In theory a summary is a good idea, in practice Google’s is catastrophically wrong often enough to produce news like this, and can trivially be shown to be wrong in other cases. It stands to reason that it’s likely also often wrong in ways that we don’t notice, which makes me not want to rely on it.
One of the big problems with pre-AI Overviews was the highly SEO optimized website that received an A+ in website ranking but barely a C- or D in website content. Lots of buzzwords, but no substance. There were lots of those kinds of sites, particularly after the approximate time period of 2010, give or take a few years. Countless times I’d find (maybe) what I was looking for on page 2 or 3 of search results. The newer AI Overviews, and the ability to engage with the AI, is invaluable to me. AI answers are definitely not right 100% of the time, but neither were folks and corporations writing their websites. Even highly peer-reviewed science is wrong some of the time.
What I think is happening here, besides any legal arguments of defamation, is that corporations are unhappy that their websites are not getting as much traffic as they used to get.
Not just corporations, but yeah, the irritating thing for anybody with a website is that people are purely getting their answers from these summary overviews and closing the window, and that doesn’t count as actually visiting the website these “answers” are coming from.
I’ll admit they’ve been somewhat helpful a few times, and I’ve even been impressed when they’ve dug up a particularly deep detail that like one buried site mentioned, but on the flipside is the whole “idiot parrot” problem, where it’ll confidently tell you things that are completely wrong.
Companies are also seeding Reddit with “opinions” about their products so that Google’s LLMs pick up on it and start spitting that bias out to the users… because of course they are.
But yeah, essentially Google is killing traffic to the web, while monetizing everybody else’s hard work. (Without permission, to the surprise of nobody.)
The summary feature can be helpful, but I hate seeing all these tech giants siloing power and attention to their stupid megasites. The web is hardly “browsable” anymore, unless you’re really digging into sub-networks where the humans are hiding…
In theory a summary is a good idea, in practice Google’s is catastrophically wrong often enough to produce news like this, and can trivially be shown to be wrong in other cases. It stands to reason that it’s likely also often wrong in ways that we don’t notice, which makes me not want to rely on it.
One of the big problems with pre-AI Overviews was the highly SEO optimized website that received an A+ in website ranking but barely a C- or D in website content. Lots of buzzwords, but no substance. There were lots of those kinds of sites, particularly after the approximate time period of 2010, give or take a few years. Countless times I’d find (maybe) what I was looking for on page 2 or 3 of search results. The newer AI Overviews, and the ability to engage with the AI, is invaluable to me. AI answers are definitely not right 100% of the time, but neither were folks and corporations writing their websites. Even highly peer-reviewed science is wrong some of the time.
What I think is happening here, besides any legal arguments of defamation, is that corporations are unhappy that their websites are not getting as much traffic as they used to get.
Not just corporations, but yeah, the irritating thing for anybody with a website is that people are purely getting their answers from these summary overviews and closing the window, and that doesn’t count as actually visiting the website these “answers” are coming from.
I’ll admit they’ve been somewhat helpful a few times, and I’ve even been impressed when they’ve dug up a particularly deep detail that like one buried site mentioned, but on the flipside is the whole “idiot parrot” problem, where it’ll confidently tell you things that are completely wrong.
Companies are also seeding Reddit with “opinions” about their products so that Google’s LLMs pick up on it and start spitting that bias out to the users… because of course they are.
But yeah, essentially Google is killing traffic to the web, while monetizing everybody else’s hard work. (Without permission, to the surprise of nobody.)
The summary feature can be helpful, but I hate seeing all these tech giants siloing power and attention to their stupid megasites. The web is hardly “browsable” anymore, unless you’re really digging into sub-networks where the humans are hiding…
the summary are largely hodgepodge of different websites that may come from blogs, or whatever opinions it finds. often it uses REDDIT as a source.