Riiight... Next headline: "Pusher claims that his drugs not the cause sleepless nights and bugs under the skin"
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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Fox promises hens will be safe at his daycare.
AI is driving more searches
This is hilarious. People are searching more because they aren't getting results they need from AI, which drives ad revenue so Google's doing great!
Search engines are so significantly worse than they were a decade ago. The golden age of accurate searches is over, now it’s all SEO piss and AI slop.
To give credit to the people trying to make good search, the internet is so much worse than it was a decade or two ago.
Over that time the ad driven internet has encouraged low quality, high volume websites full of articles designed around common search terms.
It started before AI, but now you can drum up an article in seconds it has got much worse.
Yup I ran into this last week, looking for a wiring diagram of a relatively obscure part.
1st page of results on DDG and Google were both AI ‘blog’ style results of random diagrams unrelated to the part. All the same “loading…” text and I’m pretty sure all generated on the fly as I opened them.
It didn’t even give me the manufacturer’s site in the first 2 pages. And because I got upset and clicked through every result to vent to a co-worker, it decided to give me MORE slop results. I watched the useful info vanish from the results on reloads of the same search term.
Holy crap, I hadn't considered that we have the technology to create articles on the fly based on search terms.
That could be a serious weapon of war - you get your site to the top through SEO, then show each user personalised propoganda. You show googlebot the genuine page but adjust the page based on what you know about the user.
SEO garbage has been around for much more than a decade. In fact, before Google got really good at search ranking, sites easily gamed the search engines.
There are really two options, either
- Clicks on results have decreased because AI summaries are so good. Or
- AI summaries aren't giving the answers people want so they're clicking on results.
It's good for Google to show that clicks are happening because that's part of how they make their money, their clients need the clicks to survive. It's good for Google to show that AI summaries are being used because it's a product they've poured a lot of money into, that's being sold to shareholders as a superintelligence.
Bubble is going to burst.
Owner of product being sold says product is not bad.
That's not what the data said back in March. I highly doubt it's gotten better.
Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?
I run sites for a major NGO for addiction recovery. We often ask people how they found us. More than half now say AI. We don't have ads in our sites, but for people monetizing their sites this must be dramatic.
Also, Google must be bleeding ads revenue,
Google search boss says words and no numbers :333
To computer, word is numbers
Amount of Google searches I've made since implementation of AI results: zero
I've only used Google a couple of times, and by accident. The ebook reader I have seems hard coded to search Google when you ask it to search the web for a word in the book. I intensely dislike the AI slop. I do not want an AI summary of the Wikipedia article. Just take me to the wiki article you dunces!
I don’t believe this for a second.
I don't believe this for half a second.
I believed it for a couple seconds, but then I came to my senses.
So he's lying. Good to know.
Man who invented torture nexus claims torture nexus isn't used for torture.
Are we counting Gemini interactions as search?
Ding ding ding
If you make up a new metric then you can say there isn’t a problem.
Search clicks were dead already from 19 out of the top 20 results being AI generated SEO garbage pages and "articles" that contains information that is blatantly false and even contradictory. AI just gives you that same garbage right there without having to click anything. The real info is probably buried somewhere two search pages down.
Honestly, the guy is absolutely full of crap, but this is a solid point. The question is where the clicks AI summaries are absolutely killing are coming from.
I can't imagine this will survive forever, considering that Google has already gone through the loop of getting nuked from orbit by the EU by summarizing news content once. Even if AI wasn't involved in this at all, it's of very dubious legality in... well, wherever Google News got swiftly shut down.
People still use Google for search?
Do people still use the most popular search engine for search? I get you're trying to be factitious but it comes across as naff.
I just tried to use google a few hours ago and it got me the same bad results as other search engines, only that it gave me a bunch of advertisements and AI slop first.
Right... But you're not operating under the misapprehension that Google is somehow an uncommon choice for search. I agree it's gotten crap in a lot of cases, but equally I also know just about everyone uses it for search.
It might be the most popular but it is utter crap and has been for a while. It has reached peak enshittification. You used to be able to say you absolutely wanted a term in the search or you didn’t want other terms. It ignores all of that now. Google stopped being about able to search years ago and is more about showing you the most relevant ad. I’m either DuckDuckGo or I self-host my own searxng. I’ve also tried using a locally hosted perplexica (running on my own local LLM) which uses searxng underneath the hood I think.
Btw: I’m a yank so I had to look up naff so I learned some cool new slang! Now I’ll admit I was being slightly flippant but serious in the fact that Google really sucks as a search engine now.
*facetious
DuckDuckGo is way better.
Maybe I just am using it wrong, but DDG consistently gives me completely irrelevant results, while Google still gives me what I'm looking for about 70% of the time. Maybe I just need to learn the proper way to search with DDG but so far it's been next to useless in finding me relevant info.
DDG also seems to exclude some websites from search even if you specifically give terms that should give results for a site. Try searching for any model from Bad Dragon's website like "bad dragon nova" or another sex toy maker "mr hankeys beefcake" and the first result should be for the item on the maker's website. I can't ever get DDG to give results and safe search is already off. It has been like this for years.
Duckduckgo uses Bing which has deindexed a couple of sites.
I have found the emulation wiki to no longer show up through DDG. It's the first result on Google but DDG gives you just Fandom garbage.
As my country likes to put it "ownself check ownself"
Hahahahahahahahahahaha.....
But on a serious note I am starting to get questions asked how to avoid AI completely. Nuke Google seems to make people very angry!
Avoiding Google is honestly the best choice to avoid AI. Duckduckgo has a toggle where you can switch off AI summaries and filter out most AI generated images in image search. I switched to DDG years ago and never looked back.
indeed - run a searxng instance now and it is my default search engine. Includes google in the search but no AI and adds DDG and others. Works well enough
Reading bing, dogpile ddg and misc website aggregate requests as clicks
Company fails to realize people circumvent their shoehorned tool
Nice try Mr convinso
I believe it, chiefly because I read the slop answer and then have to check 5 more pages to figure out if it's spouting nonsense or not.
I click the links to the source on the relevant part.
How does data show better experiences?
Use searx