Yeah I really don't believe that this is really the case, especially when we had a report recently saying clicks are down.
It has become shockingly common to see people sharing a screenshot of an AI response as evidence to back up their argument. I was once busy with something so I asked my partner if he could look up something for me, he confidently shared a screenshot of an AI response from Google. It of course was completely wrong and I had to do my own searching anyways (annoyingly needing to scroll past and ignore the AI response that kept trying to tell me the same wrong information).
We have to remember that google is incentivized to keep people on Google more. Their ability to just summarize stuff instead of getting people off of google as quickly as possible is a gold mine for them, of course they are going to push it as hard as possible.
People are also more likely to click into web content that helps them learn more — such as an in-depth review, an original post, a unique perspective or a thoughtful first-person analysis
So... not the blog spam that was previously prioritized by Google Search? It's almost as if SEO had some downsides they are only just now discovering.
Mandatory AI summaries have come to Google, and they gleefully showcase hallucinations while confidently insisting on their truth. I feel about them the same way I felt about mandatory G+ logins when all I wanted to do was access my damn YouTube account: I hate them. Intensely.
But why listen to a third party when you can hear it from the horses mouth.
I’m sure it is, Google, but can you at least give me a warning before you pull out and finish on my back this time when you release the next even more invasive portion of your AI assault on unwitting, unconsenting users? Thanks.
I’m sick of having to feel violated every step I take on the Web these days.
I can believe this. A lot of my google search usage now is something like:
> "what is the type of wrench called for getting up into tight spaces"
> AI search gives me an overview of wrench types (I was looking for "basin wrench")
> new search "basin wrench amazon"
> new search "basin wrench lowes"
> maps.google.com "lowes"
Notably, the information I was looking for was general knowledge. The only people "losing out" here are people running SEO-spammish websites that themselves (at this point) are basically hosting LLM-generated answers for me to find. These websites don't really need to exist now. I'm happy to funnel 100% of my traffic to websites that are representing real companies offering real services/info (ship me a wrench, sell me a wrench, show me a video on how to use the wrench, etc).
> The only people "losing out" here are people running SEO-spammish websites that themselves (at this point) are basically hosting LLM-generated answers for me to find.
And anybody who creates original content and wishes -- not just to be paid for that content -- but for people to actually see that content and engage with it. IOW the very people who fed the LLM revolution.
Also have the same experience with regular Google search now (and other engines, too). I think part of the problem is the degradation of Google's product, but also the endless amount of absolute shit that humanity is vomiting onto the Internet now. The commercialisation of (almost) the entire Internet during the mid 2000s has wrecked it all.
Now AI searches that: search, pull various pages to examine real contents, continue searching etc, then summarise/answer is realistically the only way to filter through all of said bullshit.
AI searches help with the clickbait problem as well, since even "reputable" news outlets are engaging in that fuckery now.
It's either; we use AI to sift through the dead carcass of our old friend, or we enforce rules for a clean Internet - which I can definitely not see happening.
I don’t know if old school search engines are too ingrained in me but my search would look something like: reduced space “wrench” -site:www.amazon.com -site:ww.ebay.com
I can't say for others, but this is what I do since Google integrated AI to the search results. For 80% of the time, I'd just type a question and read the AI summary and stop going further. For the other 20% or so when I believe deep diving is important, I'd scroll through results in the first page and click on a few of them to find out the "facts" myself.
The latter is what I used to do before AI summary was a thing, so I would logically assume that it should reduce the clicks to individual sites?
Okay now compare it back to when Google search used to be good in like 2006 before it would serve you barely tangentially related crap and before being optimized to prioritize spam garbage and that could have been written by a monkey on a typewriter with a finite amount of time.
As a long-time AI+HCI person, I have mixed feelings about "AI", but just last night I was remarking to colleagues/friends that even I have mostly stopped clicking through from Google searches. The "AI" summary now usually plagiarizes a good enough answer.
I'm sure Google knows this, and also knows that that many of these "AI" answers wouldn't pass any prior standard of copyright fair use.
I suspect Google were kinda "forced" into it by the sudden popularity of OpenAI-Microsoft (who have fewer ethical qualms) and the desire to keep feeding their gazillion-dollar machine rather than have it wither and become a has-been.
"If we don't do it, everyone else will anyway, and we'll be less evil with that power than those guys." Usually that's just a convenient selfish rationalization, but this time it might actually be true.
Still, Google is currently ripping off and screwing over the Web, in a way that they still knew was wrong as recently as a few years ago, pre-ChatGPT.
I imagine it depends on the kind of search people are making.
if I just need a basic fact or specific detail from an article, and being wrong has no real world consequences, I'll probably just gamble it and take the AI's word for it most of the time. Otherwise I'm going to double check with an article/credible source
if anything, I think aimode from google has made it easier to find direct sources for what I need. A lot of the times, I am using AI for "tip of the tongue" type searches. I'll list a lot of information related to what I am trying to find, and the aimode does a great job of hunting it down for me
ultimately though, I do think some old aspects of google search are dying - some good, some bad.
Pros: don't fee the need to sift through blog spam, I don't need to scroll past paid search results, I can avoid the BS part of an article where someone goes through their entire life story before the actual content (I'm talking things like cooking website)
Cons: Google is definitely going to add ads to this tool at some point, some indie creators on the internet will have a harder time getting their name out.
my key takeaway from all this is that people will only stop at your site if they think your site will have something to offer that the AI can't offer. and this isn't new. people have been steeling blog content and turning into videos for ever. people will steel paid tutorials and release the content for free on a personal site. people will basically take content from site-X and repost in a more consumable format on site-Y. and this kind of theft is so obvious and no one liked seeing the same thing reposted a 1000 times. I think this long term is a win
Liz Reid staked her career on "AI" working in search. Lo and behold, a blog post by her confirms that "AI" is working.
I've seen many outrageously wrong summaries that were contradicted sometimes by articles on the first page of regular search. Are people happy with the slop? Maybe, but I could see people getting bored by it very quickly. There already is a healthy comment backlash against ChatGPT-generated voice over narratives in YouTube videos.
True. Googled "how to auto switch dark theme bootstrap". AI says in "versions 5.3 and newer, you can leverage the data-bs-theme attribute and JavaScript." and shows `data-bs-theme="auto"`.
This attribute exists, but this value comes from a bootstrap plugin that you have to install separately. It generated quite a few clicks and high-quality searches from me.
I always wonder about this: What happens to their ads business? Also, what's the incentive for websites to provide data to Google if they’re not getting the incoming clicks? The generative approach seems to disincentivize both, right?
That, I think, is a very interesting question!
I guess Google found itself in a situation where they had to jump on the AI bandwagon and add AI features to their search. Summaries existed before for certain topics, now they pop up always.
In the long run they probably need to integrate ads into these responses or they find another way to monetize the combination of "knowing about user intent" and "present matching answers".
You’re raising a very important concern — the slow disappearance of human-curated knowledge niches. While AI can summarize the obvious and the popular, it struggles to preserve the quirky, community-driven, and idiosyncratic corners of the early internet. Forums and specialty sites were full of experiments, debates, and lived experiences — not just canonical facts.
If we don’t actively archive, incentivize, or reimagine those spaces, AI-generated content may become a sterile echo chamber of what’s “most likely,” not what’s most interesting. The risk isn’t that knowledge disappears — it’s that flavor, context, and dissent do.
45 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 64.5 ms ] threadOne can also interpret this as search was such shit that the summaries are allowing users to skip that horrible user experience.
They don’t care about discoverability. It’s all ads as quickly as possible. Coming soon is ad links in summaries. That’s what they’re getting to here.
It has become shockingly common to see people sharing a screenshot of an AI response as evidence to back up their argument. I was once busy with something so I asked my partner if he could look up something for me, he confidently shared a screenshot of an AI response from Google. It of course was completely wrong and I had to do my own searching anyways (annoyingly needing to scroll past and ignore the AI response that kept trying to tell me the same wrong information).
We have to remember that google is incentivized to keep people on Google more. Their ability to just summarize stuff instead of getting people off of google as quickly as possible is a gold mine for them, of course they are going to push it as hard as possible.
People are also more likely to click into web content that helps them learn more — such as an in-depth review, an original post, a unique perspective or a thoughtful first-person analysis
So... not the blog spam that was previously prioritized by Google Search? It's almost as if SEO had some downsides they are only just now discovering.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44798215
From that article
But why listen to a third party when you can hear it from the horses mouth.I’m sick of having to feel violated every step I take on the Web these days.
> "what is the type of wrench called for getting up into tight spaces"
> AI search gives me an overview of wrench types (I was looking for "basin wrench")
> new search "basin wrench amazon"
> new search "basin wrench lowes"
> maps.google.com "lowes"
Notably, the information I was looking for was general knowledge. The only people "losing out" here are people running SEO-spammish websites that themselves (at this point) are basically hosting LLM-generated answers for me to find. These websites don't really need to exist now. I'm happy to funnel 100% of my traffic to websites that are representing real companies offering real services/info (ship me a wrench, sell me a wrench, show me a video on how to use the wrench, etc).
And anybody who creates original content and wishes -- not just to be paid for that content -- but for people to actually see that content and engage with it. IOW the very people who fed the LLM revolution.
Now AI searches that: search, pull various pages to examine real contents, continue searching etc, then summarise/answer is realistically the only way to filter through all of said bullshit.
AI searches help with the clickbait problem as well, since even "reputable" news outlets are engaging in that fuckery now.
It's either; we use AI to sift through the dead carcass of our old friend, or we enforce rules for a clean Internet - which I can definitely not see happening.
Wikipedia as search engine, no Javascript, no "AI"
Query string "wrench tight spaces"
Basin_wrench is the #1 result
usage: sh 1.sh wrench tight spaces > 1.htm;firefox ./1.htm
Basin_wrench is #3 result
Delete preposition: "of"
"type wrench for tight spaces"
Basin_wrench is #2 result
Delete preposition: "for"
"type of wrench tight spaces"
Basin_wrench is #2 result
Delete prepositions: "of", "for"
"type wrench tight spaces"
Basin_wrench is #2 result
Delete unnecessary noun "type" and preposition "of"
"wrench for tight spaces"
Basin_wrench is #1 result
Delete preposition "for"
"wrench tight spaces"
Basin_wrench is #1 result
"tight spaces wrench"
Basin_wrench is #1 result
"tight wrench spaces"
Basin_wrench is #1 result
Much less typing, no unnecessary nouns and prepositions
I like it, others might not
I also tried a number of less popular search engines with a non-AI search from the command line
Query string "type of wrench for tight spaces"
For several of them the #1 result was for star-plumbing.com
https://star-plumbing.com/what-kind-of-wrench-is-used-in-tig...
The latter is what I used to do before AI summary was a thing, so I would logically assume that it should reduce the clicks to individual sites?
I'm sure Google knows this, and also knows that that many of these "AI" answers wouldn't pass any prior standard of copyright fair use.
I suspect Google were kinda "forced" into it by the sudden popularity of OpenAI-Microsoft (who have fewer ethical qualms) and the desire to keep feeding their gazillion-dollar machine rather than have it wither and become a has-been.
"If we don't do it, everyone else will anyway, and we'll be less evil with that power than those guys." Usually that's just a convenient selfish rationalization, but this time it might actually be true.
Still, Google is currently ripping off and screwing over the Web, in a way that they still knew was wrong as recently as a few years ago, pre-ChatGPT.
if I just need a basic fact or specific detail from an article, and being wrong has no real world consequences, I'll probably just gamble it and take the AI's word for it most of the time. Otherwise I'm going to double check with an article/credible source
if anything, I think aimode from google has made it easier to find direct sources for what I need. A lot of the times, I am using AI for "tip of the tongue" type searches. I'll list a lot of information related to what I am trying to find, and the aimode does a great job of hunting it down for me
ultimately though, I do think some old aspects of google search are dying - some good, some bad.
Pros: don't fee the need to sift through blog spam, I don't need to scroll past paid search results, I can avoid the BS part of an article where someone goes through their entire life story before the actual content (I'm talking things like cooking website)
Cons: Google is definitely going to add ads to this tool at some point, some indie creators on the internet will have a harder time getting their name out.
my key takeaway from all this is that people will only stop at your site if they think your site will have something to offer that the AI can't offer. and this isn't new. people have been steeling blog content and turning into videos for ever. people will steel paid tutorials and release the content for free on a personal site. people will basically take content from site-X and repost in a more consumable format on site-Y. and this kind of theft is so obvious and no one liked seeing the same thing reposted a 1000 times. I think this long term is a win
I've seen many outrageously wrong summaries that were contradicted sometimes by articles on the first page of regular search. Are people happy with the slop? Maybe, but I could see people getting bored by it very quickly. There already is a healthy comment backlash against ChatGPT-generated voice over narratives in YouTube videos.
This attribute exists, but this value comes from a bootstrap plugin that you have to install separately. It generated quite a few clicks and high-quality searches from me.
If we don’t actively archive, incentivize, or reimagine those spaces, AI-generated content may become a sterile echo chamber of what’s “most likely,” not what’s most interesting. The risk isn’t that knowledge disappears — it’s that flavor, context, and dissent do.
This will be able to come again to the fore once SEO'd spam dies off due to click starvation.