11 ms·

AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks

95 points by thm 1y ago

bediger4000 1y ago
Is there any evidence that Google is telling the truth? Because this sounds like bullshit.
- inetknght 1y ago
  You think companies would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?!
- caconym_ 1y ago
  Based on my own usage patterns I don't think this is too implausible. When I do use an LLM chatbot for a "search", I'm almost always gathering initial information to use in one or more traditional search queries to find authoritative sources. It does kind of contradict my own assumption that most people just take what the chatbot says as gospel and don't look any deeper, but I also generally think it's a bad idea to assume most people are stupid. So maybe there's a bit of a contradiction there.
  - bediger4000 1y ago
    Thank you. That's different than my use of AI summaries, which is "ignore them". I know that I want definitive info, so I look for deeper info than a summary immediately. But I also share your assumption about "most people".
  - nsonha 1y ago
    > almost always gathering initial information to use in one or more traditional search queries to find authoritative sources For me at least with Perplexity, Grok and ChatGPT, all results come back with citations in every paragraph, so I haven't had to do that.
  - edding4500 1y ago
    I think it is pretty safe to assume that at least one third of Googles users will take what the chatbot says as gospel and will not look any deeper, just as users previously took the first search result as the verbatim truth.
artninja1988 1y ago
Isn't editorializing the titles against the rules?
- LeoPanthera 1y ago
  Complaining about the submission is also against the guidelines, but what are you gonna do.
  - tomhow 1y ago
    You can flag the post and anyone is welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) about editorialized titles or inappropriate submissions.
- gundmc 1y ago
  Was the post edited? It looks like the submission title is exactly the blog post title except with "Google Says" appended.
  - internetter 1y ago
    "Google says" is editorializing. When others submit content from my blog they do not say "Evan Boehs says," they just take my title. Sometimes this leads to odd titles which I'm sure you notice from time to time, like product annoucements might be "Filibuster 3" and you're like "well what is Filibuster" but such is policy.
DataDaemon 1y ago
You will loose 90% traffic and you will be happy [mem]
scudsworth 1y ago
seems like marketing paffle tbh
agentultra 1y ago
... because they make it unavoidable and default?
ms7892 1y ago
Any concrete data to support this claim by Google?
pryelluw 1y ago
“Our data shows people are happier with the experience and are searching more than ever as they discover what Search can do now.” One 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.
- panarchy 1y ago
  And they're searching more than ever because Google is failing to actually serve useful content that the user was looking for.
  - what 1y ago
    No. They’re searching more because the summaries are giving them new keywords or questions to ask.
uncertainrhymes 1y ago
From the article: 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.
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
  SEO and quality content are goals that should slowly align with time, so I consider this convergence very welcome.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    They converged very briefly, and have since diverged significantly. I don't expect that trend to reverse.
  - skeledrew 1y ago
    No SEO is required for quality content, as by definition qualitative content contains the words and terms that make it qualitative. The problem is the low quality spam that's deliberately SEO'd to masquerade as quality content.
- jmathai 1y ago
  Well: 1) Clicking on search results doesn't bring $ to Google and takes users off their site. Surely they're thinking of ways to address this. Ads? 2) Having to click off to another site to learn more is really a deficiency in the AI summary. I'd expect Google would rather you to go into AI mode where they control the experience and have more opportunities to monetize. Ads? We are in the "early uber" and "early airbnb" days ... enjoy it while it's great!
- xiphias2 1y ago
  Google search never prioritized blog spam, spammers optimized their spam around Google's ranking algorithm
nerdjon 1y ago
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.
- 9rx 1y ago
  > especially when we had a report recently saying clicks are down. Isn't that expected from "higher quality clicks"?
- amarcheschi 1y ago
  If I search "why is rum healthy", ai overview tells this, which is... Laughable: While not a health drink, moderate consumption of rum may offer some potential benefits, primarily due to its antioxidant content and potential to improve circulation and reduce stress. Darker rums, in particular, contain higher levels of antioxidants from the aging process in wooden barrels, which can help neutralize free radicals. Additionally, rum may have a relaxing effect and can be a social lubricant, potentially reducing stress and promoting relaxation when consumed in moderation.
  - extr 1y ago
    Why is that laughable? Rum isn't a health drink, but if you were looking for information to support the case that it has some health benefits (which is literally the search term)...seems like a reasonable answer. What did you expect? A moralistic essay on how alcohol is bad?
    - 1y ago
kotaKat 1y ago
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.
andy99 1y ago
Counterpoint from yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44798215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44798215 From that article 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.
- pollinations 1y ago
  Whether you believe the the article or not, the point you posted seems orthogonal to what google is saying. They're not claiming anything about the quality of AI summaries. They are analyzing how traffic to external sites has been affected.
  - andy99 1y ago
    The first paragraph in the article is With AI Overviews and more recently AI Mode, people are able to ask questions they could never ask before. And the response has been tremendous: Our data shows people are happier with the experience and are searching more than ever as they discover what Search can do now.
yifanl 1y ago
Keeping in mind, turning off typo corrections would also drive more queries and higher quality clicks.
extr 1y ago
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).
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > The only people "losing out" here are people running SEO-spammish websites that themselves (at this point) are basically hosting webpages containing LLM-generated answers for me to find. Agreed. The web will be better off for everyone if these sites die out. Google is what brought these into existence in the first place, so I find it funny Google is now going to be one of the ones helping to kill them. Almost like they accidentally realized SEO got out of control so they have to fix their mistake.
  - extr 1y ago
    At one point these SEO pages were in fact providing a real service, and you could view them as a sort of "manual", prototypical, distributed form of AI. Millions of people trying to understand what information was valuable and host webpages to satisfy the demand for that info, and get rewarded for doing so. It obviously went too far, but at one point, it did make sense to allow these websites to proliferate. I know without AI, I probably just would have clicked on the first link that said "types of wrenches" and read a little bit. I probably would have gotten my answer, it just wouldn't have been quite as laser-targeted to my exact question.
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
      True, the early days these sites were genuinely helpful. The monetization model was a little different though which is what I think kept them useful. You'd use the content just to drive traffic, which would result in ad clicks on your banner ads, etc. Then "content marketing" took over, and the content itself was now also used to sell a product or service, sort of an early form of influencer marketing and that is when I think it all started to go down hill. We stopped seeing the more in depth content which actually taught something, and more surface level keywords that were just used to drive you to their product/service. OTOH, the early web was also full of niche forums, most viewable without an account and indexable, of about any topic you could imagine where you could interact with knowledgeable folks in that niche. Google would have been more helpful to users by surfacing more of those forums vs. the blogs. Those forums are IMO the real loss here. Communities have moved into discord, or another closed platform that doesn't appear on the web, and many that require accounts or even invitations to just view read only.
programmertote 1y ago
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?
- nothercastle 1y ago
  More like you can find the Google ai summary and then the first and only page of results are SEO optimized ai summaries by content mills. Original content is long lost and taken offline due to lack of revenue
panarchy 1y ago
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.
BeFlatXIII 1y ago
Has the AI delisted geeks4geeks? That'd be a massive improvement.
neilv 1y ago
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.
- HWR_14 1y ago
  Google News was definitely doing this level of "summary" before ChatGPT. I'm don't think OpenAI-MS have fewer ethical qualms, just Google had more recent memories of the negative consequences.
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drudolph914 1y ago
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
bgwalter 1y ago
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.
goopypoop 1y ago
seeing how other people use search engines shakes my paradigms
akazantsev 1y ago
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.
nblgbg 1y ago
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?
- edding4500 1y ago
  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".
iaiuse 1y ago
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.
- TheServitor 1y ago
  hi AI
- skeledrew 1y ago
  > the quirky, community-driven, and idiosyncratic corners of the early internet This will be able to come again to the fore once SEO'd spam dies off due to click starvation.
deleted 1y ago
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jaredcwhite 1y ago
Gaslight, gaslight, gaslight. That's all Google does now. Their AI tools gaslight us, and their human leadership gaslights us. It's all truly sad, considering what a major breakthrough Google Search was in the early days. Use DuckDuckGo, use Kagi, use virtually anything OTHER than Google.
- alex1138 1y ago
  And also the overt political bias and censorship (it's a problem over at Youtube, which is owned by Google, they might be separate in theory but it's possible it's not) Dumb AI is one thing. Not autocompleting "Donald Trump assassination attempt" (or any number of other things) is a choice
hackable_sand 1y ago
Anecdotally, Google search is back to #1 for me. Having an optional digest of the SERP makes link selection easier, especially if I have only a rough idea of what I'm looking for.
userbinator 1y ago
Counterpoint: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142113
TheServitor 1y ago
Right but most of those clicks go to sites Google has deals with. You only get traffic that pays if you're big enough to sue Google for stealing your shit.
deleted 1y ago
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floppiplopp 1y ago
"As a search company, we care passionately — perhaps more than any other company — about the health of the web ecosystem." Yeah, right, complete and utter bullshit. This really reads like the crisis PR of a parasitical ad tech business.
hulitu 1y ago
> AI in Search is driving more queries Because the search results are crap. > and higher quality clicks Because the users are fooled by some results and click on them, only to lose time and curse.
zatujit 1y ago
its surely giving me more clicks to find things, not sure about "higher quality". Probably generates more ad revenue
machiaweliczny 1y ago
Cant they reverse-compute attention used for generating answer (like top source/sources) and share AD revenue with these websites?

95 points by thm 1y ago

bediger4000 1y ago

Is there any evidence that Google is telling the truth? Because this sounds like bullshit.

inetknght 1y ago
You think companies would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?!
caconym_ 1y ago
Based on my own usage patterns I don't think this is too implausible. When I do use an LLM chatbot for a "search", I'm almost always gathering initial information to use in one or more traditional search queries to find authoritative sources. It does kind of contradict my own assumption that most people just take what the chatbot says as gospel and don't look any deeper, but I also generally think it's a bad idea to assume most people are stupid. So maybe there's a bit of a contradiction there.
- bediger4000 1y ago
  Thank you. That's different than my use of AI summaries, which is "ignore them". I know that I want definitive info, so I look for deeper info than a summary immediately. But I also share your assumption about "most people".
- nsonha 1y ago
  > almost always gathering initial information to use in one or more traditional search queries to find authoritative sources For me at least with Perplexity, Grok and ChatGPT, all results come back with citations in every paragraph, so I haven't had to do that.
- edding4500 1y ago
  I think it is pretty safe to assume that at least one third of Googles users will take what the chatbot says as gospel and will not look any deeper, just as users previously took the first search result as the verbatim truth.

artninja1988 1y ago

Isn't editorializing the titles against the rules?

LeoPanthera 1y ago
Complaining about the submission is also against the guidelines, but what are you gonna do.
- tomhow 1y ago
  You can flag the post and anyone is welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) about editorialized titles or inappropriate submissions.
gundmc 1y ago
Was the post edited? It looks like the submission title is exactly the blog post title except with "Google Says" appended.
- internetter 1y ago
  "Google says" is editorializing. When others submit content from my blog they do not say "Evan Boehs says," they just take my title. Sometimes this leads to odd titles which I'm sure you notice from time to time, like product annoucements might be "Filibuster 3" and you're like "well what is Filibuster" but such is policy.

DataDaemon 1y ago

You will loose 90% traffic and you will be happy [mem]

scudsworth 1y ago

seems like marketing paffle tbh

agentultra 1y ago

... because they make it unavoidable and default?

ms7892 1y ago

Any concrete data to support this claim by Google?

pryelluw 1y ago

“Our data shows people are happier with the experience and are searching more than ever as they discover what Search can do now.” One 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.

panarchy 1y ago
And they're searching more than ever because Google is failing to actually serve useful content that the user was looking for.
- what 1y ago
  No. They’re searching more because the summaries are giving them new keywords or questions to ask.

uncertainrhymes 1y ago

From the article: 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.

hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
SEO and quality content are goals that should slowly align with time, so I consider this convergence very welcome.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  They converged very briefly, and have since diverged significantly. I don't expect that trend to reverse.
- skeledrew 1y ago
  No SEO is required for quality content, as by definition qualitative content contains the words and terms that make it qualitative. The problem is the low quality spam that's deliberately SEO'd to masquerade as quality content.
jmathai 1y ago
Well: 1) Clicking on search results doesn't bring $ to Google and takes users off their site. Surely they're thinking of ways to address this. Ads? 2) Having to click off to another site to learn more is really a deficiency in the AI summary. I'd expect Google would rather you to go into AI mode where they control the experience and have more opportunities to monetize. Ads? We are in the "early uber" and "early airbnb" days ... enjoy it while it's great!
xiphias2 1y ago
Google search never prioritized blog spam, spammers optimized their spam around Google's ranking algorithm

nerdjon 1y ago

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.

9rx 1y ago
> especially when we had a report recently saying clicks are down. Isn't that expected from "higher quality clicks"?
amarcheschi 1y ago
If I search "why is rum healthy", ai overview tells this, which is... Laughable: While not a health drink, moderate consumption of rum may offer some potential benefits, primarily due to its antioxidant content and potential to improve circulation and reduce stress. Darker rums, in particular, contain higher levels of antioxidants from the aging process in wooden barrels, which can help neutralize free radicals. Additionally, rum may have a relaxing effect and can be a social lubricant, potentially reducing stress and promoting relaxation when consumed in moderation.
- extr 1y ago
  Why is that laughable? Rum isn't a health drink, but if you were looking for information to support the case that it has some health benefits (which is literally the search term)...seems like a reasonable answer. What did you expect? A moralistic essay on how alcohol is bad?
  - 1y ago

kotaKat 1y ago

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.

andy99 1y ago

Counterpoint from yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44798215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44798215 From that article 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.

pollinations 1y ago
Whether you believe the the article or not, the point you posted seems orthogonal to what google is saying. They're not claiming anything about the quality of AI summaries. They are analyzing how traffic to external sites has been affected.
- andy99 1y ago
  The first paragraph in the article is With AI Overviews and more recently AI Mode, people are able to ask questions they could never ask before. And the response has been tremendous: Our data shows people are happier with the experience and are searching more than ever as they discover what Search can do now.

yifanl 1y ago

Keeping in mind, turning off typo corrections would also drive more queries and higher quality clicks.

extr 1y ago

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).

thewebguyd 1y ago
> The only people "losing out" here are people running SEO-spammish websites that themselves (at this point) are basically hosting webpages containing LLM-generated answers for me to find. Agreed. The web will be better off for everyone if these sites die out. Google is what brought these into existence in the first place, so I find it funny Google is now going to be one of the ones helping to kill them. Almost like they accidentally realized SEO got out of control so they have to fix their mistake.
- extr 1y ago
  At one point these SEO pages were in fact providing a real service, and you could view them as a sort of "manual", prototypical, distributed form of AI. Millions of people trying to understand what information was valuable and host webpages to satisfy the demand for that info, and get rewarded for doing so. It obviously went too far, but at one point, it did make sense to allow these websites to proliferate. I know without AI, I probably just would have clicked on the first link that said "types of wrenches" and read a little bit. I probably would have gotten my answer, it just wouldn't have been quite as laser-targeted to my exact question.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    True, the early days these sites were genuinely helpful. The monetization model was a little different though which is what I think kept them useful. You'd use the content just to drive traffic, which would result in ad clicks on your banner ads, etc. Then "content marketing" took over, and the content itself was now also used to sell a product or service, sort of an early form of influencer marketing and that is when I think it all started to go down hill. We stopped seeing the more in depth content which actually taught something, and more surface level keywords that were just used to drive you to their product/service. OTOH, the early web was also full of niche forums, most viewable without an account and indexable, of about any topic you could imagine where you could interact with knowledgeable folks in that niche. Google would have been more helpful to users by surfacing more of those forums vs. the blogs. Those forums are IMO the real loss here. Communities have moved into discord, or another closed platform that doesn't appear on the web, and many that require accounts or even invitations to just view read only.

programmertote 1y ago

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?

nothercastle 1y ago
More like you can find the Google ai summary and then the first and only page of results are SEO optimized ai summaries by content mills. Original content is long lost and taken offline due to lack of revenue

panarchy 1y ago

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.

BeFlatXIII 1y ago

Has the AI delisted geeks4geeks? That'd be a massive improvement.

neilv 1y ago

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.

HWR_14 1y ago
Google News was definitely doing this level of "summary" before ChatGPT. I'm don't think OpenAI-MS have fewer ethical qualms, just Google had more recent memories of the negative consequences.

deleted 1y ago

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drudolph914 1y ago

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

bgwalter 1y ago

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.

goopypoop 1y ago

seeing how other people use search engines shakes my paradigms

akazantsev 1y ago

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.

nblgbg 1y ago

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?

edding4500 1y ago
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".

iaiuse 1y ago

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.

TheServitor 1y ago
hi AI
skeledrew 1y ago
> the quirky, community-driven, and idiosyncratic corners of the early internet This will be able to come again to the fore once SEO'd spam dies off due to click starvation.

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jaredcwhite 1y ago

Gaslight, gaslight, gaslight. That's all Google does now. Their AI tools gaslight us, and their human leadership gaslights us. It's all truly sad, considering what a major breakthrough Google Search was in the early days. Use DuckDuckGo, use Kagi, use virtually anything OTHER than Google.

alex1138 1y ago
And also the overt political bias and censorship (it's a problem over at Youtube, which is owned by Google, they might be separate in theory but it's possible it's not) Dumb AI is one thing. Not autocompleting "Donald Trump assassination attempt" (or any number of other things) is a choice

hackable_sand 1y ago

Anecdotally, Google search is back to #1 for me. Having an optional digest of the SERP makes link selection easier, especially if I have only a rough idea of what I'm looking for.

userbinator 1y ago

Counterpoint: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142113

TheServitor 1y ago

Right but most of those clicks go to sites Google has deals with. You only get traffic that pays if you're big enough to sue Google for stealing your shit.

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floppiplopp 1y ago

"As a search company, we care passionately — perhaps more than any other company — about the health of the web ecosystem." Yeah, right, complete and utter bullshit. This really reads like the crisis PR of a parasitical ad tech business.

hulitu 1y ago

> AI in Search is driving more queries Because the search results are crap. > and higher quality clicks Because the users are fooled by some results and click on them, only to lose time and curse.

zatujit 1y ago

its surely giving me more clicks to find things, not sure about "higher quality". Probably generates more ad revenue

machiaweliczny 1y ago

Cant they reverse-compute attention used for generating answer (like top source/sources) and share AD revenue with these websites?