Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
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Some websites now are really shit. Won't load unless you allow JavaScript from 15 different domains, cookie consent, terrible privacy etc.
If I want to know things like what 10 kmpl in mpg, I often use DDG snippets.
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Joke's on them, I've already been working on that for decades. *pats ublock* This baby can bankrupt so many websites and I always hoped it could collapse the ad model completely.
In all seriousness, it's becoming increasingly clear that we're eventually going to have to build a new, free internet out of the wreckage of this one once the corporations are done with it. Technically it's already there, nascent but ever so slowly growing and taking root, hiding in plain sight. Like the so-called dark web of tor, it already exists in parallel to the existing structures of the internet. Call it the deep web, the indie web, nostalgia web, unsearchable web, I've heard countless terms and most of them aren't terribly accurate, but the web doesn't need ads and google search to exist, it never did. It just needs humans, which despite the best efforts of big tech many of us still are, communicating directly with one another and documenting our billions of lifetimes of diverse collective experiences and knowledge.
We are the wealth of information in the internet. Corporations don't own it. We are it.
I've been wondering how we can build a new underground net that is just the internet of 2002, but with more bandwidth. Somewhere normies can't access easily and with a bad ui so they don't want to.
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Some websites now are really shit. Won't load unless you allow JavaScript from 15 different domains, cookie consent, terrible privacy etc.
If I want to know things like what 10 kmpl in mpg, I often use DDG snippets.
12ft.io would like a word. Makes the internet usable again.
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right i stopped using "search" that muddles my answers with LLM so how would they get my clicks, they lost the customer
I've been liking kagi. Sucks you have to pay.
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Enshittify search to the point of it being nearly useless. Then introduce a little bot to find it for you. Predictable.
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Search results are shit now.
Our only hope is this opens the door to some competitor, who'll provide actually useful search results. I know that would be very expensive to start.
I want todays content in 2002 search engines.
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I've been wondering how we can build a new underground net that is just the internet of 2002, but with more bandwidth. Somewhere normies can't access easily and with a bad ui so they don't want to.
What kind of revisionist bullshit is this?
Like, it's almost always safe to write off anyone using "normies" but do you think 2002 was like in movies/TV?
"The net" wasn't some secret thing, kids had been using it in school for over a decade.
I can't tell if you weren't born then or already 50 years old...
But wherever you're getting your opinions on 2002 internet, it wasn't first hand
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I'm reading comments on arstechnica and seeing people mad at... what exactly?
The reason I go to web search is to answer my questions. Now it's given to me at once, without need to go anywhere.
Is it sometimes hallucinating? Of course it is, but have you really 100% trusted information on the Internet before anyways? I haven't.You say that ads driven websites are going to stop receiving money. But have you really liked ads driven websites? The same ones whose main incentive is to keep you on the website as long as possible or, in fact, wasting as much your time as possible to sell it to ad companies? The ones that were really worth visiting already changed their business model.
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12ft.io would like a word. Makes the internet usable again.
Is that word 'gone' ? That place was shut down a week ago.
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What kind of revisionist bullshit is this?
Like, it's almost always safe to write off anyone using "normies" but do you think 2002 was like in movies/TV?
"The net" wasn't some secret thing, kids had been using it in school for over a decade.
I can't tell if you weren't born then or already 50 years old...
But wherever you're getting your opinions on 2002 internet, it wasn't first hand
As a 50-something, I can see the case for putting the “golden age” of the internet between the birth of Wikipedia in 2001 and Facebook in 2006.
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As intended.
First they're going to collapse the ad model by eliminating most clicks.
Then they're going to put all of the information they've been scraping from the now-bankrupt websites behind paywalls.
As intended.
Yes. The secret to telling what a search engine wants you to do is whatever is on top of the search results.
You and I might scour the results to find the exact best results, but most people simply look at the very first thing they're presented with and call it a day.
When I saw all of the search engines putting AI answers first, I knew they were intentionally trying to stop people from clicking through.
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I've been liking kagi. Sucks you have to pay.
same actually, Kagi is pretty solid
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I've been liking kagi. Sucks you have to pay.
If you aren't paying, you're the product.
What sucks is that I can't unbundle their AI shit from my subscription
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I've been liking kagi. Sucks you have to pay.
I forsee a future where kagi subscriptions are bought by libraries and that's basically the only place to do internet searching for free.
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I'm reading comments on arstechnica and seeing people mad at... what exactly?
The reason I go to web search is to answer my questions. Now it's given to me at once, without need to go anywhere.
Is it sometimes hallucinating? Of course it is, but have you really 100% trusted information on the Internet before anyways? I haven't.You say that ads driven websites are going to stop receiving money. But have you really liked ads driven websites? The same ones whose main incentive is to keep you on the website as long as possible or, in fact, wasting as much your time as possible to sell it to ad companies? The ones that were really worth visiting already changed their business model.
Try and guess what happens when websites stop getting traffic.
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What kind of revisionist bullshit is this?
Like, it's almost always safe to write off anyone using "normies" but do you think 2002 was like in movies/TV?
"The net" wasn't some secret thing, kids had been using it in school for over a decade.
I can't tell if you weren't born then or already 50 years old...
But wherever you're getting your opinions on 2002 internet, it wasn't first hand
Punch the Monkey, Shake the Tree, Bonzi Buddy, flash animation, sites that only worked in IE, etc, etc.
You're right, anyone who thinks 2002 was some golden age of the internet clearly wasn't there.
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As intended.
Yes. The secret to telling what a search engine wants you to do is whatever is on top of the search results.
You and I might scour the results to find the exact best results, but most people simply look at the very first thing they're presented with and call it a day.
When I saw all of the search engines putting AI answers first, I knew they were intentionally trying to stop people from clicking through.
I'm not sure I fully understand the play here. Like, what's the grand vision? Fewer click-throughs == less ad impressions, no? They just want you to see the AdWords ads only? I'm not sure it's a fully-baked idea. I'm not convinced they can really create a moat around all information on the web
Would welcome any additional insights
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Looks like search will be dead soon.
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I'm not sure I fully understand the play here. Like, what's the grand vision? Fewer click-throughs == less ad impressions, no? They just want you to see the AdWords ads only? I'm not sure it's a fully-baked idea. I'm not convinced they can really create a moat around all information on the web
Would welcome any additional insights
Google probably wants to keep you on google.com, where they have ads. By doing the AI stuff, you never click through to someone else's page. They get 100% of the interactions and can sell all the clicks.
It's monopoly stuff. They should be stopped, with whatever box of liberty is needed.
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Any hope this takes SEO out with it, or are we just going to get to a point of PR companies flooding AIs with data to benefit their clients?