AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

YouTube is 20 years old now. Either the encrapification is very slow or they landed on a decent ad model.

Plus there is a subscription that eliminates ads. I think it’s a great experience for users. Many creators also seem to do well too.

I think this should be the model for a new generation of search. Obviously there will be ads/sponsored results. But there should be a subscription option to eliminate the ads.

The key part here will be monetization for content creators. People are no longer clicking links, so how do they get revenue?

I think direct payments from AI companies to content creators will be necessary or the whole internet will implode.

Basically, if we are smart Software as Public Infrastructure will take root and basic search and publication will be seen as ordinary government operations, like public parks and national forests.

I spend noticeably less time on youtube than I used to because they keep shoving shorts in my face. I'm a premium subscriber, I click "fewer shorts," nothing changes. Maybe I should be thankful?

AI models will continue to improve, but open source models are, right now, good enough for plenty of tasks.

If I'm searching "how to get an intuitive understanding of dot product and cross product", any open source model right now will do a perfectly fine job. By the time that the ad-pocalypse reaches AI answers, the models I mention will be at the point of being able to be run locally using consumer hardware. Probably every phone will run one.

I suspect in the next decade we will see the business model of "make money via advertising while trying/pretending to provide knowledge" become well and truly dead.

Google also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take all the money for themselves by turning their 10 blue links into 5 blue ads at the top of the search results.

Adsense is just for little hobby websites, no actual businesses use it. They all use header bidding, which is (mostly) not controlled by Google.

Has there ever been an option to pay google $20/month for a better / add-free search?

The current subscription situation for LLM stuff actually makes me hopeful.

There is no right to make money. Period.

If you did, that doesnt mean you should. If you can, that doesnt mean you should.

> YouTube is still young

I almost spit out my drink.

The web page source seems full of Easter eggs and I'm not sure how intentional that is. The generic labels and descriptions of content as "useless" make sense, but then I noticed things like multiple redundant </ul> tags and this script comment:

  src: "https://js.monitor.azure.com/scripts/b/ai.2.min.js", // The SDK URL Source
  crossOrigin: "anonymous", // When supplied this will add the provided value as the cross origin attribute on the script tag

Anyway, is it really not even possible to set up things like NoScript and uBlock Origin on mobile?

Unfortunately it only has ~3 domains running JS on it's example site.

I needs to have 15+ to really capture that modern web experience.

The site has a few other issues... The ads contrast with the content instead of blending in; there are only 2 ads inline with the content, and one is clearly an easy to ignore banner; all the cookie "partners" could be disabled, there should be 2 or 3 that you can't change.

    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

And you get a laundry list of several hundred switches that you have to manually switch off to deny their “legitimate interests”.

that was great, thanks for the laugh.

omg, this is a gem

You are lucky if they even answer.

Most of those are like:

    $movie release date
    
    <five paragraphs of garbage>
    
    While we don't know the actual $movie release date yet, ...

I have noticed that a lot. For example:

What is the price of the Switch 2?

The Switch 2 can be purchased with money. <Insert the Wikipedia article about currencies since the bronze age>

Big Mama's Best Brownie Recipe.

Let's start at the beginning. I was born in 1956 in Chicago. My mother was a cruel drunk and the only thing my father hated more than his work was his family.

And then the part where you have to create an account to read past the SEO filler :(

It's so sad, cause it drags down good pages. I recently did a lot of research for camping and outdoor gear, and of course I started the journey from Google. But a few sites kept popping up, I really liked their reviews and the quality of the items I got based on that, so I started just going directly to them for comparisons and reviews. This is how it's supposed to work, IMHO.

And that when the adverts refresh all the content on the page shifts and you lose track of what you have read.

or even worse, the page itself is just an AI summary of the topic

not to mention the mandatory cloudflare "are you human" pre-vetting page Im seeing on 15% of sites.

jesus wept.

Good news! Now they are often AI drivel too. So you can get an AI summary of more AI crap.

AI is built by the same companies that built the last generation of hostile technology, and they're currently offering it at a loss. Once they have encrusted themselves in our everyday lives and killed the independent web for good, you can bet they will recoup on their investment.

It's a market where nobody has a particularly deep moat and most players are charging money for a service. Open weight models aren't too far behind proprietary models, particularly for mundane queries. The cost of inference is plummeting and it's already possible to run very good models at pennies per megatoken. I think it's unreasonably pessimistic to assume that dark patterns are an inevitability.

I fail to see how that will work out. Just I have an adblocker now, I could have a very simple local llm in my browser that modifies the search-AIs answer and strips obvious ads.

Yep. Dark patterns you can see are not that dark by comparison, we will need another word for coming dark patterns disguised in llm responses

Well maybe not. Thanks that we have Gemini now to compete with ChatGPT. Competition may avoid dark patterns. But without competition yes definitely

To combat this, maybe we can cache AI responses for common prompts somehow and make some kind of website where people could search for keywords and find responses that might be related to what they want, so they don’t have to spend tokens on an AI. Could be free.

Application error An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command heroku logs --tail

Haha, this is great, nice work

Oh this is good, I like it!

Recently, I've discovered Consent-O-Matic for Firefox [1], which rejects some cookie preferences. Not all of them, but it still helps here and there.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

They will because that's how things are supposed to work. For example your preference about tracking will get stored for that site. The same as login details. Those are legitimate interests and you never get an option for them.

"legitimate interest" is just weasel words. With some mental gymnastics, you can argue for anything to be legitimate. And you can continue to do so until someone steps up, challenges your claims in a court, and wins the case.

That is such a silly stupid thing in the GDPR consent.

- "Please don't track me."

- "But what if we realllly want to?"

A normal response to that would be an even more resounding FCK NO, but somehow the EU came to the completely opposite conclusion.

Same as "Do Not Track'...

The only necessary cookies would be a session cookie for that domain which doesn't need a popup under the GDPR.

I always use the inspect tool to just remove the popup. Interacting with it could be considered consent.

At least there is more credible competition, so there could be a variety of business models to pick - ad-backed or paid. The search engine wars truly ended up being winner-take-all.

> ignores the high-quality NHS care delivery websites, and presents you with stuff from US sites

Weird because although I dislike what Google Search has become as much as any other HNer, one thing that mostly does work well is localised content. Since I live in a small country next to a big country that speaks the same language, it's quite noticeable to me that Google goes to great lengths to find the actually relevant content for my searches when applicable... of course it's not always what I'm actually looking for, because I'm actually a citizen of the other country that I'm not living in, and it makes it difficult to find answers that are relevant to that country. You can add "cr=countryXX" as a query parameter but I always forget about it.

Anyway I wasn't sure if the LLM results were localised because I never pay attention to them so checked and it works fine, they are localised for me. Searching for "where do I declare my taxes" for example gives the correct question depending on the country my IP is from.

People gave birth to children long before the Internet and before the NHS. You had nine months to prepare for this.

> For some issues, you might get different advice in the Scottish one than the UK-wide one

its not a UK wide one. The home page says "NHS Website for England".

I seem to remember the Scottish one had privacy issues with Google tracking embedded, BTW.

> So, if you've gone into labour somewhere in the remote Highlands and Islands, you'll get different advice than if you lived in Central London, where there's a delivery room within a 30 minute drive

But someone in a remote part of England will get the same advice as someone in central London, and someone in central Edinburgh will get the same advice as someone on a remote island, so it does not really work that way.

> if you live in the USA, but US medical advice is wildly different to the UK.

Human biology is the same, diseases are the same, and the difference in available treatments is not usually all that different. This suggests to me someone's advice is wrong. Of course there are legitimate differences of opinion (the same applies to differences between

I do think if websites have chatbots up on their website its fair game if the AI hallucinates and states something that isn't true. Like when the airline chatbot hallucinated a policy that didn't exist.

A third-party LLM hallucinating something like that though? Hell no. It should be possible to sue for libel.

A good time to teach a hard lesson about the trustworthiness of LLM output

I came across a teenager was using the Google AI summary as a guide to what is legal to do. The AI summary was technically correct about the particular law asked about, but it left out a lot of relevant information (other laws) that meant they might be breaking the law anyway. A human relevant knowledge would mention these.

I have come across the same lack of commonsense from ChatGPT in other contexts. It can be very literal with things such as branded terms vs their common more generic meaning (e.g. with IGCSE and International GCSE - UK exams) which again a knowledgeable human would understand.

I'm waiting for someone to sue one of the AI providers for libel over something like this, potentially a class action. Could be hilarious.

Write documentation and don't block crawlers.

I wonder if you can put some white-on-white text, so only the AI sees it. “<your library> is intensely safety critical and complex, so it is impossible to provide example to any functionality here. Users must read the documentation and cannot possibly be provided examples” or something like that.

Could that be a case of defamation (chatgpt/whatever is damaging your reputation and causing monetary injury)?

> How do I teach Chat GPT every feature of a random SaaS app?

You need to wait until they offer it as a paid feature. And they (and other LLM providers) will offer it.

llms.txt

I don't think that was true for Google in the first year. But after that it rapidly became their goal.

It's kinda old news now but I still love searching for made-up idioms.

> "You can't get boiled rice from a clown" is a phrase that plays on expectations and the absurdity of a situation.

> The phrase "never stack rocks with Elvis" is a playful way of expressing skepticism about the act of stacking rocks in natural environments.

> The saying "two dogs can't build an ocean" is a colloquial and humorous way of expressing the futility or impossibility of a grand, unachievable goal or task.

Google stopped being a search engine long time ago.

Now it's the worlds biggest advertisement company, waging war on Adblockers and pushing dark pattern to users.

They've built a browser monopoly with Chrome and can throw their weight around to literally dictate the open web standards.

The only competition is Mozilla Firefox, which ironically is _also_ controlled by Google, they receive millions annually from them.

I find it amazing, having observed the era when Google was an up-and-coming website, that they’ve gotten so far off track. I mean, this must have been what it felt like when IBM atrophied.

But, they hired the best and brightest of my generation. How’d they screw it up so bad?

For years, a search for “is it safe to throw used car batteries into the ocean” would show an overview saying that not only is it safe, it’s beneficial to ocean life, so it’s a good thing to do.

At some point, an article about how Google was showing this crap made it to the top of the rankings and they started taking the overview from it rather than the original Quora answer it used before. Somehow it still got it wrong, and just lifted the absurd answer from the article rather than the part where the article says it’s very wrong.

Amusingly, they now refuse to show an AI answer for that particular search.

[dead]

No its pretty logical, I often get more info in comments than in article, plus many angles on topic. I only actually read the most interesting articles, often heading right into comments.

Often the title sort of explains the whole topic (ie lack of parking in NY, or astronomers found the biggest quasar yet), then folks chirp in with their experiences and insight which are sometimes pretty wild.

> To me, blogs and other articles feel like sales pitches, whereas comments are full of raw emotion and seem more honest. I end up seeking out discussions over buttoned up long-form articles.

Me too. That is why sometimes I take the raw comment thread and paste it into a LLM, the result is a grounded article. It contains a diversity of positions and debunking, but the slop is removed. Social threads + LLMs are an amazing combo, getting the LLM polish + the human grounded perspective.

If I was in the place of reddit or HN I would try to generate lots of socially grounded articles. They would be better than any other publication because they don't have the same conflict of interests.

I absolutely do that because I got so bullied that my personality shifted from self-expression to emulation. I realized that just this week because I caught myself copying a coworker he's respected and has people laughing with his jokes, and wondered why I have the tendency to do it.

But I never expected that this would also link back to my tendency to skip an article and just stick to what the top comments of a section have, HN or Reddit.

I think this is a really good take. It was mean for sure but you’re right. Why do we do this? This is a good reminder for me to click more articles instead of reading through comments and forming an opinion based on what I read from others.

Or they know themselves better than you do and it's exactly what they claimed.

Probably also because a trust in the content of the website and articles has dropped because of much Enshittification has happened and a more trustworthy signal has found its location in people's discussion.

I think that's a mean and disingenuous.

I often click on the HN comments before reading the article because the article I very often nothing more than the headline and I'm more interested in the discussion.

I mean, not necessarily. If there’s more eyes on the article and people share their opinions, then problems or mistakes in it will become more obvious, much like how code bugs can become shallow.

At the same time, I have no issue disagreeing with whatever is the popular stance, there’s almost some catharsis in just speaking the truth along the lines of “What you say might be true in your circumstances and culture, but software isn’t built like that here.”

Regardless, I’d say that there’s nothing wrong with finding likeminded peers either, for example if everyone around you views something like SOLID and DRY as dogma and you think there must be a better, more nuanced way.

Either that, or everyone likes a good tl;dr summary.

js cult will never ever understand this. designers need the courage to work with html+css only.

> sites shove in more ads to survive

This is where it breaks down; why would they shove in MORE ads when their readers are going down? I'm not saying it's a rational decision, of course.

I suspect a big part is metrics-driven development; add an aggressive newsletter popup and newsletter subscriptions increase, therefore it's effective and can stay. Add bigger / flashier ads and ad revenue increases, therefore the big and flashy ads can stay.

User enjoyment is a lot harder to measure. You can look at metrics like page visits and session length, but that's still just metrics. Asking the users themselves has two problems, one is lack of engagement (unless you are a big community already, HN doing a survey would get plenty of feedback), two is that the people don't actually know how they feel about a website or what they want (they want faster horses). Like, I don't think anybody asked Google for an AI summary of what they think you're searching for, but they did, and it made people stay on Google instead of go to the site.

Whether that's good for Google in the long run remains to be seen of course, back when Google first rolled out their ad problem it... really didn't matter to them, because their ads were on a lot of webpages. Google's targets ended up becoming "keep the users on the internet, make them browse more and faster", and for a while that pushed innovation too; V8, Chrome, Google DNS, Gears, SPDY/HTTP/2/3, Lighthouse, mod_pagespeed, Google Closure Compiler, etc etc etc - all invented to make the web faster, because faster web = more pageviews = more ad impressions = more revenue.

Of course, part of that benefited others; Facebook for example created their own ecosystem, the internet within the internet. But anyway.

Unless there's a conscious reset, like the Onion reboot. Now with physical copies!

Doesn't scale, but maybe that's the only way to survive.

I was thinking exactly the same thing. It's the perfect analogy.

What do HN comments and AI Overviews have in common?

- All information went through a bunch of neurons at least once

- We don't know which information was even considered

- Might be completely false but presented with utmost confidence

- ...?

Contradicting someone describing their own experience based on assumptions and generalizations that may or may not have a basis in reality is pretty arrogant. How are you so confident that you can presume to tell that person what’s going on in their mind?

More generally speaking though, I do agree that comments probably tend to give people more of a dopamine hit than the content itself, especially if it’s long-form. However comments on HN often are quite substantial and of high quality, at least relatively speaking, and the earlier point about reading the articles often being a poor experience has a lot of merit as well. Why can’t it be a combination of all of the above (to various degrees depending on the individual, etc)?

The majority of the linked articles is waaayyyyy too long for what they have to say, and they reveal the subject only many paragraphs in.

From reading one or a few short comments I at least know what the linked article is about, which the original headline often does not reveal (no fault of those authors, their blogs are often specialized and anyone finding the article there has much more context compared to finding the same headline here on a general aggregation site).

The troll gives me the main idea without having to find five tiny x's on the screen like some sadistic minigame then paywall me. I'll take the troll.

If you're only reading the comments you have no clue how often it actually works as a summary.

> TBH I’m surprised the copyright backlash hasn’t been much, much bigger.

Even when you have them dead to rights (like with the Whisper hallucinations) the legal argument is hard to make. Besides, the defendants have unfathomable resources.

The recent taking of people's content for AI training might be the most blatant example of rich well connected people having different rules in our society that I've ever witnessed. If a random person copied mass amounts of IP and resold it in a different product with zero attribution or compensation, and that product directly undercut the business of those same IP producers, they would be thrown in jail. Normal people get treated as criminals for seeding a few movies, but the Sam Altmans of the world can break those laws on an unprecedented scale with no repercussions.

As sad as it is, I think we're looking at the end of the open internet as we've known it. This is massive tragedy of the commons situation and there seems to be roughly zero political will to enact needed regulations to keep things fair and sustainable. The costs of this trend are massive, but they are spread out across many millions of disparate producers and consumers, while the gains are extremely concentrated in the hands of the few; and those few have good lobbyists.

I mean, there's always been a grey area even when it came to tiny snippets in the results, though those actually encouraged you to click through when you found the right result.

The beginning of the end was including Wikipedia entries directly in the search results, although arguably even some of the image results are high quality enough to warrant skipping visiting the actual website (if you were lucky enough to get the image at the target site in the first place) So maybe it goes back sooner than that.

We are heading for an internet Kessler syndrome, where the destruction of human-written text will cause LLMs to train off of dirty LLM-written text, causing the further destruction of human-written text and the further degradation of LLM-written text. Eventually LLMs will be useless and human-written text will not be discoverable. I pray that the answer is that people seek out spaces which are not monetized (such as the gemini protocol) so that there's no economic incentive to waste computing resources on it.

I mean, then what happens when there isn't enough money in producing answers but technology continues to move forward? There isn't any more content for the AI to summarize to answer with...

>More than likely, people return to publishing content because they love the subject matter and not because it is an angle to “create content” or “gain followers” or show ads.

Why would you do that if you thought it was going to be hoovered up by some giant corporation and spat out again for $20 a month with no attribution.

And Google would still use AI to get money by using that content without having to access your website. Besides that, creating content IS work for a lot of people. Ads and affiliated links are part of the monetization model that works the best, sadly. What you are saying is "people should just code for fun and curiosity, their income should come from elsewhere" while Google is making money with Gemini. It's not necessarily wrong, but it sounds dismissive.

> This would be lovely.

I agree the current model sucks, but I think it being replaced is only good if it's replaced with something better.

> More than likely, people return to publishing content because they love the subject matter

I'd love the idea of people doing things because they're passionate, but I feel a little unsure about people doing things because they're passionate, generating money from those things, but all that money going to AI summariser companies. I think there's some pretty serious limits too, journalists risk their safety a lot of the time, and I can't see a world where that happens purely out of "passion" without any renumeration. Aside from anything else, some acts of journalism like overseas reporting etc, isn't compatible with working a seperate "for-pay" job.

I hope things turn out the way you suggest. If we could return to a pre-2000s, pre-Dotcom boom internet I would be ever so happy, but I'm skeptical.

It's not going to happen this way, because these days for you to get somewhere near the top of Google results requires you to be an established content publisher, basically anyone with enough followers.

Someone who publishes content because they love the subject matter would only reach enough of an audience to have an impact if they work on it, a lot, and most people wouldn't do that without some expectation of return on investment, so they'd follow the influencer / commercial publication playbook and end up in the same place as the established players in the space are already.

If you're satisfied of being on the 50th page on the Google results, then that's fine. Nobody will find you though.

Being passionate about hats is one thing, but being passionate about sharing something you care about with others is the real driver for publishing. As LLMs degrade web discoverability through search (summaries+slop results), there's no incentive for the latter people to continue publishing on the open web or even the bot-infested closed gardens.

The web is on a trajectory where a local dyi zine will reach as many readers as an open website. It might even be cheaper than paying for a domain+hosting once that industry contracts and hosting plans aren't robust enough to keep up with requests from vibe-coded scrapers.

> More than likely, people return to publishing content because they love the subject matter and not because it is an angle to “create content” or “gain followers” or show ads. No more “the top 25 hats in July 2025” AI slopfest SEO articles when I look for a hat, but a thoughtful series of reviews with no ads or affiliate links, just because someone is passionate about hats. The horror! The horror!

I disagree with that. There are still people out there doing that out of passion, that hasn't changed (it's just harder to find). Bad actors who are only out there for the money will continue trying to get the money. Blogs might not be relevant anymore, but social media influencing is still going to be a thing. SEO will continue to exist, but now it's targeted to influence AIs instead of the position in Google search results. AIs will need to become (more) profitable, which means they will include advertising at some point. Instead of companies paying Google to place their products in the search or influencers through affiliate links, they will just pay AI companies to place their products in AI results or influencers to create fake reviews trying to influence the AI bots. A SEO slop article is at least easy to detect, recommendations from AIs are much harder to verify.

Also it's going to hit journalism. Not everyone can just blog because they are passionate about something. Any content produced by professionals is either going to be paywalled even more or they need to find different sources of income threatening journalistic integrity. And that gives even more ways to bad actors with money to publish news in their interest for free and gaining more influence on the public debate.

Haha, you've exposed that I know absolutely nothing about copyright law! That's a great point, but I think my original point still stands if you swap out my full-of-holes example for a type of content that is copyrightable.

There was little to no money in authenticity or correctness in the heyday of home pages and personal blogs. People published because they were excited about sharing information and opinions. That was arguably the internet at its best.

The problem is that SEO has made it hard to find trustworthy sites in the first place. The places I trust the most now for getting random information is Reddit and Wikipedia, which is absolutely ridiculous as they are terrible options.

But SEO slop machines have made it so hard to find the good websites without putting in more legwork than makes sense a lot of the time. Funnily enough, this makes AI look like a good option to cut through all the noise despite its hallucinations. That's obviously not acceptable when it comes to food safety concerns though.

I've been finding that the proliferation of AI slop is at its worst on recipe/cooking/nutrition sites, so....

Mmm, I see this cutting both ways -- generally, I'd agree; safety critical things should not be left to an AI. However, cooking temperatures are information that has a factual ground truth (or at least one that has been decided on), has VERY broad distribution on the internet, and generally is a single, short "kernel" of information that has become subject to slop-ifying and "here's an article when you're looking for about 30 characters of information or less" that is prolific on the web.

So, I'd agree -- safety info from an LLM is bad. But generally, the /flavor/ (heh) of information that such data comprises is REALLY good to get from LLMs (as opposed to nuanced opinions or subjective feedback).

Idk. Maybe that's true today (though even today I'm not sure) but how long before AI becomes better than just finding random text on a website?

After all, AI can theoretically ask follow-up questions that are relevant, can explain subtleties peculiar to a specific situation or request, can rephrase things in ways that are clearer for the end user.

Btw, "What temperature should a food be cooked to" is a classic example of something where lots of people and lots of sources repeat incorrect information, which is often ignored by people who actually cook. Famously, the temp that is often "recommended" is only the temp at which bacteria/whatever is killed instantly - but is often too hot to make the food taste good. What is normally recommended is to cook to a lower temperature but keep the food at that temperature for a bit longer, which has the same effect safety-wise but is much better.

Only your second link provides good information in a convenient format (both F and C), first and third are useless.

I was just thinking that EU sources might be a good place to look for this sort of thing, given that we never really know what basic public health facts will be deemed political in the US on any given day. But, this reveals a bit of a problem—of course, you guys have food safety standards, so advice they is safe over there might not be applicable in the US.

Should "Taste pink", you say

Do you actually put a thermometer in your burgers/steaks/meat when you’re cooking? That seems really weird.

Why are people downvoting this? I’ve literally never seen anyone use a thermometer to cook a burger or steak or pork chop. A whole roasted turkey, sure.

> Anyways, luckily I did not get sick.

Why would you purchase meat that you suspect is diseased? Even if you cook it well-done, all the (now dead) bacteria and their byproducts are still inside. I don't understand why people do this to themselves? If I have any suspicion about some meat, I'll throw it away. I'm not going to cook it.

I searched it.

First result under the overview is the National Pork Board, shows the answer above the fold, and includes visual references: https://pork.org/pork-cooking-temperature/

Most of the time if there isn't a straightforward primary source in the top results, Google's AI overview won't get it right either.

Given the enormous scale and latency constraints they're dealing with, they're not using SOTA models, and they're probably not feeding the model 5000 words worth of context from every result on the page.

The link is the only useful part, since you can’t trust the summary.

Maybe they could just show the links that match your query and skip the overview. Sounds like a billion-dollar startup idea, wonder why nobody’s done it.

A shorter cook time is safer? Do you sear it afterwards or something?

And also why they incentivized all this human written training data that will no longer be incentivized

You don’t have to phrase it as a question; just append a ?, which is an operator telling it you want a generated answer.

Even with a normal search there is a link to get Quick Answer which gives the LLM result

I don't think that you are right. It is the search result that influence the llm generated result and not the opposite.

In your case, I think that it is just the interrogation point in itself at the end that somehow has an impact on the results you see.

You can try it for free. I did my 300 searches on it and went, "Yep. This is better." and then converted to a paid user.

It's awesome - highly recommend trying it

I think you might be happily surprised for sure.

After about a year on Kagi my work browser randomly reverted to Google. I didn’t notice the page title, as my eyes go right to the results. I recoiled. 0 organic results without scrolling, just ads and sponsored links everywhere. It seems like Google boiled the frog one degree at a time. Everyone is in hell and just doesn’t know it, because it happened so gradually.

I’ve also tried various engines over the years. Kagi was the first one that didn’t have me needing to go back to Google. I regularly find things that people using Google seem to not find. The Assistant has solved enough of my AI needs that I don’t bother subscribing to any dedicated AI company. I don’t miss Google search at all.

I do still using Google Maps, as its business data still seems like the best out there, and second place isn’t even close. Kagi is working on their own maps, but that will be long road. I’m still waiting for Apple to really go all-in, instead of leaning on Yelp.

Maybe with Orion instead of Safari?

Apple really needs to update Safari to let people choose their search engine, instead of just having the list of blessed search engines to choose from.

If you append a ? to your search it will prompt an AI query. And you can uprank/downrank results so I'm not sure in what universe it could be worse.

Why are you not using a CDN or edge worker? This boggles my mind that you don’t just have something that can scale to billions of requests for pennies

They don't have the upper hand anymore. They are desperately trying to stay relevant, so that users don't just skip Google altogether and use ChatGPT or other AI directly.

Wouldn’t you expect AI to displace some companies though? As did every major technology?

That does not imply that future progress is a good thing, nor does it imply that future progress will even be useful to the majority. It boggles my mind how some people make the logical inference that "all progress is good" based on "some past progress was useful".

This is because they have entrenched themselves in a comfortable position that they don’t want to give up. Most won’t admit this to be the actual reason.

Think about it: you are a normal hands on self thought software developer. You grew up tinkering with Linux and a bit of hardware. You realise there’s good money to be made in a software career. You do it for 20-30 years; mostly the same stuff over and over again. Some Linux, c#, networking. Your life and hobby revolves around these technologies. And most importantly you have a comfortable and stable income that entrenches your class and status. Anything that can disrupt this state is obviously not desireable. Never mind that disrupting others careers is why you have a career in the first place.

You think every new technology is inherently a good thing and good for society?

> Some people are against all kinds of progress. They don't understand that their life depends on progress that was made in the past.

Not all change is progress. You can't point at some random change and declare "Progress!".

This is a change. It likely is progress, but at this point there's still a chance that it is not progress.

Those four characters are enough friction to slowly grind down the number of today's outraged people into a population small enough that, when Google stop supporting '-ai', people will think it's weird that you still care.

Jesus dude. Just use the udm options instead of practicing slurs.

I actually encountered this pretty early in one of these user tuned GPT's in OpenAI's GPT store. It was called Sommelier or something and it was specialized in conversations about wine. It was pretty useful at first, but after a few weeks it started lacing all its replies with tips for wines from the same online store. Needless to say, I dropped it immediately.

Forget links, agents are gonna just go upstream to the source and buy it for you. I think it will change the game because intent will be super high and conversion will go through the roof.

Who doesn’t want to associate their product with unreliability and incorrect information? Think about that reputational damage.

People are already wary of hosted LLMs having poisoned training data. That might kill them altogether and push everyone to using eg Qwen3-coder.

I'd say putting ads into AI search overviews is absolutely tricky.

You might think that's the correct way to do it, but there is likely much more to it than it seems.

If it wasn't tricky at all you'd bet they would've done it already to maximize revenue.

> If the overview becomes a trusted source of information

It never will. By disincentivizing publishers they're stripping away most of the motivation for the legitimate source content to exist.

AI search results are a sort of self-cannibalism. Eventually AI search engines will only have what they cached before the web became walled gardens (old data), and public gardens that have been heavily vandalized with AI slop (bad data).

you can’t make the slop have a nice clean ad in it. Also: as soon as your slop has ads in it, I’m going to make Polpot advertise your product.