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Nobody clicks past Google’s AI Overviews (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [M] to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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[–] 22 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Most searchers don’t click on anything else if there’s an AI overview — only 8% click on any other search result. It’s 15% if there isn’t an AI summary.

I can't get over that. An oligopolistic company imposes a source on its users that is very likely either hallucinating or plagiarizing or both, and most people seem to eat it up (out of convenience or naiveté, I assume).

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago

    Counter-theory: The now completely irrelevant search results and the idiotic summaries, are a one-two punch combo, that plunges the user in despair, and makes them close the browser out of disgust.

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  • [–] [S] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Convenience is king, and never mind accuracy.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    If I'm not mistaken, even in pre-LLM days, Google had some kind of automated summaries which were sometimes wrong. Those bothered me less. The AI hallucinations appear to be on a whole new level of wrong (or is this just my personal belief - are there any statistics about this?).

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    Subjectively speaking:

    1. Pre-LLM summaries were for the most part actually short.
    2. They were more directly lifted from human written sources, I vaguely remember lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits by newspapers over google infoboxes and copyright infringement in pre-2019 days, but i couldn't find anything very conclusive with a quick search.
    3. They didn't have the sycophantic—hey look at me I'm a genius—overly-(and wrong)-detailed tone that the current batch has.
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    • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Btw, for the people who don't know, you can turn off the AI previews https://udm14.com/ (don't use this site to search, click on what is umd14 and edit your search urls to include that).

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