https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/01/just-give-me-the-fing...
That said, udm=14 has still been a huge plus for me in terms of search engine usability, so it's my default now.
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
window.addEventListener('load', function() { var things = this.document.getElementsByClassName('M8OgIe'); for (var thing of things) { thing.style.display = 'none'; } }, false);
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
People who are aware of that and care enough to change consumption habits are an inconsequential part of the market.
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.
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.
Disclaimer: google stock holder.
Maybe we can type the commands, but that is also quite slow compared with tapping/clicking/scrolling etc.
But they're not often confidently wrong like AI summaries are.
The AI overview sucks but it can't really be a lot worse than that :)
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.
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
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.
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.
And there's no AI garbage sitting in the top of the engine.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
- 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.
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.
"Absolutely nothing on any website that relies on ads for revenue is of any value" is a wild take.
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
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.
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.
The early web was eccentric and kind of … "shambly", but I would not be upset if we returned to that.
So now individuals putting up their sites face the risk of higher traffic fees.
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.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/ai-insights#crawl-to-refer-rati...
Ad web has never incentivized quality and never will.
We know they aren't oracles and come up with a lot of false information in response to factual questions.
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.
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".
People will go to museums to see how complicated pre-ai era was
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.
1. Start by drawing some circles.
2. Erase everything that isn't an owl, until your drawing resembles an owl.
If you don't want hallucinations, you can't use LLM, at the moment. People are using LLM, so having giving it data, to hallucinate less, is the only practical answer to the problem they have.
If you see another, that will work within the current system of search engines using AI, please propose it.
Don't take this as me defending anything. It's the reality of the current state of the tech, and the current state of search engines, which is the context of this thread. Pretending that search engines don't use LLM that hallucinate data doesn't help anyone.
As always, we work within the playground that google and bing give us, because that's the reality of the web.
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.
It's also obnoxious on mobile where it takes up the whole first result space.
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.
“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.
It’s the classic XYProblem.
Would you say "pah why are you shipping a search engine that only sometimes finds what I'm looking for?"?
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.
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.
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?
So don’t worry about writing that documentation- the helpful AI will still cite what you haven’t written.
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.
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.
In many, if not most cases, the producers of this information never asked for LLMs to ingest it.
I expect courts will go out of their way to not answer that question or just say no.
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.
I agree, I just don't see courts issuing restrictions on this gold rush any time soon.
Platforms want S230-like protections for everything, and I think they'll get them for their AI products not because it's right, but because we currently live in hell and that makes the most sense.
To answer your latter question: there's a lot of value in destroying people's ability to trust, especially formally trusted institutions. We aren't the ones that capture that value, though.
You need to wait until they offer it as a paid feature. And they (and other LLM providers) will offer it.
The venue organizers also ended up with a shit experience (and angry potential customer) while having nothing to do with the BS.
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.
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?
His problem.
Frankly, most people would be angry in that situation.
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.
A base and egocentric person.
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.
A third-party LLM hallucinating something like that though? Hell no. It should be possible to sue for libel.
- 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.
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.
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?
But, they hired the best and brightest of my generation. How’d they screw it up so bad?
- willing to work on ads - who were successful in their process
and everyone just fell for the marketing?
> "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.
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.
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.
No different from Google search results.
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”.
1. Here's the answer (but it's misinformation) 2. Here are some websites that look like they might have the answer
?
If Google shows bullshit about me on the top of its search, I'm helpless.
(for me read any company, person, etc)
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?)
It started well, agreed. But my recollection is the good Google lasted several years.
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.
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.
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.
(I mean, I don't generally make a big secret of it. But still.)
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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."
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 145°F (63°C)"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trust it if you want I guess. Be cautious though.
> 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...
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
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...
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.
The reality is, every time someone's search is satisfied by an organic result is lost revenue for Google.
Unfortunately there are no workable alternatives. DDG is somehow not better, though I use it to avoid trackers.
We need AI that’s trained exclusively on verified data and not random websites and internet comments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We should remember that's partly Google's fault as well. They decided SEO sites were OK.
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.
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).
I don’t think this is substantively different from cooking temperature, so I’m not trusting that either.
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.
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
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.
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.
First result: https://www.porkcdn.com/sites/porkbeinspired/library/2014/06...
Second result: https://pork.org/pork-cooking-temperature/
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
i havent heard it for burgers, but steaks for sure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?"
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.
It has little to do with overdesign or load times.
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
- ...?
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)?
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).
If something is overwhelmingly long, especially considering the subject matter, I just skip to the comments or throw it in an LLM to summarize.
This is not strictly logical but I have a feeling I'm not alone.
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.
Harvest said comments and create a 1h, 1d, 1 week, all time digest.
(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.
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.
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.
Or, youre confusing primordial desire to be aligned with perceived peers -- checking what others say, then effortlessly nodding along -- with forming your own judgment.
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.
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.
Because when you were still swinging from the trees a some generations back that was a survival trait.
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.
Hey, coming out feels good - I thought I was the only one.
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.
The everyone just stops using it, cause it's shit and not worth the money.
Doesn't scale, but maybe that's the only way to survive.
I will need $100M in seed funding.
Except the other commenters didn't read the article either. Now you're all basically just LLM using the title as a prompt.
I do this on hackernews, and especially on news-sites I check (cleantechnica, electrec, reneweconomy) and I actively shun sites _without_ comments.
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.
At big tech scale, this is clearly anti-compete and piracy IMHO.
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.
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?
things like "gemini said" and "gpt said" will enter common lingo like "google it" did in the 2010s
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
So now they're having to scramble to rethink their approach, and obviously aren't happy about that.
No, you won't. Because how will you know that my site exists?
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.
That is pretty much as it should be.
I only go to a website to perform an action as you said.
* 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.
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.
It’s on a very old Heroku hosting plan. I should probably update that one day.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 ).
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.
The aricle talks about AI overviews. As exemplified by the AI summary at the top of Google search results page. That thing is free.
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
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.
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.
If Google throws in a free AI summary in their search it only helps promoting Gemini in the long run.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Where did I say I think that?
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.
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.
Looking ahead, Search will become a de facto LLM chatbot, if it isn't already.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 180° 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.
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
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.
I’ll take that bet.
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.
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 180° 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.
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.
Those data centers don't pay for themselves, you know.
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"
- "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.
"Necessary" means "necessary for fulfilment of the contract". Your name and address are necessary data when you order off Amazon, your clickstream is not.
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.
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.
End of recital (47):
> The processing of personal data for direct marketing purposes may be regarded as carried out for a legitimate interest.
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
I'm also grumpy about lots of this, but most? Can you point at any data that support this?
I always use the inspect tool to just remove the popup. Interacting with it could be considered consent.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...
It was with the best of intentions but cookie banners have done more to hurt web browsing than anything else in the last decade
Even website makers who don't use predatory tracking end up including them as a CYA tactic
jesus wept.
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>
The dish in question is a ham sandwich.
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.
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.
Most of those are like:
$movie release date
<five paragraphs of garbage>
While we don't know the actual $movie release date yet, ...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.
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.
I might come back later though.
https://marginalia-search.com/site/www.fontstruct.com?view=t...
https://marginalia-search.com/search?query=special%3Apopover...
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.
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.
document.querySelectorAll("[type='checkbox']").forEach(c => c.checked = undefined)
Probably useless for mobile though, unless you can punch it in the omnibar with `javascript:` prefix
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
Anyway, is it really not even possible to set up things like NoScript and uBlock Origin on mobile?
I needs to have 15+ to really capture that modern web experience.
for now! and we should enjoy it while it lasts. Ad-driven AIs are coming, it is inevitable.
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
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.
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.
"Now people pay cable companies to watch TV shows. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing."
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
The first Cable channel was HBO. The second was TBS, it had ads from the beginning.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
Netflix did the same. In fact they even silently downgraded us from 4k HDR surround sound during a software update. And nothing can get us back the max quality anymore. I stopped paying all together.
So you know what doesn't buffer, has the absolute best quality (like 4x the bitrate etc), all the languages and what not? pirated content.
It's just stupid how much easier it is to obtain predictable quality without stutter by downloading rather than actually paying a streamer service.
Plus the ads and other UX dark patterns are through the roof.
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.
Ads are useful and have their place in keeping the web accessible to everyone, but Google's anti user policies really stretch that relationship.
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.
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).
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.
> Ads are useful and have their place in keeping the web accessible to everyone,
No. Advertising is a cancer on commerce.
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
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.
I think a similar thing is happening with their crappy games too. They keep coming back (the games still say "don't show me this" though).
Adsense is just for little hobby websites, no actual businesses use it. They all use header bidding, which is (mostly) not controlled by Google.
[...]
> 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...
I almost spit out my drink.
Give it time.
If you did, that doesnt mean you should. If you can, that doesnt mean you should.
The current subscription situation for LLM stuff actually makes me hopeful.
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.
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.
ad-free? For now. That's just a matter of time.
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.
This is naturally not addressed in the US "AI" Action Plan, same as copyright theft.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Over the last years I've moved over a lot of initial search to Wikipedia, which either answers directly or provides useful links.
Your default search engine. AI overviews begone.
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. ?
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.
1. The anchor icon.
2. Then one of the sites that appear on the right (on desktop).
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.
Hell will freeze over first
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.
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...
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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!
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.
[B]ecause they love the subject matter and not because it is an angle to “create content” or “gain followers” or show ads.
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.
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.
― 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recipes are not protected by copyright law. That's _why_ recipe bloggers have resorted to editorialising recipes, because the editorial content is copyrightable.
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.
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.
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.
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
Spying on you when you're fixing your carburetor and then making a how-to guide for other people.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, maybe a small amount of people ultimately contributing but if their input is truly novel and “true” then what’s the downside?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/...
It's why things like /r/savedyouaclick exist.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
How is this any different?
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.
skywhopper•1d ago
thewebguyd•1d ago
~57% of their revenue is from search advertising. How do they plan on replacing that?
flashgordon•1d ago
EarlKing•1d ago
Seriously, Futurama and Cyberpunk and 1984 were all supposed to be warnings... not how-to manuals.
xt00•1d ago
bugsMarathon88•1d ago
landl0rd•1d ago
mrheosuper•1d ago
gundmc•1d ago