
| at 3:55 AM PDT.
|
| I mean, it certainly gives an immediate answer...
| ncallaway wrote:
| Dear lord please don't use an AI overview answer for food
| safety.
|
| If you made a bet with your friend and are using the AI
| overview to settle it, fine. But please please click on an
| actual result from a trusted source if you're deciding what
| temperature to cook meat to
| zahlman wrote:
| I've been finding that the proliferation of AI slop is at its
| worst on recipe/cooking/nutrition sites, so....
| ncallaway wrote:
| 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...
| sothatsit wrote:
| The problem is that SEO has made it hard to find trustworthy
| sites in the first place. The places I trust the most now for
| getting random information is Reddit and Wikipedia, which is
| absolutely ridiculous as they are terrible options.
|
| But SEO slop machines have made it so hard to find the good
| websites without putting in more legwork than makes sense a
| lot of the time. Funnily enough, this makes AI look like a
| good option to cut through all the noise despite its
| hallucinations. That's obviously not acceptable when it comes
| to food safety concerns though.
| jordanb wrote:
| Google could have cut down on this if they wanted. And in
| general they did until they fired Matt Cutts.
|
| The reality is, every time someone's search is satisfied by
| an organic result is _lost revenue_ for Google.
| taurath wrote:
| Which is the stupidest position ever if Google wants to
| exist long term.
|
| Unfortunately there are no workable alternatives. DDG is
| somehow not better, though I use it to avoid trackers.
| what wrote:
| DDG is just serving you remixed bing and yandex results.
| There's basically no alternative to GBY that do their own
| crawling and maintain their own index.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| qwant ?
| touisteur wrote:
| Qwant also has an AI overview. Pretty bad too.
| frm88 wrote:
| I've been using noai.duckduckgo.com for a few weeks now
| and it's pretty reliable. Still yandex etc. but at least
| no longer AI overview. (Yes, I know about settings, but
| they get deleted every restart).
| Miraste wrote:
| It's a bit like the Easter Islanders cutting down all of
| their trees for wood. Where does Google management think
| they'll get search results if they kill the entire
| internet? Has anyone at Google thought that far ahead?
| 9dev wrote:
| The internet they dream of is like a large mall. It
| consists of service providers selling you something, and
| Google directing you to them in exchange for some of the
| profit. The role of users in this model is that of a
| Pinata that everyone hits on to drop some money.
| al_borland wrote:
| AI is being influenced by all that noise. It isn't
| necessarily going to an authoritative source, it's looking
| at Reddit and some SEO slop and using that to come up with
| the answer.
|
| We need AI that's trained exclusively on verified data and
| not random websites and internet comments.
| sothatsit wrote:
| Creating better datasets would also help to improve the
| performance of the models, I would assume. Unfortunately,
| the costs to produce high-quality datasets of a
| sufficient size seem prohibitive today.
|
| I'm hopeful this will be possible in the future though,
| maybe using a mix of 1) using existing LLMs to help
| humans filter the existing internet-scale datasets,
| and/or 2) finding some new breakthroughs to make model
| training more data efficient.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It'll still hallucinate
| jval43 wrote:
| I asked Gemini about some Ikea furniture dimensions and
| it gave seemingly correct answers, until it suddenly
| didn't make sense.
|
| Turns out _all_ the information it gave me came from old
| Reddit posts and lots of it was factually wrong. Gemini
| however still linked some official Ikea pages as the
| "sources".
|
| It'll straight up lie to you and then hide where it
| actually got it's info from. Usually Reddit.
| omnicognate wrote:
| If I do that search on Google right now, the top result is
| the National Pork Board (pork.org): ad-free, pop-up free,
| waffle-free and with the correct answer in large font at
| the top of the page. It's in F, but I always stick " C" at
| the end of temperature queries. In this case that makes the
| top result foodsafety.gov which is equally if not more
| authoritative, also ad-, waffle-, and popup- free and with
| with the answer immediately visible.
|
| Meanwhile the AI overview routinely gives me completely
| wrong information. There's zero chance I'm going to trust
| it when a wrong answer can mean I give my family food
| poisoning.
|
| I agree that there is a gigaton of crap out there, but the
| quality information sources are still there too. Google's
| job is to list those at the top and it actually has done so
| this time, although I'll acknowledge it doesn't always and
| I've taken to using Kagi in preference for this reason. A
| crappy AI preview that can't be relied on for anything
| isn't an acceptable substitute.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Kagi sort of gets this correct.
|
| Kagi search gives the pork board first as well. But note
| that site fails mtkd's requirements giving temperature in
| degrees Fahrenheit and not Celsius. The second hit does
| give a correct temperature but has a cookie banner (which
| at least can be rejected with one click)
|
| The optional Kagi assistant quotes the pork board, usda
| which also is only in Fahrenheit, and third a blog on
| site for a thermometer that quoted the UK Food Standard
| Authority and gives its temperature
|
| However there is a problem the UK FSA does not agree with
| USDA on the temperature it puts it higher at 70 degrees C
| rather than 63
|
| So if you get the USDA figure you are taking a risk. The
| Kagi Assistant gives both temperatures but it is not
| clear which one is correct although both figures are
| correctly linked to the actual sites.
| omnicognate wrote:
| 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.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| The OPs main complaint was lack of C when that is the
| temperature scale used in their country
| omnicognate wrote:
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >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.
| FredPret wrote:
| 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.
| jkingsman wrote:
| 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
| about 30 characters of information or less" that is prolific
| on the web.
|
| So, I'd agree -- safety info from an LLM is bad. But
| generally, the /flavor/ (heh) of information that such data
| comprises is REALLY good to get from LLMs (as opposed to
| nuanced opinions or subjective feedback).
| Velorivox wrote:
| 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.
| edanm wrote:
| Idk. Maybe that's true today (though even today I'm not sure)
| but how long before AI becomes _better_ than just finding
| random text on a website?
|
| After all, AI can theoretically ask follow-up questions that
| are relevant, can explain subtleties peculiar to a specific
| situation or request, can rephrase things in ways that are
| clearer for the end user.
|
| Btw, "What temperature should a food be cooked to" is a
| classic example of something where lots of people and lots of
| sources repeat _incorrect_ information, which is often
| ignored by people who actually cook. Famously, the temp that
| is often "recommended" is only the temp at which
| bacteria/whatever is killed instantly - but is often too hot
| to make the food taste good. What is normally recommended is
| to cook to a lower temperature but keep the food at that
| temperature for a bit longer, which has the same effect
| safety-wise but is much better.
| gspencley wrote:
| > Btw, "What temperature should a food be cooked to" is a
| classic example of something where lots of people and lots
| of sources repeat incorrect information, which is often
| ignored by people who actually cook. Famously, the temp
| that is often "recommended" is only the temp at which
| bacteria/whatever is killed instantly
|
| I love this reply because you support your own point by
| repeating information that is technically incorrect.
|
| To qualify myself, I have a background in food service.
| I've taken my "Food Safe" course in Ontario which is not
| legally mandated to work in food service, but offered by
| our government-run health units and many restaurants
| require a certificate to be employed in any food handling
| capacity (wait staff or food prep).
|
| There is no such thing as "killed instantly." The
| temperature recommendations here in Canada, for example,
| typically require that the food be held at that temperature
| for a minimum of 15 seconds.
|
| There is some truth in what you say. Using temperature to
| neutralize biological contaminants is a function of time
| and you can certainly accomplish the same result by holding
| food at lower temperature for a longer period of time.
| Whether this makes the food "taste better" or not depends
| on the food and what you're doing.
|
| Sous Vide cooking is the most widely understood method of
| preparation where we hold foods at temperatures that are
| FAR lower than what is typically recommended, but held for
| much longer. I have cooked our family Thanksgiving Turkey
| breast at 60C sous vide, and while I personally like it...
| others don't like the texture. So your mileage may vary.
|
| My point is that you're making a bunch of claims that have
| grains of truth to them, but aren't strictly true. I think
| your comment is an application of the dunning kruger
| effect. You know a little bit and because of that you think
| you know way more than you actually do. And I had to
| comment because it is beautifully ironic. Almost as if that
| paragraph in your comment is, itself, AI slop lol
| edanm wrote:
| > And I had to comment because it is beautifully ironic.
| Almost as if that paragraph in your comment is, itself,
| AI slop lol
|
| Glad to be of service :) I think that's the first time a
| comment of mine has been accused of being AI slop. Sorry
| to say, every word - correct or incorrect - is mine.
|
| > To qualify myself, I have a background in food service.
|
| I'm just a person who watches cooking YouTube a bit, so
| right off the bat - I'll defer to your expertise on this.
|
| I'm not sure we really disagree much though. My rough
| memory is that the guidelines specify temperature at
| which things are killed, I don't know if "instantly" or
| "15 seconds" really makes a difference in practice.
|
| > Sous Vide cooking is the most widely understood method
| of preparation where we hold foods at temperatures that
| are FAR lower than what is typically recommended, but
| held for much longer.
|
| Sous Vide is where I was first exposed to this concept,
| but I was more referring to things like chicken breasts,
| etc, which often aren't great at the minimal internal
| temperature, but I've seen YouTube "chefs" recommend
| cooking them to a slightly lower temperature, banking on
| the idea that they will effectively be at a slightly
| lower temperature, but long enough to still effectively
| kill bacteria. I've even seen criticism of the FDA charts
| for exactly this reason.
|
| But to clarify, this is far outside any expertise I
| actually have.
|
| > I think your comment is an application of the dunning
| kruger effect. You know a little bit and because of that
| you think you know way more than you actually do.
|
| Absolutely possible.
| gspencley wrote:
| > , but I was more referring to things like chicken
| breasts, etc, which often aren't great at the minimal
| internal temperature, but I've seen YouTube "chefs"
| recommend cooking them to a slightly lower temperature,
| banking on the idea that they will effectively be at a
| slightly lower temperature, but long enough to still
| effectively kill bacteria.
|
| Something that is very common is removing food from the
| heat source before the internal temperature hits your
| target because heat transfer itself takes time and so the
| food will continue to cook inside for a short period of
| time after being removed. This is because the outside,
| which you are blasting with heat that is far higher than
| your internal target, will partly transfer to the inside
| (the rest will dissipate into the air). So if you remove
| it from the heat exactly when you hit the internal temp,
| you can exceed the target temperature and your food will
| be "over cooked."
|
| The problem with a tv chef recommending using a
| traditional cooking method, such as baking or frying, to
| TARGET a lower temperature, is that is very hard with
| those mediums to control for time. What you are doing
| with those mediums is you are blasting the outside of
| your food with a temperature that is far hotter than your
| internal target.
|
| And so say, for example, you have your oven set to 180C
| and you are cooking chicken and your internal temperature
| target is, let's say 4 degrees cooler than the official
| recommendation. So the official recommendation is 74C
| held for a minimum of 15 seconds (that's Canada) and you
| are targeting 70C. With traditional cooking methods, you
| are playing a guessing game where you're blasting the
| outside of the food with very hot temperatures in order
| to bring the inside of the food up to some target.
|
| I don't know off hand how much longer you would have to
| hold at 70C to get the same effect as 15 seconds at 74C
| ... but while you're waiting, your food is likely to
| exceed 74C anyway because of the high temperatures you're
| working with.
|
| So that's why I talked about sous vide... becuase it's
| kind of the only way you can control for those variables.
| No oven can hold steady at temps as low as 70C (even at
| higher temps they fluctuate quite a bit. Anywhere from 5C
| - 20C depending on the oven).
|
| And yeah - we definitely agree on most things. The
| minimum recommended temperatures are "play it safe"
| rather than "make food delicious." I do recognize that
| that was ultimately your point :)
|
| It wasn't really my point to pick on you or argue with
| you, but to show that certain things you said are "partly
| true", which is a common complaint of AI (that and
| hallucinations). When we're dealing with things like food
| safety and the general public, it is usually better to
| offer general advise that is play it safe.
|
| And with certain foods this matters more than others.
| Chickens get infected with salmonella while they are
| alive, for example, and so the bacteria can live
| throughout the meat. Whereas if you're cooking beef, you
| really only need to worry about surface contamination and
| so you can sear a steak for a few seconds and have it
| still be very "blue" in the middle and you're good.
| squigz wrote:
| I wonder how people have such awful experiences with
| (traditional) Google when I don't and really never have.
|
| First result:
| https://www.porkcdn.com/sites/porkbeinspired/library/2014/06...
|
| Second result: https://pork.org/pork-cooking-temperature/
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| This is the first search result for me:
| https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/general-food...
| refactor_master wrote:
| It doesn't take long to find SEO slop trying to sell you
| something:
|
| _When our grandmothers and grandfathers were growing up,
| there was a real threat to their health that we don't face
| anymore. No, I'm not talking about the lack of antibiotics,
| nor the scarcity of nutritious food. It was trichinosis, a
| parasitic disease that used to be caught from undercooked
| pork._
|
| _The legitimate worry of trichinosis led their mothers to
| cook their pork until it was very well done. They learned to
| cook it that way and passed that cooking knowledge down to
| their offspring, and so on down to us. The result? We've all
| eaten a lot of too-dry, overcooked pork._
|
| _But hark! The danger is, for the most part, past, and we
| can all enjoy our pork as the succulent meat it was always
| intended to be. With proper temperature control, we can have
| better pork than our ancestors ever dreamed of. Here, we'll
| look at a more nuanced way of thinking about pork
| temperatures than you've likely encountered before. "_
|
| Sorry, what temperature was it again?
|
| Luckily there's the National Pork Board which has bought its
| way to the top, just below the AI overview. So this time
| around I won't die from undercooked pork at least.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| The link quoted does not have that text so what are you on
| about?
|
| However that site gives the temperature for Pork as 71C
| which is not what USDA says but is correct. So using the
| USDA recommendation does have a risk according to at least
| Canada and UK
| zahlman wrote:
| > but is correct
|
| That's the thing, though -- there isn't an objective
| standard here; it's mediated both by the local context
| (how good are the local trich inspections, etc.) and risk
| tolerance vs. cultural expectations for how the meat
| should taste. The Canadian and US governments currently
| disagree; so it goes.
|
| Everything "has a risk". Taste and smell are not reliable
| indicators of bacterial contamination, and properly
| cooking meat won't eliminate dangerous toxins left behind
| by prior contamination if the meat was improperly stored
| before cooking.
| eviks wrote:
| > 6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?
|
| No it wasn't, most of the first page results have the
| temperature right there in the summary, many of them with both
| F and C, and unlike the AI response, there is much lower chance
| of hallucinated results.
|
| So you've gained nothing
|
| PS Trying the same search with -ai gets you the full table with
| temperatures, unlike with the AI summary where you have to
| click to get more details, so the new AI summary is strictly
| worse
| didibus wrote:
| Funny story, I used that to know the cooked temperature of
| burgers, it said medium-rare was 130. I proceeded to eating it
| and all, but then like half way through, I noticed the middle
| of this burger is really red looking, doesn't seem normal, and
| suddenly I remembered, wait, ground beef is always supposed to
| be 160, 130 medium-rare is for steak.
|
| I then chatted that back to it, and it was like, oh ya, I made
| a mistake, you're right, sorry.
|
| Anyways, luckily I did not get sick.
|
| Moral of the story, don't get mentally lazy and use AI to save
| you the brain it takes for simple answers.
| what wrote:
| 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.
| lotyrin wrote:
| Many people wing dishes that they've prepared 100s of
| times. Others rarely make the same recipe twice. Neither
| are correct or incorrect, but the latter is very much going
| to measure everything they're doing carefully (or fail
| often).
| avidiax wrote:
| For something safety critical like a burger, yes.
|
| For whole meats, it's usually safe to be rare and you can
| tell that by feel, though a thermometer is still useful if
| you aren't a skilled cook or you are cooking to a doneness
| you aren't familiar with.
| 8note wrote:
| thermometers were recommended by folks like alton brown and
| kenji to get really consistent results.
|
| i havent heard it for burgers, but steaks for sure.
| habinero wrote:
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I suspect your reference pool is the small one. Most
| people buy their burgers in a packet and hence follow the
| timing instructions on that packet.
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| Perhaps this varies by region? I don't know anyone that
| buys burgers in a packet. They buy ground beef and either
| make patties or balls (for smash burgers).
| toast0 wrote:
| I don't do much of the shopping, but we get costco frozen
| burger patties for most of our home burgers. I don't
| think it costs more than the same weight of 'whole'
| ground beef, and it's convenient.
|
| Those are thin enough I wouldn't think to stick a
| thermometer in them... it would be too hard to get it in
| the center and not out the other side, and it's pretty
| easy to get a sense of doneness from the outside (or cut
| into one and see). Steaks, depending on who's eating and
| doneness preferences, thermometer is nice. Roasts, almost
| certainly.
| what wrote:
| 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?
| padjo wrote:
| People are downvoting you because you've come onto a
| website populated by engineers and called someone weird for
| using objective measurements.
| PetahNZ wrote:
| Why wouldn't I? It takes a few seconds and my thermometer
| just sits on fridge.
| pjc50 wrote:
| You're getting lots of thermometer answers, so I'm going to
| give the opposite: I'm also on team "looks good to me" +
| "cooking time on packet" + "just cut it and look"
| bogdan wrote:
| What sort of world you must live in to find using a food
| thermometer "really weird"
| what wrote:
| It's definitely weird. People cook food until it looks
| done, they don't neurotically measure the temperature.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Anyways, luckily I did not get sick.
|
| Why would you purchase meat that you suspect is diseased?
| Even if you cook it well-done, all the (now dead) bacteria
| and their byproducts are still inside. I don't understand why
| people do this to themselves? If I have any suspicion about
| some meat, I'll throw it away. I'm not going to cook it.
| maerch wrote:
| Meanwhile, in Germany, you can get raw pork with raw onions on
| a bread roll at just about every other bakery.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett
|
| When I searched for the safe temperature for pork (in German),
| I found this as the first link (Kagi search engine)
|
| > Ideally, pork should taste pink, with a core temperature
| between 58 and 59 degrees Celsius. You can determine the exact
| temperature using a meat thermometer. Is that not a health
| concern? Not anymore, as nutrition expert Dagmar von Cramm
| confirms: > "Trichinae inspection in Germany is so strict --
| even for wild boars -- that there is no longer any danger."
|
| https://www.stern.de/genuss/essen/warum-sie-schweinefleisch-...
|
| Stern is a major magazine in Germany.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I was just thinking that EU sources might be a good place to
| look for this sort of thing, given that we never really know
| what basic public health facts will be deemed political in
| the US on any given day. But, this reveals a bit of a problem
| --of course, you guys have food safety standards, so advice
| they is safe over there might not be applicable in the US.
| Daz1 wrote:
| what a cringe comment
| pjc50 wrote:
| Doesn't even have to be "better", just "different". The
| classic one is whether you should refrigerate eggs, which
| has diametrically opposite answers.
|
| But anything that actually matters could be politicized at
| any time. I remember the John Gummer Burger Incident:
| http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/369625.stm , in the
| controversy over whether prion diseases in beef (BSE) were
| a problem.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Should "Taste pink", you say
| maerch wrote:
| It's just the ChatGPT translation, and it's a literal one.
| That said, I've never heard that phrase in German either.
| layer8 wrote:
| The literal translation is wrong in that context, it
| should have been translated to "medium".
| Rapzid wrote:
| AI overview also says 165f is the best temperature to cook
| chicken breast to. Which is and always has been bollocks.
| greazy wrote:
| I googled (Australia) "what temp is pork safe at?", top three
| hits:
|
| 1. https://www.foodsafety.asn.au/australians-clueless-about-
| saf... 2. https://www.foodsafety.gov/food-safety-charts/safe-
| minimum-i... 3. https://pork.org/pork-cooking-temperature/
|
| All three were highly informative, well cited sources from
| reputable websites.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Only your second link provides good information in a
| convenient format (both F and C), first and third are
| useless.
| croes wrote:
| Don't forget to add glue and rocks
| Jean-Papoulos wrote:
| Incredible, you are the problem. Didn't think I'd see such an
| idiotic answer on HN, please for the love of god do not use AI
| to know what is safe to eat.
| 8note wrote:
| id consider that google thinks its good enough for people to
| base their food safety off of it, and they deserve to get
| sued for whatever theyre worth for providing said
| recommendations when somebody trusts them and gets sick
| grey-area wrote:
| Why do you think that answer is correct? I mean maybe it is, or
| maybe it's by the same user who recommended eating rocks (which
| 'AI' also recommended).
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o
| stereolambda wrote:
| Honestly the SEO talk sounds like reflexive coping in this
| discourse. I get that WWW has cheapened quality, but we now
| have the tech that could defeat most of the SEO and other trash
| tactics on the search engine side. Text analysis as a task is
| cracked open. Google and such could detect dark patterns with
| LLMs, or even just deep learning. This would probably be more
| reliable than answering factual queries.
|
| The problem is there is no money and fame in using it that way,
| or at least so people think in the current moment. But we could
| return to enforcing some sort of clear, pro-reader writing and
| bury the 2010s-2020s SEO garbage on page 30.
|
| Not the mention that the LLMs randomly lie to you with less
| secondary hints at trustworthiness (author, website, other
| articles, design etc.) than you get in any other medium. And
| the sustainability side of incentivizing people to publish
| anything. I really see the devil of convenience as the only
| argument for the LLM summaries here.
| zahlman wrote:
| > But we could return to enforcing some sort of clear, pro-
| reader writing and bury the 2010s-2020s SEO garbage on page
| 30.
|
| We could.
|
| But it will absolutely not happen unless and until it can be
| more profitable than Google's current model.
|
| What's your plan?
|
| > Not the mention that the LLMs randomly lie to you with less
| secondary hints at trustworthiness (author, website, other
| articles, design etc.) than you get in any other medium. And
| the sustainability side of incentivizing people to publish
| anything. I really see the devil of convenience as the only
| argument for the LLM summaries here.
|
| Well, yes. That's the problem. Why rely on the same random
| liars as taste-makers?
| SwtCyber wrote:
| The issue is more when those same tools start replacing deeper
| content or misrepresenting nuanced info
| kriro wrote:
| On Google: """what temp in C is pork safe at?"""
|
| AI: 63C
|
| First result: Five year old reddit thread (F only discussion,
| USDA mentioned).
|
| Second result: ThermoWorks blog (with 63C).
|
| Third result: FoodSafety.gov (with 63C)
|
| Forth result: USDA (with 63C)
|
| Seems reasonable enough to scan 3-4 results to get some
| government source.
| krupan wrote:
| I feel like the discussion here is missing the point. It doesn't
| matter if the AI overview is correct or not, it doesn't matter if
| you can turn it off or not. People are using it instead of
| visiting actual websites. Google has copied the entire World Wide
| Web into their LLM and now people not using the web anymore! We
| have bemoaned the fact that Facebook and Twitter replaced most of
| the web for most people, but now it's not even those, it's a
| single LLM owned and controlled by a single corporation.
| landl0rd wrote:
| Is there an appreciable difference between a company that
| controls what information is surfaced via pagerank and one that
| does so via LLM?
|
| Remember the past scandals with google up/downranking various
| things? This isn't a new problem. Wrt how the average person
| gets information google doesn't really have more control
| because people aren't clicking through as much.
| nicbou wrote:
| The main difference is that pagerank still rewarded content
| creators with an audience. Now Google extracts all the value
| of their work.
| yalogin wrote:
| For the most part there really is no need to use search in the
| traditional sense for knowledge. For information it's still the
| only because llms are not reliable. But ChatGPT must have taken a
| huge dent in google's traffic.
| h4kunamata wrote:
| Not any AI tho.
|
| I have replaced SEO with Perplexity AI only. It isn't a chatbot
| but it actually search for what you are looking for and most
| importantly, it shows all the sources it used.
|
| Depending on the question I can get anywhere from 10 to 40
| sources. No other AI service provides that, they use the data
| from their training model only which in my experience, is full of
| errors, incomplete, cannot answer or altogether.
| nneonneo wrote:
| Google's AI overviews gives you sources. The sources don't
| always say what Google AI thinks it says. Or, Google will mix
| up two sources that are talking about totally different things,
| assume they're the same thing, and then show you nonsense
| generated from the mix.
|
| I don't immediately assume that Perplexity will be any better
| off. Citing sources is great, but I'd rather just read the
| sources myself rather than assuming that the AI did anywhere a
| good job of actually summarizing them properly. At that point,
| what does the AI actually usefully bring to the table?
| jjani wrote:
| Huh? All of the other AI service provide that. Geminii, Claude,
| GPT.
| didibus wrote:
| Almost all other AI do that as well. ChatGPT will show you like
| 10+ sources, it'll put it next to the part of the answer that
| the source was used for too.
| kazinator wrote:
| > Google users are less likely to click on a link when they
| encounter search pages with AI summaries
|
| Well, doh:
|
| "Do I just read the AI summary? Or click past five pages of ads
| and spam to maybe find an organic link to something real?"
| watwut wrote:
| I find this claim massivy exaggerated.
| ctas wrote:
| We (Geostar.ai) work with many brands and companies that have
| experienced near-death situations caused by Google's AI
| Overviews. The negative impact this feature has had on people's
| livelihoods is heartbreaking to witness.
|
| Just today, I met with a small business owner who showed me that
| AIO is warning users that his business is a scam, based on bogus
| evidence (some unrelated brands). It's a new level of bullshit.
| There's not much these businesses can do other than playing the
| new GEO game if they want to get traffic from Google.
|
| Who knows if Google will even present any search results other
| than AIO a few years from now.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Of course slow, shitty web sites also cause a massive drop in
| clicks, as soon as an alternative to clicking emerges. It's just
| like on HN, if I see an interesting title and want to know what
| the article is about, I can wince and click the article link, but
| it's much faster and easier to click the HN comments link and
| infer the info I want from the comments. That difference is
| almost entirely from the crappy overdesign of almost every web
| site, vs. HN's speedy text-only format.
| skydhash wrote:
| I like good design as much as the next guy, but only when it
| does not impact information access. I use eww (emacs web
| wowser) and w3m sometimes and it's fascinating how much speed
| you get after stripping away the JS bloat.
| kome wrote:
| js cult will never ever understand this. designers need the
| courage to work with html+css only.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Kill css too.
| whatevaa wrote:
| No need for html too, just use butterflies and telepathy.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i just pipe echo to netcat if i want to minimize overhead
| /s
| vismit2000 wrote:
| You might want to try out https://hackernews.betacat.io/
| manmal wrote:
| Temu ad just below the fold, no thank you.
| mnsc wrote:
| Effortlessly not clicking that link to form my own
| judgement. Thank you manmal!
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Who on HN browses the internet in this day and age without
| adblock / ublock / pihole?
| pjc50 wrote:
| .. strictly worse than HN's UI, and with a cookie banner and
| an ad.
| cornholio wrote:
| This is a pretty apt analogy: why settle for the original
| article when you can read the outrage infused summary of an
| opinionated troll in a hurry?
|
| It has little to do with overdesign or load times.
| throwaway992673 wrote:
| The troll gives me the main idea without having to find five
| tiny x's on the screen like some sadistic minigame then
| paywall me. I'll take the troll.
| watwut wrote:
| They dont. Most commenters react to the title and
| preexistent opinions. Rhey frequently misinterpret the
| article too - misconstructing arguments they dont like and
| such.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Most commenters react to each other, either to the
| comment itself or to different interpretations and/or
| knowledge about the subject of TFA. It is the top level
| comments that are supposed to react to the article.
| jcattle wrote:
| I was thinking exactly the same thing. It's the perfect
| analogy.
|
| What do HN comments and AI Overviews have in common?
|
| - All information went through a bunch of neurons at least
| once
|
| - We don't know which information was even considered
|
| - Might be completely false but presented with utmost
| confidence
|
| - ...?
| StackRanker3000 wrote:
| Contradicting someone describing their own experience based
| on assumptions and generalizations that may or may not have a
| basis in reality is pretty arrogant. How are you so confident
| that you can presume to tell that person what's going on in
| their mind?
|
| More generally speaking though, I do agree that comments
| probably tend to give people more of a dopamine hit than the
| content itself, especially if it's long-form. However
| comments on HN often are quite substantial and of high
| quality, at least relatively speaking, and the earlier point
| about reading the articles often being a poor experience has
| a lot of merit as well. Why can't it be a combination of all
| of the above (to various degrees depending on the individual,
| etc)?
| nosianu wrote:
| The majority of the linked articles is waaayyyyy too long for
| what they have to say, and they reveal the subject only many
| paragraphs in.
|
| From reading one or a few short comments I at least know what
| the linked article is about, which the original headline
| often does not reveal (no fault of those authors, their blogs
| are often specialized and anyone finding the article there
| has much more context compared to finding the same headline
| here on a general aggregation site).
| Drew_ wrote:
| Strongly agree with this. Many authors and video creators
| have interesting, valuable things to say, but they don't
| exercise restraint or respect for their audience's time.
|
| If something is overwhelmingly long, especially considering
| the subject matter, I just skip to the comments or throw it
| in an LLM to summarize.
| poemxo wrote:
| I do the same thing, but it's not because of format. To me,
| blogs and other articles feel like sales pitches, whereas
| comments are full of raw emotion and seem more honest. I end up
| seeking out discussions over buttoned up long-form articles.
|
| This is not strictly logical but I have a feeling I'm not
| alone.
| visarga wrote:
| > To me, blogs and other articles feel like sales pitches,
| whereas comments are full of raw emotion and seem more
| honest. I end up seeking out discussions over buttoned up
| long-form articles.
|
| Me too. That is why sometimes I take the raw comment thread
| and paste it into a LLM, the result is a grounded article. It
| contains a diversity of positions and debunking, but the slop
| is removed. Social threads + LLMs are an amazing combo,
| getting the LLM polish + the human grounded perspective.
|
| If I was in the place of reddit or HN I would try to generate
| lots of socially grounded articles. They would be better than
| any other publication because they don't have the same
| conflict of interests.
| arkh wrote:
| Why even bother linking to an article or blogpost: use a
| shock title, maybe associate it with some specific news
| source. No article to read, just a title and a comment
| section.
|
| Harvest said comments and create a 1h, 1d, 1 week, all time
| digest.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That reminds me of this webpage some years ago (idk if I
| can link it, it was very cynical) that summarized the
| week on HN with a lot of cynicysm and snark, it was a
| great, "grounding" read, a cynical break from the HN
| techbro overhyping of e.g. Rust.
|
| (I don't know if Rust is overhyped, it's calmed down
| again but at one point a recurring post on HN was "solved
| problem X... but written in Rust!", where the latter was
| the main selling point instead of e.g. the 10x
| performance boost that a lot of applications get from a
| rewrite to a lower-level language)
| zahlman wrote:
| > I don't know if Rust is overhyped, it's calmed down
| again but at one point a recurring post on HN was "solved
| problem X... but written in Rust!", where the latter was
| the main selling point instead of e.g. the 10x
| performance boost that a lot of applications get from a
| rewrite to a lower-level language
|
| Even the routine posts about uv seem to have settled down
| from that, honestly. The "written in Rust" fanfare is
| mostly contained to GitHub READMEs now. I still get the
| sense that it occupies quite a bit of mindshare in the
| background, though.
| locofocos wrote:
| Oh yeah, n-gate.com, "we can't both be right"
| jajko wrote:
| No its pretty logical, I often get more info in comments than
| in article, plus many angles on topic. I only actually read
| the most interesting articles, often heading right into
| comments.
|
| Often the title sort of explains the whole topic (ie lack of
| parking in NY, or astronomers found the biggest quasar yet),
| then folks chirp in with their experiences and insight which
| are sometimes pretty wild.
| anton-c wrote:
| Also if a website is terrible or the article is suspect,
| the top comment is usually going to be addressing that.
|
| Yet I too often am looking for the discussion. When I see
| there's high quality discourse or valuable experiences
| being shared, I'm more likely to read the full content of
| the article.
| HSO wrote:
| > _faster and easier to click the HN comments link and infer
| the info I want from the comments_
|
| Or, youre confusing primordial desire to be aligned with
| perceived peers -- checking what others say, then effortlessly
| nodding along -- with forming your own judgment.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I think that's a mean and disingenuous.
|
| I often click on the HN comments before reading the article
| because the article I very often nothing more than the
| headline and I'm more interested in the discussion.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Or they know themselves better than you do and it's exactly
| what they claimed.
| nextzck wrote:
| I think this is a really good take. It was mean for sure but
| you're right. Why do we do this? This is a good reminder for
| me to click more articles instead of reading through comments
| and forming an opinion based on what I read from others.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| I absolutely do that because I got so bullied that my
| personality shifted from self-expression to emulation. I
| realized that just this week because I caught myself copying
| a coworker he's respected and has people laughing with his
| jokes, and wondered why I have the tendency to do it.
|
| But I never expected that this would also link back to my
| tendency to skip an article and just stick to what the top
| comments of a section have, HN or Reddit.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > wondered why I have the tendency to do it
|
| Because when you were still swinging from the trees a some
| generations back that was a survival trait.
| KronisLV wrote:
| I mean, not necessarily. If there's more eyes on the article
| and people share their opinions, then problems or mistakes in
| it will become more obvious, much like how code bugs can
| become shallow.
|
| At the same time, I have no issue disagreeing with whatever
| is the popular stance, there's almost some catharsis in just
| speaking the truth along the lines of "What you say might be
| true in your circumstances and culture, but software isn't
| built like that here."
|
| Regardless, I'd say that there's nothing wrong with finding
| likeminded peers either, for example if everyone around you
| views something like SOLID and DRY as dogma and you think
| there must be a better, more nuanced way.
|
| Either that, or everyone likes a good tl;dr summary.
| da25 wrote:
| Probably also because a trust in the content of the website
| and articles has dropped because of much Enshittification has
| happened and a more trustworthy signal has found its location
| in people's discussion.
| kimi wrote:
| I do the same thing - Instead of going first to an unknown site
| that might (will?) be ad-infested and possibly AI generated, so
| that a phrase becomes a 1000-word article, I read the comments
| on HN, decide if it's interesting enough to take the risk, and
| then click. If it's Medium or similar, I won't click.
|
| Hey, coming out feels good - I thought I was the only one.
| SwtCyber wrote:
| But it's kind of a vicious cycle: users avoid bad sites,
| traffic drops, sites shove in more ads to survive, UX gets
| worse, and so on
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > sites shove in more ads to survive
|
| This is where it breaks down; why would they shove in MORE
| ads when their readers are going down? I'm not saying it's a
| rational decision, of course.
|
| I suspect a big part is metrics-driven development; add an
| aggressive newsletter popup and newsletter subscriptions
| increase, therefore it's effective and can stay. Add bigger /
| flashier ads and ad revenue increases, therefore the big and
| flashy ads can stay.
|
| User enjoyment is a lot harder to measure. You can look at
| metrics like page visits and session length, but that's still
| just metrics. Asking the users themselves has two problems,
| one is lack of engagement (unless you are a big community
| already, HN doing a survey would get plenty of feedback), two
| is that the people don't actually know how they feel about a
| website or what they want (they want faster horses). Like, I
| don't think anybody asked Google for an AI summary of what
| they think you're searching for, but they did, and it made
| people stay on Google instead of go to the site.
|
| Whether that's good for Google in the long run remains to be
| seen of course, back when Google first rolled out their ad
| problem it... really didn't matter to them, because their ads
| were on a lot of webpages. Google's targets ended up becoming
| "keep the users on the internet, make them browse more and
| faster", and for a while that pushed innovation too; V8,
| Chrome, Google DNS, Gears, SPDY/HTTP/2/3, Lighthouse,
| mod_pagespeed, Google Closure Compiler, etc etc etc - all
| invented to make the web faster, because faster web = more
| pageviews = more ad impressions = more revenue.
|
| Of course, part of that benefited others; Facebook for
| example created their own ecosystem, the internet within the
| internet. But anyway.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| It's why brands slowly and steadily lose value. What's 50c
| more for a box of cereal? Why not make it 12oz instead of
| 16oz? Sure use lesser quality material, you can't really
| tell the difference.
|
| The everyone just stops using it, cause it's shit and not
| worth the money.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Unless there's a conscious reset, like the Onion reboot. Now
| with physical copies!
|
| Doesn't scale, but maybe that's the only way to survive.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| YC idea pitch: HN Commenters as AI Summarizer Simulator as a
| Service
|
| I will need $100M in seed funding.
| raincole wrote:
| > it's much faster and easier to click the HN comments link and
| infer the info I want from the comments
|
| Except the other commenters didn't read the article either. Now
| you're all basically just LLM using the title as a prompt.
| sandos wrote:
| Iv'e been focusing on comments on social media for I don't know
| how long. It works 90% of the time as a pretty good summary for
| some reason.
|
| I do this on hackernews, and especially on news-sites I check
| (cleantechnica, electrec, reneweconomy) and I actively shun
| sites _without_ comments.
| davidcbc wrote:
| If you're only reading the comments you have no clue how
| often it actually works as a summary.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| You monster!
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There are some contrarians.
|
| https://lite.cnn.com for example.
|
| I'm not a big fan of CNN but this is something I'd like to see
| more of.
| AnimeLife wrote:
| In a sense this is similar to what Amazon has been doing in few
| countries. Find top selling products, get them cheaper from
| somewhere, rebrand them, rank them higher and sell them. They
| don't need to invest in market research like their competetors,
| they get all data from Amazon.com
|
| At big tech scale, this is clearly anti-compete and piracy IMHO.
| nicbou wrote:
| Except in this case they still rely on people to create content
| to train their AI on.
| feverzsj wrote:
| The AI overview is wrong in most of the time when I check the
| referenced links. It's even worse than ads.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| My question here is: why would Google try to actively sabotage,
| possibly even devastate the very backbone cash cow that is all
| those spammy, SEO-laden search and ad results right below its own
| AI overview, that's displacing them for engine users who don't
| bother with the rest (I thing I personally avoid because fuck you
| hallucinating AI overview)
|
| Anyone have any ideas?
|
| EDIT: Also, the irony of Google, which for years harped on and on
| about working to fight incorrect, erroneous and also even
| "misinformation-laden" search results, now making a hallucinating
| AI that often makes up outright bullshit with authority as its
| primary, first-line result for information. Truly a company that
| bathes in an ever deeper pool of shit the bigger it grows.
| protocolture wrote:
| First they came for the stackoverflow comments, and I said
| nothing, for stackoverflow is notorious for being full of jerks.
|
| Then they came for the search engine clicks, and I said nothing,
| because monetised search contributed heavily to the
| enshittification of the internet.
|
| Great so far. Can AI kill off social media and internet
| surveillance next?
| nicbou wrote:
| Who will provide the training data for AI when Google has
| stolen everyone's audience and revenue?
| tropicalfruit wrote:
| if you can get answer in 1 step, why 2?
|
| things like "gemini said" and "gpt said" will enter common lingo
| like "google it" did in the 2010s
| wiseowise wrote:
| And thank God! It does. I'm done dealing with bazillion shitty
| websites with bad, slow, performance, bad ui and dark patterns.
| All I need is an information in a convenient format and that is
| what AI tools provide to me.
| croes wrote:
| But that also kills the good sites.
| teddyh wrote:
| Only if those "good sites" were dependent on advertisements
| for survival.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| How many of the "good sites" do you pay for regularly?
| 99.9% of ALL sites are ad-funded, good or bad. Most people,
| even people with the disposable income, don't pay for the
| good sites, esp. because their value is only fractions of a
| cent from that one google search a month.
|
| My irrational hope is that the "good" sites establish a
| shared Spotify-esque model, where I pay a basic
| subscription that then gets distributed roughly by usage to
| all the websites. There is no chance in hell anyone is
| willing to have the 20 subscriptions to support all the
| websites they've gotten utility from (directly OR
| indirectly) this month.
| croes wrote:
| Some do
| Therenas wrote:
| Okay, but when those sites go out of business, where does the
| AI get its information from? This is obviously not sustainable.
| bloak wrote:
| It's only the advertising-funded sites that go out of
| business and a lot of those sites were in any case just
| scraping other sites. What proportion of reliable online
| information is only available from a web site that is funded
| by advertising? It's not zero, but it's not a very big
| number, either, I suspect, so it might be sustainable.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| What's interesting is that:
|
| 0. Internet is initially pretty good.
|
| 1. Google introduces search algorithm that is pretty good.
|
| 2. SEO becomes a thing because of Google, and makes the web
| bad.
|
| 3. AI (including Google's AI) bypasses that.
|
| 4. The web is eradicated, and Google/other AI companies are the
| only place where you can get information...
|
| Seems like the web would have been better off without Google.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| You are forgetting:
|
| 0.5 User 1,563,018 puts their credit card details in to make
| the world's first online transaction!
|
| 0.50001 The web is filled with spam and unsearchable for real
| information
|
| 0.9 Some smart nerds figure out an algorithm to find the
| signal in the noise
|
| 1.9 Google throws out "don't be evil" because search is cost,
| ad's are money
|
| 4.1 Google and the rest of the AI/s subvert human decision
| making in ways that marketers could only ever dream
|
| [?].[?] Humans toil in slavery to the whims of our corporate
| overlords
|
| I wanted a different dystopia.
| jacquesm wrote:
| All you need is _good_ information and AI tools are giving you
| information without you knowing whether or not it is any good.
| You may think it is good, but unless you know more about the
| answer to your query than what you needed to create it you won
| 't be able to tell the difference. If you did then you would
| not have been asking in the first place. Effectively you are
| now believing in an oracle.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| Which is different from believing the information on an ad
| and dark pattern infected website how?
|
| Since the AI is trained on the data on the websites below the
| AI summary, the summary quality is basically lock step with
| the quality of the websites.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It is different because the AI is 'Google' branded and not
| 'ad and dark pattern infected website' branded. That
| proximity to Google's branding conveys trust, but it just
| whitewashes the content from that ad and dark pattern
| infected website. Only now you don't know about it.
| josteink wrote:
| I'm going to call good old "supply & demand" at this.
|
| There was a demand for information, and people made websites to
| make that information easily accessible. The market was working.
|
| Then cheap/free hosting combined with Google Ads came along
| incentivized the market to SPAM the internet with SEO-optimized
| websites which makes that information just as inaccessible as the
| market could possibly tolerate. Basically the market converged on
| enshittification, rather than excellence.
|
| The result of that was that users were forced to search, the
| first SEO spam, then the second, then the third and maybe
| somewhere along the line they found what they were really looking
| for, from a real website. The market just barely supplied what
| there was a demand for.
|
| But thanks to AI and LLMs, the power has now shifted back to the
| users, and we can sidestep all the Google Ads SEO SPAM
| enshittification nonsense. If this is done via ChatGpt, DDG Chat
| or Google AI overviews, I don't really care.
|
| Once again we have gained easy access to information without any
| ill-incentivized middle men making the process cumbersome. This
| is absolutely a good thing. If this means the death of Google Ads
| funded content farms, I'm all for it.
|
| The niche sites which contains real information was never funded
| or driven by Google Ads in the first place, so hopefully they
| won't buckle under during this minor AI apocalypse.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| 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
| toenail wrote:
| Some people are against all kinds of progress. They don't
| understand that their life depends on progress that was made in
| the past.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| 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".
| toenail wrote:
| Do you think that having fast, distraction-free access to
| relevant information is not useful?
| djeastm wrote:
| It is useful, but it assumes the information is
| trustworthy. At least with websites you could discern
| some credibility based on the organization publishing the
| information. With AI summaries, it's just "Google's
| latest model seems to think this is the answer, good
| luck!"
| toenail wrote:
| You can always follow the source links.. or ask for
| them..
| simianwords wrote:
| This is because they have entrenched themselves in a
| comfortable position that they don't want to give up. Most
| won't admit this to be the actual reason.
|
| Think about it: you are a normal hands on self thought
| software developer. You grew up tinkering with Linux and a
| bit of hardware. You realise there's good money to be made in
| a software career. You do it for 20-30 years; mostly the same
| stuff over and over again. Some Linux, c#, networking. Your
| life and hobby revolves around these technologies. And most
| importantly you have a comfortable and stable income that
| entrenches your class and status. Anything that can disrupt
| this state is obviously not desireable. Never mind that
| disrupting others careers is why you have a career in the
| first place.
| righthand wrote:
| C#?
| contagiousflow wrote:
| You think every new technology is inherently a good thing and
| good for society?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Some people are against all kinds of progress. They don't
| understand that their life depends on progress that was made
| in the past.
|
| Not all change is progress. You can't point at some random
| change and declare "Progress!".
|
| This is a change. It likely _is_ progress, but at this point
| there 's still a chance that it is not progress.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Because some companies are going bankrupt because of the data
| google is taking. Google always had a weird relationship with
| sites, they sort of needed each other but google always had the
| upper hand, now it's even worse
| ripped_britches wrote:
| Wouldn't you expect AI to displace some companies though? As
| did every major technology?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They don't have the upper hand anymore. They are desperately
| trying to stay relevant, so that users don't just skip Google
| altogether and use ChatGPT or other AI directly.
| entuno wrote:
| A lot of companies seem to have based their business model on
| the assumption that Google and Microsoft would continue to send
| them traffic for free indefinitely.
|
| So now they're having to scramble to rethink their approach,
| and obviously aren't happy about that.
| alastairr wrote:
| Where do you suppose AI overviews get their source from? The
| problem here is Google is now inserting itself between a
| business' user and the business' content. I'm not saying that
| was a good or invulnerable business to begin with but that's
| what's happened. If you kill the business of making reliable
| content, what are they left to serve?
| zahlman wrote:
| > If you have content better than Gemini I will still go to
| your site
|
| No, you won't. Because how will you know that my site exists?
| arrowleaf wrote:
| 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 10x, but
| human traffic is down 50-70%.
|
| I'm basically paying to host content for AI crawlers to scrape
| and I don't know how much longer I can do this. I'm adding
| Goodreads-esque features currently, but if it doesn't get the
| sign ups I'll be forced to archive the code and take the site
| down.
| toenail wrote:
| Why could i perform a web search that leads me to multiple
| results with cloudflare identity checks and ad spam when i can
| just use a llm..
| metalrain wrote:
| People only click from search when they have actual need to visit
| the site. E-commerce, image/video content, social media, etc.
|
| That is pretty much as it should be.
| Oras wrote:
| This! Why would I go and read 2000 words optimized article for
| SEO when I can get the answer in one line?
|
| I only go to a website to perform an action as you said.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| 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. Upon pressing the tiny X in the corner it takes 1-2 seconds
| to close or multiple presses as I am either missing the x or
| because there is a network roundtrip
|
| * I scroll down a screen and get a popup overlay asking me to
| signup for their service or newsleter, again messing with the x
| to close
|
| * video or other flashy adds in the content keep bugging me
|
| This is btw. usually all before I even established if the content
| is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to me (often
| it is not).
|
| If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted
| content without any annoyance.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > This is btw. usually all before I even established if the
| content is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to
| me
|
| And to find that out you have to hit Page Down about twenty
| times, scanning as you, because the content is padded out to
| increase ad coverage.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I made this game inspired by all the dark patterns from
| darkpatterns.org - every pop up is based on a real dark pattern
|
| https://www.termsandconditions.game/
| jama211 wrote:
| Haha, this is great, nice work
| bokkies wrote:
| Application error An error occurred in the application and
| your page could not be served. If you are the application
| owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the
| Heroku CLI with the command heroku logs --tail
| seszett wrote:
| I also get that.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Weird only some people getting an error. Works ok for me.
|
| It's on a very old Heroku hosting plan. I should probably
| update that one day.
| seszett wrote:
| Just for the record, I get the same result with Firefox
| or Chromium and with IPs in different EU countries.
| Barbing wrote:
| LMK, reporting in as well: broken when trying multiple
| ways on my end and wanna play! Great idea!
| esskay wrote:
| Dead here in the UK too
| andruby wrote:
| me too. Are we all in the EU? (I am)
| gorbypark wrote:
| When you posted this, it would have been 1-3AM in North
| America (and probably large parts of South America), so
| yeah, probably mostly Europeans!
| timpera wrote:
| Same for me! I'm also in the EU.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| the darkest pattern of all!
| cudder wrote:
| Funny because it's true. Nothing in the GP's list of dark
| patterns irritate me more than a site that initially
| loads and nicely displays the content but then takes it
| all away and switches to the generic next.js "Application
| error" when you move the mouse or try to scroll. FFS!
| cylemons wrote:
| Same, Western Asia
| tim1994 wrote:
| I also get this. Firefox on Android in Germany.
| DaanDL wrote:
| Oh this is good, I like it!
| ssss11 wrote:
| And don't try to exit or you'll get another pop up "why are you
| leaving? Please don't go"
| visarga wrote:
| Sometimes they hack the back navigation function and present
| their own clone of Google Discover feed. If you are not
| careful you might end up in a different feed.
| Barbing wrote:
| Anyone know the largest site that does this reliably? I've
| seen e.g. Meta's FB mess with the back button but not the
| cloning grift.
| federiconafria wrote:
| Or sending you back to their home page...
| tmountain wrote:
| AI is following the drug dealer model. "The first dose is
| free!" Given the cost incurred, lots of dark patterns will be
| coming for sure.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Yep. Dark patterns you can see are not that dark by
| comparison, we will need another word for coming dark
| patterns disguised in llm responses
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Yep. Dark patterns you can see are not that dark by
| comparison, we will need another word for coming dark
| patterns disguised in llm responses
|
| As someone else said, you can probably filter responses
| through a small purpose-built/trained LLM that strips away
| dark patterns.
|
| If you start getting mostly empty responses as a result,
| then there was no value prior to the stripping anyway.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| If you can't tell when a big expensive llm is
| subliminally grooming you to like/dislike something or is
| selective with information then another (probably small
| and cheaper) llm somehow can? Arms race?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > If you can't tell when a big expensive llm is
| subliminally grooming you to like/dislike something or is
| selective with information
|
| I mean, I _can_ tell when a page contains advertisements,
| but I still use an ad-blocker.
|
| The point was not to help me detect when a response is
| ad-heavy, but to stop me seeing those ads at all.
|
| > Arms race?
|
| Possibly. Like with ad-blockers, this race can't be won
| by the ad-pusher LLM if the user uses the ad-blocker LLM.
|
| The only reason ad-pusher websites still work is because
| users generally don't care enough to install the ad-
| blocker.
|
| In much the same way, the only reason LLM ad-pushers will
| work is if users don't bother with an LLM ad-blocker.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > I mean, I can tell when a page contains advertisements,
| but I still use an ad-blocker
|
| Yep, because why let people make money from their work
| right? You should just get content for free!
|
| > this race can't be won by the ad-pusher LLM if the user
| uses the ad-blocker LLM.
|
| As per my comment it literally can.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > If you can't tell when a big expensive llm is
| subliminally grooming you to like/dislike something or is
| selective with information
|
| this is already there and in prod but called AI "safety"
| (really corporate brand safety). The largest LLMs have
| already been shown to favor certain political parties
| based on the preferences of the group doing the training
| as well. Even technical people who should know better
| naively trust the response of an LLM well enough to allow
| to make API calls on their behalf. What would prevent an
| LLM provider to train their model to learn and manipulate
| an API to favor them or a "trusted partner" in some way?
| It's just like in the early days, "it's on the Internet,
| it has to be true".
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| We need to move LLMs into libraries. They are already our
| local repository of knowledge and make the most sense to be
| the hosts/arbiters of it. Not dystopian tech companies
| whose main profits come from dark patterns. I get AIs for
| companies being provided by businesses, but for the average
| person coming from libraries just make so much more sense
| and would be the natural continuation/extension if we had a
| healthy/sane society.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| I fail to see how that will work out. Just I have an
| adblocker now, I could have a very simple local llm in my
| browser that modifies the search-AIs answer and strips
| obvious ads.
| svachalek wrote:
| They won't be obvious. They'll be highly customized brain
| worms influencing your votes and purchases to the highest
| bidder.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Yep. Right now, even with cookies inferences about
| individual humans are minimal, but exposing your whole
| patterns in speech make you a ripe target for
| manipulation at a scale that some may not fully
| understand yet. 4o is very adept at cold reading and it
| is genuinely fascinating to read those from that
| perspective alone. Combine it with style evaluation and a
| form of rudimentary history analysis, and you end up with
| actual dossier on everyone using that service.
|
| Right now, we are lucky, because it is the least altered
| version of it ( and we all know how many filters public
| models have to go through ).
| lopis wrote:
| Which sounds very illegal in most places, as clearly
| identifying sponsored content is required. Let's see how
| that turns out.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| For hire drivers/having employees had very specific legal
| requirements in most areas. Let's see how that turned
| out. Oh yeah, the dystopian tech companies won and we the
| people got the benefit job/job rules being thrown out for
| the beauty that is independent contractor 'gig work'.
| floatrock wrote:
| > as clearly identifying sponsored content is required
|
| Citation needed?
|
| Once AI content becomes monetized with ads, it's not
| going to look like the ads/banners we're used to. If
| you're looking into the past, you don't understand the
| potential of AI. Noam Chomsky's manufactured consent is
| going to look quaint by comparison.
| jdietrich wrote:
| It's a market where nobody has a particularly deep moat and
| most players are charging money for a service. Open weight
| models aren't too far behind proprietary models, particularly
| for mundane queries. The cost of inference is plummeting and
| it's already possible to run very good models at pennies per
| megatoken. I think it's unreasonably pessimistic to assume
| that dark patterns are an inevitability.
| simgt wrote:
| For the sake of argument, none of the typical websites with
| the patterns described have a moat, and the cost of hosting
| them has plummeted a while ago. It's not inevitable but
| it's likely, and they will be darker if they are embedded
| in the models' output...
| azangru wrote:
| > and most players are charging money for a service
|
| The aricle talks about AI overviews. As exemplified by the
| AI summary at the top of Google search results page. That
| thing is free.
| svachalek wrote:
| 1. Create free and good product
|
| 2. Attract large user base
|
| 3. Sell user data and attention to advertisers
|
| 4. Extract maximal profit from sponsors
|
| 5. Earn billions from shit product
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Hey that's like a popular Search engine's search results
| page!
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| You do realize of course that every service that now
| employs all these dark patterns we're complaining about was
| already profitable and making good money, and that simply
| isn't good enough? Revenue has to increase quarter-to-
| quarter otherwise your stock will tank.
|
| It's not simply enough that a product "makes money" it must
| "make more money, every quarter, forever" which is why
| everything, not even limited to tech, but every product
| absolutely BLOWS. It's why every goddamn thing is a
| subscription now. It's why every fucking website on the
| internet wants an email and a password so they can have you
| activate an account, and sell a known active email to their
| ad partners.
| xp84 wrote:
| I wish I could put 10 votes on this instead of just one.
| It just bothers me how success can be defined as
| something absurdly impossible like that.
|
| We're already at a wild stage of the rot caused by the
| growth-forever disease: the most successful companies are
| so enormous that further profit increases would require
| either absurd monopoly status (Chase, Wells Fargo, B of A
| all merge!) or to find increasingly insane ways of
| extracting money (witness network TV: First they only got
| money from ads, then they started leeching additional
| money streams from cable providers, now most have added
| their own subscription service that they also want you to
| pay for, on top of watching ads.)
|
| ISPs used to just charge a fee, now they also sell
| personal information about your browsing behavior for
| extra revenue, cap your bandwidth usage and charge for
| more, and one of them (comcast) owns a media
| conglomerate.
| bdelmas wrote:
| Well maybe not. Thanks that we have Gemini now to compete
| with ChatGPT. Competition may avoid dark patterns. But
| without competition yes definitely
| generic92034 wrote:
| Competition or not, dark patterns or not - sooner or later
| LLMs will need to earn money for their corporations.
| moontear wrote:
| But they do? Paid subscriptions for Gemini, ChatGPT and
| Copilot are a thing.
|
| If Google throws in a free AI summary in their search it
| only helps promoting Gemini in the long run.
| ileonichwiesz wrote:
| Look up the numbers. OpenAI actually loses money on every
| paid subscription, and they're burning through billions
| of dollars every year. Even if you convince a fraction of
| the users to pay for it, it's still not a sustainable
| model.
| nicbou wrote:
| Even if they were profitable, the investors would feel
| that it's not profitable _enough_. They won 't stop at
| breaking even.
| generic92034 wrote:
| And even if it was the highest profit branch of the
| company, they still would see a need to do anything
| possible to further increase profits. That is often where
| enshittification sets in.
|
| This currently is the sweet phase where growing and thus
| gaining attention and customers as well as locking in new
| established processes is dominant. Unless the technical
| AI development stays as fast as in the beginning, this is
| bound to change.
| lelanthran wrote:
| I actually wondered about this myself, so I asked Gemini
| with a long back and forth conversation.
|
| The takeaway from Gemini is that subscriptions _do_ lose
| money on _some_ subscribers, but it is expected that not
| all subscribers use up their full quota each month. This
| is true even for non-AI subscriptions since the beginning
| of the subscription model (i.e. magazines, gamepass,
| etc).
|
| The other surprising (to me, anyway) takeaway is that the
| AI providers have _some_ margin on each token for PAYG
| users, and that VC money is not necessary for them to
| continue providing the service. The VC money is capital
| expenditure into infrastructure for training.
|
| Make of it what you will, but it seems to me that if they
| stop training they don't need the investments anymore. Of
| course, that sacrifices future potential for
| profitability today, so who knows?
| fl0id wrote:
| That's just a general explainer of subscription models.
| As of right now VC money is necessary for just existing.
| And they can never stop training or researching. They
| also constantly have to buy new gpus unless there's at
| some point a plateau of 'good enough'
| vidarh wrote:
| The race to continue training and researching, however,
| is drive by competition that will fall away if
| competitors also can't raise more money to subsidise it.
|
| At that point the market may consolidate and progress
| slow, but not all providers will disappear - there are
| enough good models that can be hosted and served
| profitably indefinitely.
| sfmz wrote:
| Seems like there can never be good enough models; the
| user will want it up-to-date models with respect to news
| and culture.
| vidarh wrote:
| For some uses, sure. But for plenty of uses that can be
| provided in context, RAG, or via tool use, or doesn't
| matter.
|
| Even for the uses where it does matter, unless providers
| get squeezed down to zero margin, it's not that new
| models will never happen, but that the speed at which
| they can afford to produce large new models will slow.
| malfist wrote:
| Why do you think Gemini is the authority on the internal
| costs of AI providers and their profit margins?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Why do you think Gemini is the authority on the
| internal costs of AI providers and their profit margins?
|
| Where did I say I think that?
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| That's the source you chose to use, according to you.
|
| You don't mention cross-checking the info against other
| sources.
|
| You have the "make of it what you will" at the end, in
| what appears to be an attempt to discard any
| responsibility you might have for the information. But
| you still chose to bring that information into the
| conversation. As if it had meaning. Or 'authority'.
|
| If you weren't treating it as at least somewhat
| authoritative, what was the point of asking Gemini and
| posting the result?
|
| Gemini's output plus some other data sources could be an
| interesting post. "Gemini said this but who knows?" is
| useless filler.
| seunosewa wrote:
| The mediocre AI summaries aren't promoting Gemini when
| you can't use them to start a chat on Gemini. They
| effectively ads and search results for no benefit.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| The electric bill does not pay for itself.
|
| What is also interesting is one of the biggest search
| companies is using it to steer traffic away from its
| former 'clients'. The very websites google talked into
| slathering their advertisements all over themselves. By
| giving them money and traffic. But that worked because
| google got a pretty good cut of that. But now only google
| gets the 'above the fold' cut.
|
| That has two long term effects. One the place they
| harvest the data will go away. The second is their long
| term money will decrease. As traffic is lowered and less
| ads shown (unless google goes full plaster it everywhere
| like some sites).
|
| AI is going to eat the very companies making it. Even if
| the answers are kind of 'meh'. People will be fine with
| 'close enough' for the majority of things.
|
| Short term they will see their metric of 'main site
| retention' going up. It will however be at the cost of
| the websites that fed the machine.
| diogolsq wrote:
| Good point.
|
| Looking ahead, Search will become a de facto LLM chatbot,
| if it isn't already.
| floatrock wrote:
| > Competition may avoid dark patterns.
|
| Oh bless your heart.
|
| You don't even need to bring up corporate collusion,
| countless price gouging schemes, or the entire
| enshittification movement to understand that competition
| _discovers_ the dark patterns. Dark patterns aren 't
| something to be avoided, they're the natural evolution of
| ever-tighter competition.
|
| When the eyeball is the product, you get more checks if you
| get more eyeballs. Dark patterns are how you chum the water
| to attract the most product.
| nicbou wrote:
| AI is built by the same companies that built the last
| generation of hostile technology, and they're currently
| offering it at a loss. Once they have encrusted themselves in
| our everyday lives and killed the independent web for good,
| you can bet they will recoup on their investment.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| That indeed is likely to come, but having experienced user
| hostile technology, the appropriate response is to prepare.
| Some trends suggest this is already happening ( though that
| only appears to be a part HN crowd so far ): moving more
| and more behind a local network. I know I am personally
| exploring local llm integration for some workflows to avoid
| the obvious low hanging fruit most providers will likely go
| for. But yes, the web in its current form might perish.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Would be cool if local libraries got together and figured
| out how to allow access to community LLMs. That fits more
| with my idea of the future and AIs than having the now
| dystopian tech companies running/defining it all.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Is there another edge to this sword? Can we fight back with
| LLMs that ignore sources with all the tracking / SEO and
| other garbage? I'd love to tell my local LLM that "I hate
| pintrest" for instance and it just goes "okay, pintrest
| shields are up".
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Kagi allows you to block Pinterest
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| Kagi got me to sign up as an early adopter because it let
| me banish pinterest forever.
| troyvit wrote:
| Seconding the Kagi thing. You don't even need an LLM. If
| you search something like the term 'camping gear' search
| results pop up right away, no LLM response. However by
| each site's link is a little shield warning you about how
| many trackers and ads there will be on the page. Next to
| that is a lil kebob menu that lets you either boost the
| site or remove it from your search. That's also where
| their AI functionality is hidden. You can get a page
| summary or ask questions about that page.
|
| If you'd rather the quick AI-summaries a la google you
| can put a question mark at the end of your search term.
| 'lawsuits regarding ferrets?'
|
| And yeah as the sibling commenter pointed out, you can go
| into Kagi's preferences and explicitly rule out pinterest
| (or whatever site you want) from any of your searches for
| ever.
| deadbabe wrote:
| To combat this, maybe we can cache AI responses for common
| prompts somehow and make some kind of website where people
| could search for keywords and find responses that might be
| related to what they want, so they don't have to spend tokens
| on an AI. Could be free.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I would be curious to see what would happen if you could
| write every query/response from an LLM to an HTML file and
| then serve that directory of files back to google with a
| simple webserver for indexing.
| deadbabe wrote:
| I think the future will be:
|
| 1. Someone prompts 2. Server searches for equivalent
| prompts, if something similar was asked before, return
| that response from cache. 3. If prompt is unique enough,
| return response from LLM and cache new response. 4. If
| user decides response isn't specific enough, ask LLM and
| cache.
| Mars008 wrote:
| That's why I don't use mobile for browsing. Only Firefox with
| JS disabled unless it's needed and I need that page.
| ianis-r wrote:
| Firefox with ublock origin does wonder on mobile
| Propelloni wrote:
| I use Firefox with standard security options and the uBlock
| Origin Add-On on my Android phone and I virtually never see
| what you describe, bar the tracking consent nag screen ofc.
| Maybe we visit vastly different web content?
|
| I guess if my experience was as much degraded as yours I
| wouldn't bother with the web anymore, so yay for AI
| summarizers, at least for the time being. And don't get me
| wrong, a summarizer is a workaround, not a solution.
| cudder wrote:
| There is an extension called "I still don't care about
| cookies" that mostly solves the nag screens (There's also a
| similar one that doesn't have the "still" in its name but
| that one was bought by an ad company and enshittified.) AFAIU
| it usually accepts the cookies though, so you should combine
| it with something that clears your cookies periodically.
|
| Sometimes it breaks the site so that you can't scroll or
| something, but that's quite rare. And most of the time it's
| solved by a refresh. Very infrequently you need to whitelist
| the site and then deal with the nag screen manually. A bit
| annoying, but way better than rawdogging it.
|
| Works on desktop & mobile.
| reddalo wrote:
| No need to use a specific extension, uBlock Origin is all
| you need. Just enable the "Easy List/uBO - Cookie Notices"
| filter from the filters list (the default is off).
| aembleton wrote:
| You can also add this filter to uBO: https://www.i-dont-
| care-about-cookies.eu/abp/
| cudder wrote:
| Sweet, didn't know that. I'm gonna try if it works with
| less breakage. Thanks!
| Propelloni wrote:
| I'm going to try that, thank you!
| weinzierl wrote:
| What you describe is subtly different from what is in the
| article.
|
| The article is about Google (and other traditional search
| engines) snatching away clicks from web site owners. What you
| describe is AI tools (for lack of a better word[1]) snatching
| away traffic from the ruling gatekeepers of the web.
|
| I think the latter is a much bigger shift and might well be the
| end of Google.
|
| By extension it will be the end of SEO as we know it. A lot of
| discussion currently (especially on HN) is about how to keep
| the bad crawlers out and in general hide from the oh so bad AI
| guys. That is not unlike the early days of search engines.
|
| I predict we will soon see a phase where this switches by
| 180deg and everyone will see a fight to be the first one to be
| accessed to get an opportunity to gaslight the agent into their
| view of the world. A new three letter acronym will be coined,
| like AIO or something and we will see a shift from textual
| content to assets the AI tools can only link to.
|
| Maybe this has already happened to some degree.
|
| [1] Where would I put the boundary? Is Kagi the former or the
| latter? I'd say if a tool does a non-predetermined number of
| independent activities (like searches) on its own and only
| stops if some criteria are fulfilled it is clearly in the
| latter category.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _everyone will see a fight to be the first one to be
| accessed to get an opportunity to gaslight the agent into
| their view of the world_
|
| In this model, only monetizable content will be generated
| though.
|
| As much as we abhor what advertising has done to the web, at
| least it's independent of content: pair quality content with
| ads, make money.
|
| In the brave new AI search world, only content which itself
| is directly monetizable will be created. E.g. astroturf ads
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > pair quality content with ads, make money
|
| Huh, the exact opposite happened. Create as much filler
| content as possible, optimized for SEO, generate thousands
| of variants to capture search traffic, cover as much of the
| screen as possible with ads, use tricks to increase page
| view count, and _then_ make money.
|
| Publishers of quality content have moved to subscriptions,
| which is a different kind of trouble.
|
| > only content which itself is directly monetizable will be
| created
|
| We have already been here for a while and it can hardly get
| any worse.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _it can hardly get any worse_
|
| I'll take that bet.
| graemep wrote:
| > In the brave new AI search world, only content which
| itself is directly monetizable will be created
|
| Or content that is not meant to make money (e.g. opinion
| pieces arguing for a cause), or is very specific to
| products that make money (e.g. documentation, manuals), or
| is funded by governments or non-profits for the public
| good.
| arizen wrote:
| You're spot on. That shift you're describing isn't a
| prediction anymore, it's already happening.
|
| The term you're looking for is GEO (Generative Engine
| Optimization), though your "AIO" is also used. It's the new
| frontier.
|
| And you've nailed the 180deg turn: the game is no longer
| about blocking crawlers but about a race to become their
| primary source. The goal is to be the one to "gaslight the
| agent" into adopting your view of the world. This is achieved
| not through old SEO tricks, but by creating highly
| structured, authoritative content that is easy for an LLM to
| cite.
|
| Your point about shifting to "assets the AI tools can only
| link to" is the other key piece. As AI summarization becomes
| the norm, the value is in creating things that can't be
| summarized away: proprietary data, interactive tools, and
| unique video content. The goal is to become the necessary
| destination that the AI must point to.
|
| The end of SEO as we know it is here. The fight for
| visibility has just moved up a layer of abstraction.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > I predict we will soon see a phase where this switches by
| 180deg and everyone will see a fight to be the first one to
| be accessed to get an opportunity to gaslight the agent into
| their view of the world. A new three letter acronym will be
| coined, like AIO or something and we will see a shift from
| textual content to assets the AI tools can only link to.
|
| i can definitely see LLMs companies offering content creators
| a bump in training priority for a fee. It will be like ad-
| sales but you're paying for the LLM to consider your content
| at a higher priority than your competition.
| agent327 wrote:
| Oh, don't worry, they'll be monetizing this as soon as you're
| hooked. Google will show you the AI content... after you've
| seen this ad.
|
| Those data centers don't pay for themselves, you know.
| libertine wrote:
| Also people are just lazy and will choose the path of least
| resistance. I'll bet that Wikipedia and other websites are
| affected and don't fit in that list of legitimate grievances.
| dspillett wrote:
| >* If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only".*
|
| I never use those. I suspect that in many cases if there are
| "legitimate interest" options1 those will remain opted-in.
|
| ----
|
| [1] which I read as "we see your preference not to be stalked
| online, but fuck you and your silly little preferences we want
| to anyway"
| cudder wrote:
| That is such a silly stupid thing in the GDPR consent.
|
| - "Please don't track me."
|
| - "But what if we realllly want to?"
|
| A normal response to that would be an even more resounding
| FCK NO, but somehow the EU came to the completely opposite
| conclusion.
| indigo945 wrote:
| Claiming tracking cookies as "necessary" is often illegal
| under the GDPR. This is an enforcement problem, not a
| problem with the law itself, or the EU.
|
| "Necessary" means "necessary for fulfilment of the
| contract". Your name and address are necessary data when
| you order off Amazon, your clickstream is not.
| lazide wrote:
| If the content is free, monetizing you is clearly
| necessary (/s, kinda)
| skinkestek wrote:
| Monetizing is fine with me: There's nothing stopping
| creators from showing relevant ads--ones they choose
| themselves. Sometimes I have even found myself wishing
| there had been an ad a few months ago for a software
| conference I just realized I missed.
|
| If someone blogs about woodworking, show static ads for
| tools they actually use and love. If they're into
| programming, show JetBrains, cloud providers, or anything
| dev-adjacent. Totally fine by me.
|
| The problem is that almost everyone defaults to Google
| Ads--which then serves me wildly irrelevant junk, think
| brain-melting pay-to-win mobile games or even scammy
| dating sites that have zero connection to the content I'm
| reading and zero relevance to my interests.
|
| It's not just noise, it's actively degrading the
| experience.
| spoiler wrote:
| Ah I remember the good-old day when people were selling
| "ad spaces" on their sites that weren't obtrusive. And
| usually the ads were things the author approved of or
| even used
| kedean wrote:
| I miss the naive days of the million dollar homepage
| mr_toad wrote:
| Necessary means necessary to add it to the page for the
| project manager to collect their annual bonus.
| eitland wrote:
| Please show me where GDPR says this.
|
| I think you'll find that GDPR says the opposite and the
| only reason this continues to happen is because authorities
| don't have enough resources to go after every at the same
| time and also because European authorities have a hard time
| against US companies.
| cudder wrote:
| Sure, here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
| content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
|
| End of recital (47):
|
| > The processing of personal data for direct marketing
| purposes may be regarded as carried out for a legitimate
| interest.
| eitland wrote:
| Have my upvote. I have just learned that targeted ads
| _might_ be considered direct marketing. I always thought
| it was limited to things that had my name and address
| (physical, email or other) on it, excluding online ads
| unless they were part of a "logged in experience" like
| upsells inside the product I am currently using.
|
| That said, I read the rest of the recital and I think it
| is rather clear to the degree that such things can be
| clear that _if you didn 't expect it, it isn't legal_.
| Here are some quotes:
|
| - "[...]provided that the interests or the fundamental
| rights and freedoms of the data subject are not
| overriding, taking into consideration the reasonable
| expectations of data subjects based on their relationship
| with the controller."
|
| - "At any rate the existence of a legitimate interest
| would need careful assessment including whether a data
| subject can reasonably expect at the time and in the
| context of the collection of the personal data that
| processing for that purpose may take place."
|
| I can assure you the even after reading this, if I have
| clicked "necessary only" (as this discussion started
| with) it is not my reasonable expectation that any data
| are stored except those that are strictly necessary for
| the navigation and the user visible features[1] of the
| site works.
|
| I'll admit that it seems some people think there is an
| argument that can me made that online ads can be direct
| marketing, but I would not risk any of my savings to
| defend that claim in court and I don't think Facebook or
| Google want to help you either as they seem to trying
| their best to prevent people from targeting individuals
| or at least pretending they do. And if it does, it is
| still covered by the conditions above.
|
| [1]: and yes, that means user features, so unless you are
| creating an online ad-collection of some kind, that
| probably does not mean ads
| viraptor wrote:
| They will because that's how things are supposed to work. For
| example your preference about tracking will get stored for
| that site. The same as login details. Those are legitimate
| interests and you never get an option for them.
| csunbird wrote:
| most of them try to argue serving ads and tracking is
| `legitimate interest`, which you have to disable manually
| viraptor wrote:
| > most of them
|
| I'm also grumpy about lots of this, but most? Can you
| point at any data that support this?
| m000 wrote:
| "legitimate interest" is just weasel words. With some mental
| gymnastics, you can argue for anything to be legitimate. And
| you can continue to do so until someone steps up, challenges
| your claims in a court, and wins the case.
| msgodel wrote:
| The only necessary cookies would be a session cookie for that
| domain which doesn't need a popup under the GDPR.
|
| I always use the inspect tool to just remove the popup.
| Interacting with it could be considered consent.
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| Same as "Do Not Track'...
| vitro wrote:
| Recently, I've discovered Consent-O-Matic for Firefox [1],
| which rejects some cookie preferences. Not all of them, but
| it still helps here and there.
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-
| mat...
| nightfly wrote:
| > Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a
| popup trying to get tracking consent
|
| It was with the best of intentions but cookie banners have done
| more to hurt web browsing than anything else in the last decade
| tyfon wrote:
| The banner is not the problem, the predatory tracking by
| webpages are. You can make a webpage without it no problem,
| my home page does not have it.
| Voultapher wrote:
| To add onto it the do-not-track header can be used to
| signal an opt out. There needs to be a browser wide setting
| that is communicated to websites without user interaction.
| Some German court even ruled that Linkdin IIRC has to
| respect DNT for that.
| nightfly wrote:
| The banners themselves are ugly and can fill almost half
| the screen
|
| Even website makers who don't use predatory tracking end up
| including them as a CYA tactic
| plemer wrote:
| Yes, but is your webpage profitable?
| nikanj wrote:
| The law is good, but websites implement it badly on purpose
| to inflict consumer ire towards the EU. There's good money to
| be made if they manage to make the voting public hate the
| cookie banners so much the anti-tracking legislation gets
| repelled
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| You forgot the popup requesting access to send you background
| notifications.
| hereonout2 wrote:
| You forgot the part about when you actually get to the content,
| there's usually about 5 paragraphs of SEO filler text before it
| actually gets onto answering the topic of the post.
| jgord wrote:
| not to mention the mandatory cloudflare "are you human" pre-
| vetting page Im seeing on 15% of sites.
|
| jesus wept.
| johnisgood wrote:
| And that I often have to wait for it to automatically get
| through it, which it does not, requiring me to click to
| verify I am indeed a human. Even if I am not even using Tor
| or VPNs.
| nathan_douglas wrote:
| Assuming that clicking to verify even works, which is
| shaky. On Safari, it seems to just loop me most of the
| time... which bums me out, since I generally don't have
| many issues with Safari.
| mmikeff wrote:
| And that when the adverts refresh all the content on the page
| shifts and you lose track of what you have read.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| This is most of the results on the first page of Google
| search are AI slop.
| blendergeek wrote:
| or even worse, the page itself is just an AI summary of the
| topic
| Disposal8433 wrote:
| I have noticed that a lot. For example:
|
| What is the price of the Switch 2?
|
| The Switch 2 can be purchased with money. <Insert the
| Wikipedia article about currencies since the bronze age>
| pflenker wrote:
| 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)
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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.
| manwe150 wrote:
| I don't think recipes are much at actual fault here. It
| seems the fault of search engines preferring returning
| recipes with longer stories over just-the-recipe blogs or
| sites like AllRecipes. We humans just have to suffer as a
| result of the artificial selection of what the search
| engines wants for us to experience.
| danaris wrote:
| It's not just that: recipes on their own are, AIUI, not
| copyrightable.
| zahlman wrote:
| https://cookingforengineers.com is giving 500s for me.
| Per the Wayback machine it was working as recently as
| last month. They do include background stories but
| they're much better about this sort of thing. (The old-
| school aspects of the page layout also help.)
| 83 wrote:
| Paprika (an app for storing recipes) can parse out the
| ingredient list and directions from a webpage. It's
| surprisingly good at it.
| chasd00 wrote:
| thank you for this! i'll check it out
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| You forgot 4 paragraphs text about how they went on a
| journey of self discovery, that lead to them spending
| time in the remote village of Y, learning the traditional
| methods of cooking the dish.
|
| The dish in question is a ham sandwich.
| crustaceansoup wrote:
| I don't even know if the recipes themselves are real and
| tested any more or just slop.
|
| It seems like it's more often than not that I'm coming
| across dishes that just do not make sense, or are poorly
| plagiarized by someone who doesn't understand the cuisine
| they're trying to replicate with absolute nonsense steps
| or substitutions or quantities. I used to have a great
| success rate when googling for recipes but now it's
| almost all crap, not even a mixed bag.
| fhd2 wrote:
| And then the part where you have to create an account to read
| past the SEO filler :(
|
| It's so sad, cause it drags down good pages. I recently did a
| lot of research for camping and outdoor gear, and of course I
| started the journey from Google. But a few sites kept popping
| up, I really liked their reviews and the quality of the items
| I got based on that, so I started just going directly to them
| for comparisons and reviews. This is how it's supposed to
| work, IMHO.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| Outdoor Gear Lab is great, it's true.
| fhd2 wrote:
| Nailed it :D
| progbits wrote:
| You are lucky if they even answer.
|
| Most of those are like: $movie release date
| <five paragraphs of garbage> While we don't
| know the actual $movie release date yet, ...
| chromehearts wrote:
| These are the worst things ever
| fireflash38 wrote:
| Good news! Now they are often AI drivel too. So you can get
| an AI summary of more AI crap.
| thfuran wrote:
| Either that or fifty paragraphs of ai slop blathering in
| circles about the topic.
| const_cast wrote:
| 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.
| jerojero wrote:
| This might be a hot take but I'm usually fine with this...
| If its authentic which most of the time it isn't.
|
| But I don't know, I feel like personal stories are what
| really makes a blog worth reading?
|
| I don't like it when it's unnecessary "info dump" type.
| Like, "we all know the benefits of garlic (proceeds to list
| the well known benefits of garlic)". It's not personal or
| relevant.
|
| I just want there to be a well formatted way of viewing the
| recipe at the bottom for quickly checking the recipe on a
| second or third visit.
| xp84 wrote:
| Sure, but there's a time and a place, and when I'm
| looking for a recipe, especially if I'm landing on a site
| for the first time and don't even know who the author is
| yet, it's the time and place to do the shopping or the
| cooking, not for reading even an interesting origin
| story.
| duderific wrote:
| I discovered justtherecipe.com and never went back. So
| far it's free and ad-free, though I suspect that will end
| soon.
| jkestner wrote:
| Now that's a recipe I would read. We can fold in the
| failing publishing industry and have authors presented by
| King Biscuit Flour.
| showcaseearth wrote:
| 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).
| jabjq wrote:
| No, it's not okay. I used google to look for a brownie
| recipe; I want a brownie recipe and nothing else.
| CafeRacer wrote:
| Literally this other link from a first page of HN:
| https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...
| federiconafria wrote:
| I make the point of leaving right away, I hope some metric
| somewhere is showing them or that it screws with their SEO...
|
| I might come back later though.
| msgodel wrote:
| Don't forget the drop in device performance/battery from the
| ridiculously spammy analytics scripts they force on you.
| create-username wrote:
| I send the link to another browser, one with JavaScript
| disabled
| 3036e4 wrote:
| NoScript removes almost all of that, at the insignificant cost
| of sometimes having to add some (usually temporary) exceptions
| to run scripts from a few domains.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| You don't have NoScript or AdBlock on any default browser on
| any relevant mobile platform.
| ports543u wrote:
| You have adblock on firefox mobile or in browsers like
| Cromite (fork of Bromite, based on Chromium).
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Clay tablets and library books have no ads either. NoScript
| is not the solution to the web being full of AI-generated SEO
| crap. It's a bandaid over the real problem.
| hualapais wrote:
| I have been leaning more and more on Marginalia Search to avoid
| the type of webpages you are describing. The filters centered
| on page technologies seem to weed out much that is wrong with
| the modern style-over-substance web, IMHO.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I'm actually rolling out changes as we speak that should make
| nuisance identification even better, and will result in
| throwing out fewer babies with the bathwater.
|
| https://marginalia-
| search.com/site/www.fontstruct.com?view=t...
|
| https://marginalia-
| search.com/search?query=special%3Apopover...
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Set up your browser to open all websites in reader view and all
| these problems are solved.
| inopinatus wrote:
| Your AI chat bot is ad free _for now_. This comment brought to
| you by PlavaLaguna Ultrasonic Water. Make your next VC pitch
| higher than you ever thought possible! Consume responsibly
| aerhardt wrote:
| At least there is more credible competition, so there could
| be a variety of business models to pick - ad-backed or paid.
| The search engine wars truly ended up being winner-take-all.
| nicbou wrote:
| There was virtually unlimited competition on the web
| garylkz wrote:
| That's because AI is still in the honeymoon phase, unless it's
| a paying service, at some point the summary will start to have
| context relevant ads.
|
| Also, I felt like in long term that's going to kill off the
| good faith of all those smaller sites that are actually good,
| while the bigger ones still produce subpar contents.
| quectophoton wrote:
| 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.
| Jenk wrote:
| document.querySelectorAll("[type='checkbox']").forEach(c =>
| c.checked = undefined)
|
| Adjust the selector as neccessary, sometimes I'll use `#id-
| of-cookie-banner [type='checkbox']`
|
| Probably useless for mobile though, unless you can punch it
| in the omnibar with `javascript:` prefix
| lightbulbish wrote:
| that was great, thanks for the laugh.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The site has a few other issues... The ads contrast with the
| content instead of blending in; there are only 2 ads inline
| with the content, and one is clearly an easy to ignore
| banner; all the cookie "partners" could be disabled, there
| should be 2 or 3 that you can't change.
| tempodox wrote:
| And you get a laundry list of several hundred switches that
| you have to manually switch off to deny their "legitimate
| interests".
| zahlman wrote:
| 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 </ul> 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
| attribute on the script tag
|
| which is part of configuration for some minified/obfuscated
| driver....
|
| Anyway, is it really not even possible to set up things like
| NoScript and uBlock Origin on mobile?
| jdiff wrote:
| Firefox for Android can handle uBlock Origin, probably
| NoScript as well. It's the one thing keeping me on Android
| at this point.
| showcaseearth wrote:
| omg, this is a gem
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Unfortunately it only has ~3 domains running JS on it's
| example site.
|
| I needs to have 15+ to really capture that modern web
| experience.
| cluckindan wrote:
| On iOS Safari, "Hide distracting items" allows you to bypass
| the consent dialogs about 95% of the time without consenting to
| anything.
| alentred wrote:
| My big hope is that somehow magically we avoid bringing this
| experience back to AI summaries and chats. Realistically,
| though, I will be on the lookout for the next generation of
| uBlock, NextDNS and the like.
| rco8786 wrote:
| > you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any
| annoyance.
|
| for now! and we should enjoy it while it lasts. Ad-driven AIs
| are coming, it is inevitable.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Pretty accurate, the web is generally unpleasant at the moment
| especially using a search engine as your entry point. The first
| page of results are irrelevant paid ads.
|
| My web experience has been reduced to a handful of bookmarks,
| X, and chatgpt or grok. Occasionally I'll go looking for
| government sites to validate something I read on X. Everything
| else is noise
| pembrook wrote:
| 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 all the money for themselves by turning their
| 10 blue links into 5 blue ads at the top of the search results.
| Search ads is now the most profitable monopoly business of all
| time.
|
| YouTube is still young, but give it time. Google will
| eventually kill the golden goose there as well, by trying to
| harvest too many eggs for themselves.
|
| The same will happen with AI results as well. Companies will be
| happy to lose money on it for a decade while they fight for
| dominance. But eventually the call for profits will come and
| the AI results will require scrolling through mountains of ads
| to see an answer.
|
| This is the shape of this market. Search driven content in any
| form is and will always be a yellow pages business. Doesn't
| matter if it's on paper or some future AGI.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| There is filters links in unlock for these kind of things,
| they're called annoyances
| brokencode wrote:
| 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 key part here will be monetization for content creators.
| People are no longer clicking links, so how do they get
| revenue?
|
| I think direct payments from AI companies to content creators
| will be necessary or the whole internet will implode.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| The advertising tier has gradually gotten worse on YouTube.
| Nicook wrote:
| Its encrapification is real. It has been slow though,
| mostly affecting niche interests and smaller creators. And
| the ad experience has definitely gotten worse, but
| adblockers help. Try using youtube without and adblocker.
| brokencode wrote:
| I pay for the subscription and don't see any ads. It
| comes with YouTube Music. It's great.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| 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!
| tim333 wrote:
| I get a lot of value from youtube - hours of
| entertainment. Also I don't pay and use an ad blocker
| which is maybe a bit unfair but thanks to the people who
| do pay.
| afavour wrote:
| You're talking as if video content has no intrinsic value
| of its own. Of course it does.
|
| "Now people pay cable companies to watch TV shows. It's
| funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving
| companies money for nothing."
| dingnuts wrote:
| I mean, when it launched the point of paying for cable
| instead of getting TV for free via broadcast was no ads
|
| Now cable has ads and costs a fortune; I didn't know
| anyone who has it. I do still watch a little broadcast
| though, the price is right even if the programming isn't
| great.
|
| If there's nothing on I turn it off and look at my phone
| neaden wrote:
| I don't think there was a time Cable didn't have ads,
| certain channels like HBO yeah, but never cable as a
| whole. The attraction was just having way more content.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| In the 1950s when Cable started in the US, there were no
| Cable channels. Cable was literally renting a pipe to a
| big antenna instead of your own small antenna in your
| house, so you got broadcast with better signal strength.
|
| The first Cable channel was HBO. The second was TBS, it
| had ads from the beginning.
| afavour wrote:
| > point of paying for cable instead of getting TV for
| free via broadcast was no ads
|
| No, the point of paying for cable was to get more TV.
| Most cable stations have always had ads. You're probably
| thinking of HBO, which is a tiny subset of overall cable
| output.
| LocalH wrote:
| The _original_ point of cable was Community Antenna TV,
| where you 'd get a much better quality signal (and often
| even additional out-of-market but nearby channels). Then
| broadcasters decided to go into specifically seeking
| nationwide coverage (Ted Turner was a pioneer in this
| area). They also decided, due to the sports leagues, that
| cable should only deliver local stations in the same
| market as your location through blackouts (through my
| childhood I went from getting three ABC affiliates and
| two CBS affiliates, to one of each). It became
| unprofitable to manage blacking out the out-of-market
| station any time they were both running network or sports
| programming, so the out-of-market stations were generally
| removed (I also wouldn't be surprised if negotiations for
| retransmission consent included terms preventing carriage
| of out-of-market stations).
| mwigdahl wrote:
| 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...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| None of your videos have in-video ads? "This segment is
| sponsored by NordVPN!" style stuff?
| darrylb42 wrote:
| Content creators still have their embedded ads. You just
| avoid all the non-skippable you tube ads
| radley wrote:
| There's another plug-in called SponsorBlock that will
| skip over most of those.
| leptons wrote:
| I use Youtube on a Chromecast with the SmartTube-beta
| app, which skips in-video ads, if they are demarcated by
| the creator - and most videos with in-video ads have
| that. The app just skips right by the in-video ad, as
| well as a bunch of other non-interesting video content if
| it is specified in the video timecodes by the creator.
|
| Another great feature of SmartTube-beta - and it's the
| feature that brought me to that app - is the ability to
| completely remove all "shorts" from the entire app. No
| more shorts. I've configured the app to eliminate them
| completely like they never existed.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > if they are demarcated by the creator - and most videos
| with in-video ads have that
|
| I'm almost positive that SmartTube is using the
| SponsorBlock database, which does not depend on creator-
| submitted demarcation, but rather on user-
| generated/crowd-sourced segment tagging.
| https://sponsor.ajay.app/
| sathackr wrote:
| My YT premium recently expired for a payment issue and
| ffs the ads are absolutely insane.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| 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.
| graemep wrote:
| A lot of them have sponsors which pay more than the ads,
| or are on Patreon, or are also on other platforms that
| pay them a higher proportion or allow videos that risk
| demonetisation on Youtube, or sell merch, or something
| else.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Sure, and if you're a patreon supporter, or support them
| on a non-YouTube platform, great. But if they're
| monetized and you're just watching them on YouTube, which
| probably 90% of people do, then running an adblocker is
| preventing them from earning money they would otherwise
| have earned. Whether or not they're _also_ earning money
| via other means is irrelevant.
| tartoran wrote:
| I have a question. How much do small creators get for
| views from Premium users? Say they get a few thousand
| views per video, would they get anything from Premium
| users?
| radley wrote:
| Probably not much for a few thousand. My understanding is
| that it requires continually producing videos that
| attract 100k+ viewers. It doesn't pay a lot, but it
| attracts direct sponsors who pay better. The biggest
| money comes from selling your own products and services,
| like "How to make millions on YouTube" seminars.
| delecti wrote:
| I've seen some breakdowns, and (depending on the content,
| because different ad segments can be more or less
| lucrative) view time from Premium users tends to be worth
| more, and often way more.
|
| As I understand it, a chunk of your membership fee is
| divided amongst all monetized creators you watch on a
| monthly basis, proportional to your watch time. A
| different chunk of your membership fee is divided between
| the creators and record labels, for your watch/listen
| time of Shorts and Youtube Music.
|
| So the size of the creator is only relevant insofar as it
| can determine whether the channel is eligible for
| monetization. View time is not worth a different amount
| depending on the size of the creator.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| YouTube only still "works" because of the cat and mouse ad
| blocker game. I don't know how but my new ad blocker seems
| to fast forward through all the ads. For a little while
| YouTube had them licked and I was watching 10 to 20 second
| ads all the time so temporarily gave up on YouTube until
| the ad blockers caught up again. Now YouTube is still
| functionally broken on TVs and mobile phones but works fine
| on a desktop computer still.
| tempestn wrote:
| Why not just pay for premium?
| bombela wrote:
| 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 sponsor block
| and I forget another one to cleanup the UI.
|
| Often I download the video so that I can actually seek
| around without buffering (because YouTube buffers as
| little as possible to save cost, which I can understand).
|
| Content nowadays is 30min instead of 5min. So you better
| be ready to skip and seek.
| com2kid wrote:
| 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.
| amlib wrote:
| Pay for a global monopoly that has always subsided its
| operation with infinite money from a near ad and search
| monopoly and private equity? Yeah, I will keep my uBlock
| Origin active, no thanks.
| 3form wrote:
| Watching things without having to log in is my use case.
| Not something that Google would want to ever cater for,
| so ad blocking it is.
| tempodox wrote:
| > ...they landed on a decent ad model.
|
| You must be joking. YT is so insufferable, I can only watch
| it via Firefox with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger
| active. And even then only if and as long as I absolutely
| have to.
| WaxProlix wrote:
| 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 or whatever but of course nobody gave a
| shit. I ended up upgrading my adblocker to something that
| worked on the new YouTube but of course at that point why
| keep the subscription if I have to fight some ads arms race
| anyway?
|
| Ads are useful and have their place in keeping the web
| accessible to everyone, but Google's anti user policies
| really stretch that relationship.
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| Bullying their paying customers is such an insane choice
| golergka wrote:
| Why would you use Adblock if you pay for premium?
| WaxProlix wrote:
| There are other websites on the internet, and I don't
| want to/didn't consider toggling off ghostery, noscript,
| ublock origin, etc per domain that I choose to pay for.
| ygjb wrote:
| Because Adblock doesn't just block ads, it also blocks
| invasive trackers that I consider malware.
|
| Paying to remove Ads means I don't want ads, it doesn't
| mean I consent to all of the other invasive tracking they
| do.
| LocalH wrote:
| It's funny how experiences can be so different (likely by
| Google's design, of course). I've been having degraded
| experience with YouTube using uBlock Origin on Vivaldi. I
| elected to make use of a one-month trial for Premium.
| Suddenly these problems went away. Interestingly, after
| canceling the trial, the problems still haven't come back
| (yet). Things like, I would load a video, it'd start
| playing, but the browser tab itself would just _block_
| for a good 20-30 seconds. The entire time, the video is
| playing (well, I could hear the audio but the visuals
| were frozen). Then things would unblock and comments
| would appear, etc.
|
| The difference between my YouTube interface with and
| without premium is stark. Aside from the ads, it seemed
| like the algorithm pushed less slop in front of me to
| avoid. Purely anecdotal, and likely affected by A/B
| bullshit (or nowadays would it be more like
| A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H/I/J/K/L/M/N/O/P/Q/R/S/T/U/V/W/X/Y/Z).
| browningstreet wrote:
| I've paid for Youtube Premium for a decade, use adblock
| in my browser, have no issues with performance on
| Youtube.
| abustamam wrote:
| 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.
| worik wrote:
| I was in complete agreement until:
|
| > Ads are useful and have their place in keeping the web
| accessible to everyone,
|
| No. Advertising is a cancer on commerce.
| pxc wrote:
| I feel like YouTube's enshittification is already here. The
| algorithm has long been terrible, they now punish users for
| disabling watch history, and the ads are more frequent,
| longer, and more annoying. If not for inertia (lots of
| video creators still uploading primarily or solely there),
| I'd have abandoned YouTube entirely a long time ago.
| no_wizard wrote:
| >YouTube is 20 years old now. Either the encrapification is
| very slow or they landed on a decent ad model.
|
| Have you seen how many ads are in a video on YouTube? On
| desktop its no issue, but I use the YouTube app on my Apple
| TV now and then, and I tried to watch a few relatively
| short video, and I saw easily 4-6 ads per video, some of
| which were 90+ seconds long. Its awful
| BalinKing wrote:
| 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).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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 I don't
| have any interest in, but they have no option to remove
| them from my suggestions.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| 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.
| streptomycin wrote:
| _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.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| > 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 inventory it wanted as long as it met the
| publisher's floor price, then pass the less desirable space
| to other exchanges, according to the DOJ.
|
| [...]
|
| > But Google moved quickly to reestablish AdX's power. It
| created a competitor to header bidding called "Open
| Bidding," which let Google take an extra cut of revenue.
| And under the adoption of header bidding, Google's AdX
| ultimately got a "last look" advantage when publishers
| chose to feed the winning header bid into their publisher
| ad server -- which most often was Google's DFP. That's
| because AdX's advertiser buyers would then have the option
| to bid as little as a penny more than the winning header
| bid to secure the most attractive ad space.[0]
|
| Google's header bidding-related shenanigans were a big part
| of the antitrust case against them, and they were found to
| be "monopolizing open-web digital advertising markets"[1],
| so I wouldn't say that it is mostly not controlled by
| Google.
|
| [0] https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/24/24253293/google-ad-
| tech-a... [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-
| justice-prevails-l...
| tempodox wrote:
| It's the usual enshittification. First they screw the end
| luser, then they screw their actual customers. If you depend
| on one platform as a member of either of those groups, you're
| screwed.
| fortyseven wrote:
| > YouTube is still young
|
| I almost spit out my drink.
| LocalH wrote:
| I mean, compared to the music, TV, and film industries?
| YouTube is _very_ young. Even many of today 's media
| conglomerates have some sort of root that goes back 100
| years or more.
| pembrook wrote:
| The open web that Google killed is 20 years older than
| YouTube.
|
| Give it time.
| DudeOpotomus wrote:
| There is no right to make money. Period.
|
| If you did, that doesnt mean you should. If you can, that
| doesnt mean you should.
| drewr wrote:
| I spend noticeably less time on youtube than I used to
| because they keep shoving shorts in my face. I'm a premium
| subscriber, I click "fewer shorts," nothing changes. Maybe I
| should be thankful?
| EchoReflection wrote:
| I recently quit YT premium after decades of having it, and
| now I actually (weirdly) feel _good_ when I see ads bc it
| 's a reminder that I'm not giving Googletube 20$/month
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Turn off all the history options, and bookmark
| https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions , which shows
| you _only_ what you 're subscribed to, in reverse-
| chronological order. (It'll still show you shorts, but only
| those for channels you're subscribed to.)
| dbtc wrote:
| Has there ever been an option to pay google $20/month for a
| better / add-free search?
|
| The current subscription situation for LLM stuff actually
| makes me hopeful.
| natebc wrote:
| my kagi subscription is as valuable to me as my youtube
| premium sub.
| margalabargala wrote:
| 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. Probably every phone will run one.
|
| I suspect in the next decade we will see the business model
| of "make money via advertising while trying/pretending to
| provide knowledge" become well and truly dead.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| All because "content" isn't free to produce.
|
| AI stole all the content from those websites, starving them
| from ad revenue.
|
| The Google overview is made by the same company that puts those
| ads in those websites in first place.
|
| What is coming next is that there will be ads in the overview
| and you will have no choice but to read it because all its
| cited links will be rotten.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-
| formatted content without any annoyance.
|
| ad-free? For now. That's just a matter of time.
| ndr wrote:
| I don't know which models they use but it's likely already
| happening.
|
| Yesterday's SEO battles are today battles to convince LLMs to
| produce ad tokens. The corpus is already ridden of such
| content. And LLM make it even easier to produce more such
| spam.
| bgwalter wrote:
| If nobody writes "content" any more, there will be nothing to
| summarize. Google is stealing the clicks from real websites
| that try to make a living.
|
| This is naturally not addressed in the US "AI" Action Plan,
| same as copyright theft.
| somenameforme wrote:
| > "This is btw. usually all before I even established if the
| content is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to
| me (often it is not)."
|
| This is the huge one for me. If you search for something in
| natural language, the results you get on any search engine
| completely suck - yet ironically the AI overview is generally
| spot on. Search engines have been stuck in ~2003 for decades.
| Now the next 'breakthrough' is to use their LLMs to actually
| link to relevant content instead of using pagerank+ or whatever
| dysfunctional SEO'd algorithm they're still using.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| You forgot that after you've run the gauntlet of popups, you
| have a 50% chance of getting a hard paywall.
| latortuga wrote:
| Ugh this just makes me wonder how long it will be before we
| start seeing responses to AI chat like "please watch this 30s
| ad / drink a verification can to get your answer". I have to
| believe that ads are coming.
| niutech wrote:
| There were solutions like Google Web Lite, AMP HTML or Facebook
| Instant Articles, but sadly they are mostly gone. There is
| still reader mode in some web browsers (e.g. Speedreader in
| Brave) which helps a lot. And of course uBlock Origin (Lite) is
| a must.
| LearnYouALisp wrote:
| On a smaller phone I often can't even see the button and it
| won't let me zoom out/scroll to get to it
| otherayden wrote:
| I've actually been working on a tool that uses jina.ai's
| "reader" api to let you see a rendered markdown view of a pages
| contents. Check it out at https://leidnedya.github.io/markweb
| or try it out with
| https://leidnedya.github.io/markweb#example.com
| bgro wrote:
| also gotta have every click on the page to highlight text
| navigate to a shopping cart subscription page and then break
| the back button.
|
| Clicking on a video to mute it also needs to navigate to a
| sponsor's page and break the back button. And then the page
| reloads which doubles the page view count. Genius web dev
| decision. I bet they said "there's literally no downsides to
| doing this!"
|
| Also, the ads need to autoplay on full volume, often bypassing
| my system volume somehow so they can play even though the rest
| of the audio is on mute and none of the mute functionality
| works. Surely the user simply forgot they had mute on so we
| should just go ahead and fix that.
|
| They also need to play on 4K ultra HD to use my entire monthly
| cell plan if I don't stop it in the first 3 seconds, which I
| can't do because the video has to fully load before I'm able to
| interact with it to click stop. Or clicking stop pauses it and
| then automatically restarts playing the video.
|
| These webdev chrome devs need to stop adding new random
| features and start fixing the basic functionality. I don't want
| fading rotating banners that save 3 lines of CSS. I want the
| "DO NOT AUTOPLAY. EVER." Button to actually work.
| grishka wrote:
| On desktop I have one of those one-click JS toggle extensions,
| so the moment I see any attempts to interfere with me reading
| the goddamn article, that website gets its privilege of client-
| side interactivity revoked due to abuse.
|
| Some annoyed me so much I even disabled JS for them on my
| phone. I do that more rarely because of how unnecessarily
| convoluted that setting is in Chromium browsers on Android. You
| have to navigate 4 levels deep in the settings and enter the
| domain you want to block into a text field!
|
| For example, I have JS disabled on everything Substack (and it
| really annoys me when I end up on Substack hosted on a custom
| domain).
| greymalik wrote:
| For now. Some LLM responses will contain advertising eventually
| too. Google's search revenue is plummeting. They have to make
| it up somewhere.
| jorl17 wrote:
| 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.
| kraig911 wrote:
| I mean you're not wrong try searching for any recipe or just a
| search result where you want a simple answer. This problem
| you're outlining isn't just the search engines/ai/results
| fault. Simple questions should have answers in paragraphs of
| dialogue and anymore than 1 ad.
| Huxley1 wrote:
| This situation makes sense since everyone wants quick answers,
| and AI summaries are really convenient. A lot of people just read
| the summary without clicking through to the original content. But
| this can be a real problem for creators who rely on traffic. Does
| anyone have ideas on how to balance both user needs and support
| for creators?
| zb3 wrote:
| > But this can be a real problem for creators who rely on
| traffic.
|
| Wait.. why would that creator be paid for the traffic if I'm
| not buying any shitty overpriced product advertised on these
| scammy ads, ever? Especially when I don't even see these thanks
| to ublock.
| buyucu wrote:
| AI overviews are search. It's the next iteration of how web
| searching works.
| cm2187 wrote:
| What I don't understand is how do you square that with google
| still reporting growth in ads revenues. Surely google's business
| should tank by that much (not even taking into account the
| additional cost of processing a seach with AI).
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Maybe... it was always a lie?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > What I don't understand is how do you square that with google
| still reporting growth in ads revenues.
|
| Advertiser sees fewer hits from ad campaign, assumes it's their
| competitors, then raises their budget slightly to better
| compete in the ad auction.
|
| Multiply that by about 300m businesses.
|
| The signals that Google's customers (the advertisers) get is
| not "Your ad was ignored after we answer the user's query
| directly", it's "Your ad was ignored". The advertisers cannot
| tell _why_ the ad was ignored.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I don't think advertisers are so naive than to not be aware
| that google now answers many queries with AI.
| verzali wrote:
| My site never got much traffic from Google and I never wasted
| time on SEO. So I find it hard to care about losing clicks I
| didn't have.
|
| But I do find it concerning that Google is effectively stealing
| the time I spend on research and not offering proper credit. I'm
| always careful to credit people and provide extensive links to
| the work of others on my site. But here Google and others are
| simply stealing that work, getting it wrong, and then claiming
| they did all the effort.
| jama211 wrote:
| Well, yeah.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Main reason:
|
| Google seach ranking already became so bad that finding the right
| query to produce a decent result became a craft in and of itself.
|
| HN readers might not realize this, but I used to constantly have
| to search things for friends and family as they just couldn't
| find it with Google.
|
| The AI result is a godsend fir them. I saw a massive drop in
| their requests to me.
| SwtCyber wrote:
| But hey, I'm sure Google's quarterly earnings are doing just fine
| jeffbee wrote:
| They were fine, though.
| cess11 wrote:
| I find this rather worrying, because the summaries I look at are
| frequently wrong or misleading.
|
| Over the last years I've moved over a lot of initial search to
| Wikipedia, which either answers directly or provides useful
| links.
| Mars008 wrote:
| As I understand it they are saying users waste significantly less
| time on search if there are AI overviews. Is it really bad? Not
| from users perspective.
| wulfstan wrote:
| If you're tired of this BS can I encourage you to make:
|
| https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
|
| Your default search engine. AI overviews begone.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| I thought the search clicks was a massive driver of data for the
| search engine. How is this not a bad thing for the search engine
| company?
| keiferski wrote:
| What is the long term plan for data acquisition?
|
| 1. Use existing websites for training data
|
| 2. Replace search traffic with AI prompts, thereby destroying the
| economic incentive for websites to publish data
|
| 3. ?
| ethan_smith wrote:
| Step 3 is "train on synthetic data generated by previous AI
| models" - creating an inevitable quality death spiral as each
| generation trains on increasingly derivative content.
| dirkc wrote:
| At some stage Google will need to be accountable for answers they
| are hosting on their own site. The argument of "we're only
| indexing info on other sites" changes when you are building a
| tool to generate content and hosting that content on your own
| domain.
|
| I'm guilty of not clicking when I'm satisfied with the AI answer.
| I know it can be wrong. I've seen it be wrong multiple times. But
| it's right at the top and tells me what I suspected when I did
| the search. The way they position the AI overview is right in
| your face.
|
| I would prefer the "AI overview" to be replaced with something
| that helps me better search rather than giving me the answer
| directly.
| OldfieldFund wrote:
| Another problem is that you have to click twice:
|
| 1. The anchor icon.
|
| 2. Then one of the sites that appear on the right (on desktop).
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > The argument of "we're only indexing info on other sites"
| changes when you are building a tool to generate content and
| hosting that content on your own domain.
|
| And yet, "the algorithm" has always been their first defense
| whenever they got a complaint or lawsuit about search results;
| I suspect that when (not if) they get sued over this, they will
| do the same. Treating their algorithms and systems as a
| mysterious, somewhat magic black box.
| Havoc wrote:
| > Google will need to be accountable
|
| Hell will freeze over first
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >But it's right at the top and tells me what I suspected when I
| did the search. The way they position the AI overview is right
| in your face.
|
| Which also introduces the insidious possibility that AI
| summaries will be designed to confirm biases. People already
| use AI chat logs to prove stuff, which is insane, but it works
| on some folks.
| WA wrote:
| Several factors are at play here, which are somewhat
| contradictive:
|
| 1. Publishers feel entitled to traffic, because Google send them
| traffic in recent years. See [1] for example:
|
| _> "Google's core search engine service is misusing web content
| for Google's AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused,
| and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including
| news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue
| loss," the document said._
|
| _> "Publishers using Google Search do not have the option to opt
| out from their material being ingested for Google's AI large
| language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries,
| without losing their ability to appear in Google's general search
| results page," the complaint said._
|
| I have zero pity for these publishers.
|
| 2. Not all traffic is created equal. Does a business really lose
| customers, just because traffic goes down? Maybe that traffic
| wouldn't have converted anyways. This is basically the old piracy
| discussion revamped with businesses arguing that every single
| copy of a movie or a game would've been a customer. It's idiotic.
|
| 3. But: Google is now a content provider and different rules
| apply for those than being merely on a comparable level like an
| ISP. This has been discussed for years with social networks in
| minds. Hence, Google needs to be held accountable for providing
| harmful information (such as in another story here: the
| temperature for heating pork and when food safety is affected).
|
| [1]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/googles-ai-
| overview...
| r33b33 wrote:
| Good. About time search dies
| falcor84 wrote:
| > So more people could be walking away from a search with the
| wrong information.
|
| I'd actually be very interested in some real research about this.
| My impression is that in general, SEO-optimized sites are
| (intentionally) so bad at transmitting information that the
| difference between an average person "doing their own research"
| on these sites vs reading the AI overview would either be
| negligible, or in favor of the AI summaries.
| eitau_1 wrote:
| I hope the small web will thrive again once the profit incentive
| for putting content on the web ceases to exist so SEO/dark-
| pattern heavy players will give up and stop suppressing valuable
| (altruistic?) stuff.
| 7222aafdcf68cfe wrote:
| What current incentive is left for people to publish on the
| internet?
|
| Discovery mechanisms are less effective than before, people no
| longer visit your website, copyright is dead and in the end we're
| just feeding an insatiable machine with slave labour. Or am I
| missing something ?
| gtsop wrote:
| What was the initial incentive for people to publish on the
| internet before ad revenue was a thing?
| righthand wrote:
| Information sharing with other humans, not corporations.
| quectophoton wrote:
| Likely with some expectation of receiving attribution for
| your effort, even if only sometimes.
| djeastm wrote:
| The incentive was often creating a community around a shared
| interest. Good luck doing that with AI summaries stopping
| people from visiting the sites.
| benrutter wrote:
| 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 monetise it
| however I wanted. This has mostly led to what we have today, some
| high quality content, lots of low quality content, mostly
| monetised through user hostile ads.
|
| 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. I still can't do that, but _Google can_ if it 's
| done through the mechanism of AI summaries.
|
| I think the worst case scenario is that people stop publishing
| content on the web altogether. The most likely one is that
| search/summary engines eat up money that previously came from
| content creators. The best one is that we find some alternative,
| third way, for creators to monotise content while maintaining
| discoverability.
|
| I'm not sure what will happen, and I'm not denying the usefulness
| of AI summaries, but it feels easy to miss that, at their core,
| they're a fundamental reworking of the current economics of the
| internet.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > I think the worst case scenario is that people stop
| publishing content on the web altogether
|
| Quite clearly heading in that direction, but with a twist: the
| only people left will be advertising or propaganda, if there's
| no money in authenticity or correctness.
| layer8 wrote:
| There was little to no money in authenticity or correctness
| in the heyday of home pages and personal blogs. People
| published because they were excited about sharing information
| and opinions. That was arguably the internet at its best.
| nicbou wrote:
| It's crazy how few people see it that way. Big tech is
| capturing all the value created by content creators, and it's
| slowly strangling the independent web it feeds on. It's a
| parasitic relationship. Once the parasite has killed its host,
| it will feed on its users.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This would be lovely.
|
| > I think the worst case scenario is that people stop
| publishing content on the web altogether. The most likely one
| is that search/summary engines eat up money that previously
| came from content creators.
|
| More than likely, people return to publishing content because
| they love the subject matter and not because it is an angle to
| "create content" or "gain followers" or show ads. No more "the
| top 25 hats in July 2025" AI slopfest SEO articles when I look
| for a hat, but a thoughtful series of reviews with no ads or
| affiliate links, just because someone is passionate about hats.
| The horror! The horror!
| djeastm wrote:
| I hope things turn out the way you suggest. If we could
| return to a pre-2000s, pre-Dotcom boom internet I would be
| ever so happy, but I'm skeptical.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >More than likely, people return to publishing content
| because they love the subject matter and not because it is an
| angle to "create content" or "gain followers" or show ads.
|
| Why would you do that if you thought it was going to be
| hoovered up by some giant corporation and spat out again for
| $20 a month with no attribution.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| From my post:
|
| [B]ecause they love the subject matter and not because it
| is an angle to "create content" or "gain followers" or show
| ads.
| anton-c wrote:
| Because they like to make stuff more than they value a
| subscription. I'm gonna write music no matter what happens
| to it.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I understand that, I'm in the middle of a project right
| now that has no commercial value to me. What I'm not
| going to do is offer it up to Google et al so they can
| profit from it.
| coldpie wrote:
| > What I'm not going to do is offer it up to Google et al
| so they can profit from it.
|
| What _are_ you going to do with it? If you publish it,
| the law currently allows Google to hoover it up and there
| 's nothing you can do about it.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Why publish? If people aren't going to click into it
| anyway and read it, why not just do it and write it up
| for yourself? I've been doing this for years (in a way,
| haven't quite worked writing it up into that) but I
| explore on my own constantly and try things just with me
| and my fiance. I still hope to share it someday but this
| person is right. You don't _have_ to do anything with it
| once you've done it. You can just work on a project and
| enjoy the process and then do nothing.
|
| In that instance, google loses value over time because
| less and less valuable content is published because
| there's no point because people may read it as an AI
| summary but probably aren't going to share their own
| findings or discuss with you anyway.
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| It's so easy to say that when your income is not
| dependable on writing music.
| jaydenmilne wrote:
| "Writing is its own reward"
|
| -- Henry Miller (1964). "Henry Miller on Writing", New
| Directions Publishing
|
| "... and now its Sam Altman's reward too!"
|
| -- Jayden Milne (2025). https://jayd.ml/about/
|
| I think both are true.
| horrorente wrote:
| > More than likely, people return to publishing content
| because they love the subject matter and not because it is an
| angle to "create content" or "gain followers" or show ads. No
| more "the top 25 hats in July 2025" AI slopfest SEO articles
| when I look for a hat, but a thoughtful series of reviews
| with no ads or affiliate links, just because someone is
| passionate about hats. The horror! The horror!
|
| I disagree with that. There are still people out there doing
| that out of passion, that hasn't changed (it's just harder to
| find). Bad actors who are only out there for the money will
| continue trying to get the money. Blogs might not be relevant
| anymore, but social media influencing is still going to be a
| thing. SEO will continue to exist, but now it's targeted to
| influence AIs instead of the position in Google search
| results. AIs will need to become (more) profitable, which
| means they will include advertising at some point. Instead of
| companies paying Google to place their products in the search
| or influencers through affiliate links, they will just pay AI
| companies to place their products in AI results or
| influencers to create fake reviews trying to influence the AI
| bots. A SEO slop article is at least easy to detect,
| recommendations from AIs are much harder to verify.
|
| Also it's going to hit journalism. Not everyone can just blog
| because they are passionate about something. Any content
| produced by professionals is either going to be paywalled
| even more or they need to find different sources of income
| threatening journalistic integrity. And that gives even more
| ways to bad actors with money to publish news in their
| interest for free and gaining more influence on the public
| debate.
| gorbachev wrote:
| It's not going to happen this way, because these days for you
| to get somewhere near the top of Google results requires you
| to be an established content publisher, basically anyone with
| enough followers.
|
| Someone who publishes content because they love the subject
| matter would only reach enough of an audience to have an
| impact if they work on it, a lot, and most people wouldn't do
| that without some expectation of return on investment, so
| they'd follow the influencer / commercial publication
| playbook and end up in the same place as the established
| players in the space are already.
|
| If you're satisfied of being on the 50th page on the Google
| results, then that's fine. Nobody will find you though.
| pickledoyster wrote:
| Being passionate about hats is one thing, but being
| passionate about sharing something you care about with others
| is the real driver for publishing. As LLMs degrade web
| discoverability through search (summaries+slop results),
| there's no incentive for the latter people to continue
| publishing on the open web or even the bot-infested closed
| gardens.
|
| The web is on a trajectory where a local dyi zine will reach
| as many readers as an open website. It might even be cheaper
| than paying for a domain+hosting once that industry contracts
| and hosting plans aren't robust enough to keep up with
| requests from vibe-coded scrapers.
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| And Google would still use AI to get money by using that
| content without having to access your website. Besides that,
| creating content IS work for a lot of people. Ads and
| affiliated links are part of the monetization model that
| works the best, sadly. What you are saying is "people should
| just code for fun and curiosity, their income should come
| from elsewhere" while Google is making money with Gemini.
| It's not necessarily wrong, but it sounds dismissive.
| benrutter wrote:
| > This would be lovely.
|
| I agree the current model sucks, but I think it being
| replaced is only good if it's replaced with something better.
|
| > More than likely, people return to publishing content
| because they love the subject matter
|
| I'd love the idea of people doing things because they're
| passionate, but I feel a little unsure about people doing
| things because they're passionate, generating money from
| those things, but all that money going to AI summariser
| companies. I think there's some pretty serious limits too,
| journalists risk their safety a lot of the time, and I can't
| see a world where that happens purely out of "passion"
| without any renumeration. Aside from anything else, some acts
| of journalism like overseas reporting etc, isn't compatible
| with working a seperate "for-pay" job.
| brainwad wrote:
| >If I create content like recipes ... previously I had
| exclusive rights to my created content
|
| Recipes are not protected by copyright law. That's _why_ recipe
| bloggers have resorted to editorialising recipes, because the
| editorial content is copyrightable.
| benrutter wrote:
| Haha, you've exposed that I know absolutely nothing about
| copyright law! That's a great point, but I think my original
| point still stands if you swap out my full-of-holes example
| for a type of content that is copyrightable.
| pantulis wrote:
| > 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.
|
| And this is the reason why Google took its sweet time to
| counter OpenAI's GPT3. They _had_ to come up with this, which
| admittedly disrupts the publishers business model but at least
| if Google is successful they will keep their moat as the first
| step in any sales funnel.
| xpressvideoz wrote:
| Some HNers said AI overviews sucked and they would never use
| them, and here it is.
| bomb17982 wrote:
| AI Overviews are great for users but brutal for publishers.
| Studies show sites lose roughly 40-50% of clicks when these
| summaries appear. It feels like another step toward Google
| keeping users on the SERP, instead of sending traffic out.
|
| If this sticks, creators will either need to optimize for being
| included in the AI answer or focus more on direct channels
| (newsletters, communities) to survive.
| maurits wrote:
| (forgot what type of flour you need for bread in supermarket)
|
| innocently googles 'flour bread'
|
| half the screen, CONTINUE WITH GOOGLE - stay in browser, click
|
| COOKIES We and our 917 partners CARE ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY, click,
| click,
|
| NEWSLETTER, NEWSLETTER, click, rotate screen because the overlay
| is to big, click Im sad person who's doesn't want daily bread in
| his mailbox.
|
| APP APP APP, install APP, click click, can't hit the x, let it be
|
| LOG IN WITH YOUR FOOFLE ACCOUNT, click
|
| 5 pages with autoplay video and SEO slop
|
| I'm enjoying AI, while it lasts.
| Escapade5160 wrote:
| It's unfortunate, but websites now make content for AI. We used
| to use a browser, to view a site, to gain information. Now we use
| an AI, to tell us the information.
| karel-3d wrote:
| I just wonder
|
| if AI will destroy the internet... what it will use to train the
| next generation on? If people go to AI instead of reddit and
| stack overflow, what will they train the next models on? They
| have used reddit extensively to train the first GPT models.
|
| I guess that's "tomorrow's problem" though
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > if AI will destroy the internet... what it will use to train
| the next generation on?
|
| Spying on you when you're fixing your carburetor and then
| making a how-to guide for other people.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Google introduced its Google Knowledge Graph in 2012 and for sure
| it caused the drop in website clicks but I would say not that
| significant. People want quality content and they will always
| look for quality websites with or without AI overviews. My
| digital marketing professor once said that customers who look
| beyond first page results are the most valuable ones, because
| they are dedicated users and customers. People who read AI
| overviews won't be your first class users and customers.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| I think it's a google problem. The AI summary is often times
| wrong so I don't bother. But the pages are garbage as well, so
| normal users won't click on that looking for information. Dark
| forest and all that. Pages started to optimize for Google and not
| humans. Humans don't visit anymore. Duh
| garylkz wrote:
| Yep, I can't remember when was the last time I've visited a SEO
| optimized site but I still had the bitter taste that I felt
| when I last visited it:
|
| - searches for "How to do XYZ" and click one of the site
|
| - "what is xyz"
|
| - "why xyz matters"
|
| - "preparations before xyz"
|
| - "what you might encounter when xyz"
|
| Sounds reasonable and in theory should be useful, but the
| actual useful info are only stuffed in 1-2 lines of multi
| paragraphs on tons of sections that I don't care about.
| t0lo wrote:
| Working as designed :) enjoy the upcoming informational dark age
| einrealist wrote:
| At what point does this remove the 'platform provider' defense
| for wrong or defamatory information generated by Google & Co?
| nelblu wrote:
| This is all nice while the AI overview has no ads in it. Wait
| until it gets enshittified, and I have a feeling AI overview
| would be so infested with ads that people would rather block it
| and proceed to reading the actual links.
|
| All this said, I am guilty of using this a lot these days - while
| it is still ad-free. I just ask chatgpt.com to give me a recipe
| of "XYZ" and it gives it immediately without any annoying
| repetitive content.
| da25 wrote:
| AI systems still struggle with hallucination, especially when
| your intent of the query is to obtain the latest information.
| These models have become very good at handling stored
| information, but their ability to stay updated remains slow.
| There is a large volume of queries whose responses and underlying
| concepts don't change much, and the current AI systems, through
| innovation and user-friendly interfaces, has managed to cast a
| wide net over such pre-learned responses.
|
| However, unless these AI base model businesses create strong
| enough incentives for information owners to provide updates and
| engage in information pipelines that provide fresh data, the
| current moat of AI might not extend far enough to cover the full
| spectrum of queries.
|
| The "fossil fuel" of LLMs-static public internet data-is running
| out.
|
| Current efforts in RL help systems answer queries beyond their
| pre-learned knowledge by expanding on the user's prompt, wherein
| the system ventures into unknown data territories through agents
| and self-talk, resulting in action-result memories. These, in
| turn, serve as a large enough context-rich prompt to have all the
| needles-in-hay-stack that form the final answer or response. This
| is made possible by large context windows.
|
| For live internet queries, RL can work by expanding context with
| latest results fetched from the public web using a crawler.
| However, this is often done without the explicit consent from
| information providers and offers them little incentive beyond a
| link in the AI's response summary. As a result, some providers
| have started withholding data, and many services now offer tools
| to block AI crawlers. Meanwhile, multimodal AI systems-capable of
| understanding text, visuals, and audio-are developing agents that
| can access content through simulated browser use, effectively
| bypassing traditional crawler firewalls.
|
| This reality highlights the need for a good incentive system for
| information providers, one that encourages them to share dense,
| efficiently and ai-structured data. Certain domains have already
| begun embracing this and sharing their information in ai-native
| formats, since they have no moat in that information and rather
| see positive incentives - for example, certain documentation
| websites for tools and frameworks now provide formatted versions
| of their docs at /LLMs.txt links.
|
| If the information is the resource exchanged on these internet
| pathways, businesses fundamentally operate either by generating
| this resource or by retrieving it once it exists, and the other
| businesses enable this whole endeavour. Ultimately, individuals
| and organizations will, seek, share and exchange information in
| ways that enables them to efficiently take decisions and their
| next actions. Therefore, the incentive to access the most up-to-
| date information becomes critical when those actions depend on
| accuracy and timeliness.
| indymike wrote:
| The web is dying.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| If searchers (people, I assume) are not clicking on content links
| like they used to, it's safe to assume that they are not clicking
| on ad links as well. Google is digging their own grave here. That
| being said, given the zeitgeist, they really have no choice but
| to offer AI summaries at least on par with the competition.
| dana321 wrote:
| I installed a plugin that removes them, most of the time the
| answers it gives are complete dogwater
| ponys wrote:
| I've written a bit about this issue as well, coming from someone
| working at a company that partially relies on organic search
| results. It's been interesting (And slightly worrying) to see the
| shift and layoffs happening here already.
|
| https://sasjakoning.com/blog/how-google-s-new-ai-overview-is...
|
| I have to say that the comments here do offer a great alternative
| perspective as to how terrible the web has been to navigate
| before AI Overviews became a thing.
| DanielKehoe wrote:
| I've written high-quality technical how-tos for many years,
| starting with PC World magazine articles (supported by ads), a
| book that helped people learn Ruby on Rails (sales via Amazon),
| and more recently a website that's good for queries like
| "uninstall Homebrew" or "xcode command line tools" (sponsored by
| a carefully chosen advertiser). With both a (small) financial
| incentive and the intrinsic satisfaction of doing good work that
| people appreciate, I know I've helped a LOT of people over four
| decades.
|
| A year ago my ad-supported website had 100,000 monthly active
| users. Now, like the article says, traffic is down 40% thanks to
| Google AI Overview zero clicks. There's loss of revenue, yes, but
| apart from that, I'm wondering how people can find my work, if I
| produce more? They seldom click through on the "source"
| attributes, if any.
|
| I wonder, am I standing at the gates of hell in a line that
| includes Tower Records and Blockbuster? Arguably because I'm
| among those that built this dystopia with ever-so-helpful
| technical content.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Unfortunately for you this kind of content does seem to be
| going the way of Blockbuster. But the writing was on the wall
| for years now with how much Google Search became useless due to
| over-SEOification of every website, LLMs were just the dagger
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| The pattern repeats itself. Come, use our services, it's free,
| it will be good for you. Users elevate the service to a
| monopoly. And then the behemoth thinks that the users - who
| gave their blood so the behemoth could grow - are now more like
| a nuisance and kills those that are the most vulnerable.
|
| Every year they put the threshold higher and it results in more
| and more people getting burned. Of course the big, established
| brands are protected.
|
| So they don't want the average joe's opinion. And they don't
| want to funnel money to you, now that you have fulfilled your
| purpose.
| boringg wrote:
| What you describe is more like the traditional VC structure
| for most businesses. Provide low cost services while they
| need to grow user base -- as user base is established the
| model now needs to extract value from the users - quality
| drops and the costs increases.
|
| It happens for all VC based products since the drive on
| returns of invested capital is so high.
|
| Put another way -- early stage products that every uses and
| love (in most not all cases) should not be assumed to be the
| end product.
| BSOhealth wrote:
| Novel content will continue to require human creators. So, if
| you are at the frontier of some idea space, whether that's
| using Homebrew or baking brownies, your input will be rewarded
| to some extent. But, we won't need 1000 different Medium blogs
| about installing Rails or 1000 baking websites pitching the
| same recipe but with a different family story at the top.
|
| Yes, maybe a small amount of people ultimately contributing but
| if their input is truly novel and "true" then what's the
| downside?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > and more recently a website that's good for queries like
| "uninstall Homebrew" or "xcode command line tools" (sponsored
| by a carefully chosen advertiser). With both a (small)
| financial incentive and the intrinsic satisfaction of doing
| good work that people appreciate, I know I've helped a LOT of
| people over four decades.
|
| Simple content that can be conveyed in a few succinct lines of
| text (like how to uninstall Homebrew) is actually one of the
| great use cases for AI summaries.
|
| I'm sorry that it's losing you revenue, but I'd much rather get
| a quick answer from AI than have to roll the dice on an ad-
| supported search result where I have to parse the layout, dodge
| the ads, and extract the relevant info from the filler content
| and verbiage
| KittenInABox wrote:
| I mean, then what happens when there isn't enough money in
| producing answers but technology continues to move forward?
| There isn't any more content for the AI to summarize to
| answer with...
| chasd00 wrote:
| Then we all start buying O'Reilly books again i guess, i
| use to have dozens.
| go_elmo wrote:
| Just a question how content is produced & ingested.
|
| Utopian fantasy: interact with the ai - novel findings are
| registered as such and "saved" and made available to others.
|
| Creative ideas are registered as such, if possible, theyre
| tested in "side quests" ie the ai asks - do you have 5min to
| try this? You unblock yourself if it works & see in the future
| how many others profited as well (3k people read this finding).
|
| Its all a logistics question
| dahart wrote:
| > am I standing at the gates of hell in a line that includes
| Tower Records and Blockbuster?
|
| Maybe, but there's a big difference - Netflix doesn't rely on
| Blockbuster, and Spotify doesn't need Tower Records. Google AI
| results do need your articles, and it returns the content of
| them to your readers without sending you the traffic. And
| Google is just trying to fend off ChatGPT and Meta and others,
| who absolutely will, if allowed, try to use their AI to become
| the new search gateways and supplant Google entirely.
|
| This race will continue as long as Google & OpenAI & everyone
| else gets to train on your articles without paying anything for
| them. Hopefully in the future, AI training will either be fully
| curated and trained on material that's legal to use, or it will
| license and pay for the material they want that's not otherwise
| free. TBH I'm surprised the copyright backlash hasn't been
| much, _much_ bigger. Ideally the lost traffic you're seeing is
| back-filled with licensing income.
|
| I guess you can rest a little easier since we got to where we
| are now not primarily because of technical means but mostly by
| allowing mass copyright violation. And maybe it helps a little
| to know that most content-producing jobs in the world are in
| the same boat you are, including the programmers in your target
| audience. That's cold comfort, but OTOH the problem you (we)
| face is far more likely to be addressed and fixed than if it
| was only a few people affected.
| altcognito wrote:
| I mean, there's always been a grey area even when it came to
| tiny snippets in the results, though those actually
| encouraged you to click through when you found the right
| result.
|
| The beginning of the end was including Wikipedia entries
| directly in the search results, although arguably even some
| of the image results are high quality enough to warrant
| skipping visiting the actual website (if you were lucky
| enough to get the image at the target site in the first
| place) So maybe it goes back sooner than that.
| rurp wrote:
| 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 people get treated as criminals for seeding a few
| movies, but the Sam Altmans of the world can break those laws
| on an unprecedented scale with no repercussions.
|
| As sad as it is, I think we're looking at the end of the open
| internet as we've known it. This is massive tragedy of the
| commons situation and there seems to be roughly zero
| political will to enact needed regulations to keep things
| fair and sustainable. The costs of this trend are massive,
| but they are spread out across many millions of disparate
| producers and consumers, while the gains are extremely
| concentrated in the hands of the few; and those few have good
| lobbyists.
| tim333 wrote:
| 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 used an LLM?
| mushroomba wrote:
| 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.
| IrishTechie wrote:
| 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.
| Drew_ wrote:
| I agree whole heartedly. It seems clear to me that art and
| knowledge will transition to more private and/or
| undocumented experiences in the coming years in order to
| preserve their value.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| We are heading for an internet Kessler syndrome, where the
| destruction of human-written text will cause LLMs to train
| off of dirty LLM-written text, causing the further
| destruction of human-written text and the further degradation
| of LLM-written text. Eventually LLMs will be useless and
| human-written text will not be discoverable. I pray that the
| answer is that people seek out spaces which are not monetized
| (such as the gemini protocol) so that there's no economic
| incentive to waste computing resources on it.
| zahlman wrote:
| > TBH I'm surprised the copyright backlash hasn't been much,
| much bigger.
|
| Even when you have them dead to rights (like with the Whisper
| hallucinations) the legal argument is hard to make. Besides,
| the defendants have unfathomable resources.
| fantasizr wrote:
| Netflix didn't steal from Blockbuster mailing you their pirated
| DVDs.
| DudeOpotomus wrote:
| You never should have made any money to begin with... That's
| the reality. The entire ad floated universe is a farce in time
| and space.
| amradio1989 wrote:
| It will just be different. No profit train lasts forever.
| Google is about to be made utterly irrelevant after 20+ years
| or so as a company. And they were the best.
|
| If you still have a connection to your readers (e.g. email) you
| can still reach them. If they've formed a community, even
| better. If not, its a good time to work on that.
|
| Google doesn't really have that. I have zero sense of community
| with Google. And that's why they'll die if something doesn't
| change.
| boringg wrote:
| Sorry to hear that -- thats sounds painful.
|
| It does speak to one of the core problems with AI is the one
| time productivity boost from using all historical data created
| by humans is no longer going to be as useful going forward
| since individual contributors will no longer build and provide
| that information unless the incentive models change.
| paffdragon wrote:
| I use a user agent switcher extension to tell Google I am
| browsing with Lynx to remove some of the annoyances.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Maybe the future is "LLMO" instead of SEO, where pages are
| optimized to be more easily readable and navigable by LLMs and
| agents. Ironically this would make them better IMO, less
| Javascript bloat, faster load times, no cookies or tracking...
| wmeredith wrote:
| This is not the future. It's already a thing. The
| content_marketing subreddit has been talking about this for
| months: https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/
|
| There isn't a clever new acronym for it yet, but I'm sure it's
| coming. Right now people are just calling it LLM SEO. I assume
| the discipline will someday be shortened to AIO or similar.
|
| Here's a relevant post from 22 days ago with some good
| methodology and results:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/comments/1lq04yd/...
|
| Here's one from 2 months ago with methodology of findings and
| action items for executing LLM SEO:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/comments/1kzafm9/...
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Nice! Thanks for the sources
| FiddlerClamp wrote:
| My Google feed (the one that shows up on some Android phones) is
| 90% articles that could be answered in the headline: "This one
| ingredient improves the taste of your potato salad." Of course
| you have to click through and read, read, read till you find it.
|
| It's why things like /r/savedyouaclick exist.
| twodave wrote:
| There is (IMO) still a lot of value in having a searchable
| Internet index. If AI summaries were the only option it would be
| very difficult to know whether something is influencing the AI.
|
| The problem is, of course, that we've already lost that battle
| with Google and other search providers. We know they're
| influencing the results. There is no open Internet anymore, but
| at least we can check the different search indices against each
| other. Checking different AI summaries against each other seems a
| pretty fruitless endeavor.
| droidHZ wrote:
| Tool websites and game websites should not have such a big impact
| Henchman21 wrote:
| More and more it seems the internet is headed to the outcome seen
| in "Altered Carbon": populated by AI almost exclusively, full of
| slop, invisible by the humans that created it originally. An
| abandoned outpost on a long line of things humans have abandoned.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| I've got years of professional SEO experience, and it's clear SEO
| is dead for information, especially once you use o3 type Ai
| models daily.
|
| To be frank, good riddance. Information sites were being
| manipulated on such levels it was ridiculous.
|
| Anyways, I expect e-commerce CTR to get SO MUCH better, so
| overall it'll just be a shift away from SEO over to PPC, or maybe
| a little bit of both.
| majkinetor wrote:
| This is most definitely because AI is first thing on the top. If
| it was the last one, the situation would be much different. Nice
| tactic to further hype AI.
| 6thbit wrote:
| It is time to bring back the search index.
|
| I believe there is a place for a new but totally different
| "pagerank". Perhaps one where "likely to be human made" scoring
| is the central metric.
|
| And figure out how to keep crawlers away.
| guluarte wrote:
| I think this will be the end of Google as a search engine. I
| don't see how website owners don't start charging bots for
| scraping their content.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| See: "Introducing pay per crawl: Enabling content owners to
| charge AI crawlers for access"
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| I love Cloudflare, and they're very wise to spin up this
| service. I wonder how well it will work.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| It's definitely the beginning of the end of Google Search IMO.
| Extremely small sample size, but me and many people I know have
| started running the majority of searches that end in a question
| mark (actual questions) in an LLM, and not Google's LLM. Google
| is only used as a sort of phone book - when I need to look up
| the URL of a site by inputting the name, or when I want to find
| a particular article I previously read. I would say my usage of
| Google has reduced by about 75% (seat-of-the-pants estimate).
| It's just better to do it this way, and I have to imagine that
| this sentiment will spread.
|
| Google will have to survive on other products, like YouTube. I
| see a massive contraction of their employee base in the not-so-
| distant future. Low-return products that are subsidized by the
| massive revenue of search will likely be cut as well if they
| can't be monetized more effectively (which will ruin them).
| grapesodaaaaa wrote:
| The enshitification of search engines is driving me more and more
| to LLMs for all their warts. I can usually force them to provide
| sources and do my search that way.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| For some (unknown to me) reason the web pages that used to
| sustain themselves on very small, quiet ads that were shown on
| sides of the page, now require full page, annoying, shouting,
| focus stealing, one-minimal-x-closing-after-few-seconds ADS.
| Therefore AI summary is a panaceum for this sickness.
|
| However I understand that pages that have articles written need
| money to pay for those articles. For some another (unknown to me)
| reason reading something by AI and summarizing it is not a
| copyright violation, but the work that has been done to prepare
| the valuable content (article) will not be rewarded, therefore
| extrapolating it to future I can see that the 'dead internet
| theory' is coming right up.
|
| People will stop writing because they don't get rewarded, so AIs
| will start speaking and discussing with other AIs and the entropy
| might lower (as in the amount of information present in the
| internet) leaving us to AI generated content only.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| A lot of startups like Profound are going after the "AEO"
| (basically SEO but of AI engine) space and absolutely blowing up.
| Marketers are freaking out. It's crazy to see the search
| juggernaut finally getting threatened.
| AshleyJanssen wrote:
| As one of the creators whose entire business relied on website
| clicks for long-form, high-quality content, which is now being
| amalgamated into AI slop, I can confirm that search clicks are
| WAY down. I write a free bi-weekly newsletter/blog, which has
| been the primary lead gen for my consulting business. No
| particular effort at SEO, but up until 6 months ago, I was highly
| ranked on many terms. Now, my newsletter signups and leads are
| almost at a standstill.
| mrinterweb wrote:
| Knowing that your content is unlikely to be seen by many humans,
| and is mainly just feeding an AI is pretty discouraging. AI is
| great at detecting patterns, if content creations is discouraged,
| and more AI content is generated, AI content is likely to become
| so homogeneous that the internet becomes more of an echo chamber
| (than it already is).
| coalbin wrote:
| Hard to take a publication seriously when its content is
| editorialized to this degree. Even the title is trying to impose
| itself onto the reader.
| tj-teej wrote:
| If Google just copied and pasted the content from my blog and put
| it on their own website which had ads that paid them, preventing
| customers from going to my blog (and thus seeing my ads which I
| get paid for), that would be obviously wrong.
|
| How is this any different?
| system2 wrote:
| Warms my heart. Clicking ad-infested bullshit articles and
| wasting many minutes trying to find the line where the answer
| lies was the worst internet experience of the last decade. I am
| glad crappy ad-blogging is dying.
| tomnetherland wrote:
| I don't like having both AI overview and search results in the
| same page. I am looking for either one and not both usually...
| julienb_sea wrote:
| I pay 20$/mo for chatGPT. I find searching through websites for
| information feels very outdated. I have some websites I
| specifically visit (e.g. aggregators like HN, journalism like
| WSJ), but if I want information I am going to have chatGPT
| present it to me in a manner tailored to my specific
| investigation. I do still google things when I want to find a
| particular thing, such as a product link, but for general
| information I am going to use an LLM.
| nkotov wrote:
| I feel like there should be two modes - search and answer. It's
| helpful to get an AI summarize answer like 90% of the time. But
| the other 10%, I am searching for something specific.
|
| I use Perplexity's Comet browser part-time now. I feel like what
| makes me annoyed about AI overview summaries is that sometimes I
| really just need to get the actual site itself and not a summary.
| For example, I needed to find EC2 pricing information and
| Perplexity's default search gave me a summary answer. I was
| looking for Vantage.sh's instance info site.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I find I read the AI summary then realise I prefer and trust
| ChatGPT's answer more so copy my query into that and go from
| there. Having below average "chat" suggestions in a non-chat
| interface with loads of SERP cruft feels pointless.
| fahhem wrote:
| In other news, water makes things wet
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