Nobody clicks past Google’s AI Overviews
Nobody clicks past Google’s AI Overviews
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Nobody clicks past Google’s AI Overviews
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8 comments
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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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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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I usually scroll down just a little and find the source they
trained onstole from. That one deserves a click most times because it explains the source. -
Convenience is king, and never mind accuracy.
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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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Subjectively speaking:
- Pre-LLM summaries were for the most part actually short.
- 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.
- 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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An alternative explanation for a lot of this is that people are seqrching for something that interests them, seeing that every result is spam or shopping and exiting the page.
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8 comments