Joke's on them, I've already been working on that for decades. *pats ublock* This baby can bankrupt so many websites and I always hoped it could collapse the ad model completely.

In all seriousness, it's becoming increasingly clear that we're eventually going to have to build a new, free internet out of the wreckage of this one once the corporations are done with it. Technically it's already there, nascent but ever so slowly growing and taking root, hiding in plain sight. Like the so-called dark web of tor, it already exists in parallel to the existing structures of the internet. Call it the deep web, the indie web, nostalgia web, unsearchable web, I've heard countless terms and most of them aren't terribly accurate, but the web doesn't need ads and google search to exist, it never did. It just needs humans, which despite the best efforts of big tech many of us still are, communicating directly with one another and documenting our billions of lifetimes of diverse collective experiences and knowledge.

We are the wealth of information in the internet. Corporations don't own it. We are it.

As intended.

Yes. The secret to telling what a search engine wants you to do is whatever is on top of the search results.

You and I might scour the results to find the exact best results, but most people simply look at the very first thing they're presented with and call it a day.

When I saw all of the search engines putting AI answers first, I knew they were intentionally trying to stop people from clicking through.

Why would they do that, when they can charge advertisers to bias the LLM? How much do you think Adidas would pay to have their products advantages mixed into any response about sports gear, undetectable?

CC: @mesamunefire@piefed.social

The original Google algorithm was powered by establishing 'reputation' by the number of links to that page. Would be cool to see an algorithm that started with that analysis, but also weighed pages by their Erdős distance to your Fediverse account(think 6° of Kevin Bacon) - basically much higher scores for links from you, higher score for links by your friends, moderate boost for friends of friends, etc.

12ft.io would like a word. Makes the internet usable again.

Yeah not using Google but duck.ai gave me some claim about a product I was looking up that had some categories. I asked how many of category x and it said 11 but the product only had 11 in total. Oh yeah oops I have actually no idea how many of category x there is out of 11. Cool, people who trust it would have just wasted money.

I've been liking kagi. Sucks you have to pay.

This study isn't about total clicks, or a drop in traffic to Google caused by people not liking the ai overview. It's about for each Google search that was executed, how often did someone click on a link. Without ai it was 15% and with ai it is 8%. So if anything its proving the customers like the ai overviews and believe they are getting enough from them to answer their query.

Sure there are probably a couple people who see the overview at the top and hate ai so much they leave Google without clicking anything, but those people will probably only do that once or twice before they stop using Google entirely or disable the feature, and thus wouldn't count much in the data about ai overview searches.

Try and guess what happens when websites stop getting traffic.

Thank you, I really don't understand all the complaints on this thread. It's like everyone became really pro advertising lol. If I want an answer to a question(say what internal temp do I need to cook chicken too), then I can easily get it without scrolling through a bunch of ads and articles about cooking chicken.

At google scraping the internet, putting it in a blender then force-feeding us that goop while selling our eyeballs and data.