Why is this being framed as a problem? People are obviously happier with the new feature, duh

Of course they need to make the AI overviews suck less, but saying it’s unfair to sites is crazy talk because your site now just generates less value than an AI response if that’s what stopped you from going

If you have content better than Gemini I will still go to your site

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alastairr 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Where do you suppose AI overviews get their source from? The problem here is Google is now inserting itself between a business' user and the business' content. I'm not saying that was a good or invulnerable business to begin with but that's what's happened. If you kill the business of making reliable content, what are they left to serve?

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zahlman 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If you have content better than Gemini I will still go to your site

No, you won't. Because how will you know that my site exists?

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arrowleaf 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For the past ten years I've run a side project that estimates the word count of books and how long it takes to read them. Maintaining and improving this requires tens of hours a month, and a few hundred dollars in RDS, ECS, etc. costs. Two years ago I was at least breaking even on affiliate income, so the cost put into it was purely my own time and effort which I enjoy. These days my total traffic numbers are about 10x, but human traffic is down 50-70%.

I'm basically paying to host content for AI crawlers to scrape and I don't know how much longer I can do this. I'm adding Goodreads-esque features currently, but if it doesn't get the sign ups I'll be forced to archive the code and take the site down.

	▲	ripped_britches 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Why are you not using a CDN or edge worker? This boggles my mind that you don’t just have something that can scale to billions of requests for pennies

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wouldbecouldbe 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because some companies are going bankrupt because of the data google is taking. Google always had a weird relationship with sites, they sort of needed each other but google always had the upper hand, now it’s even worse

	▲	SoftTalker 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		They don't have the upper hand anymore. They are desperately trying to stay relevant, so that users don't just skip Google altogether and use ChatGPT or other AI directly.
	▲	ripped_britches 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Wouldn’t you expect AI to displace some companies though? As did every major technology?

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entuno 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A lot of companies seem to have based their business model on the assumption that Google and Microsoft would continue to send them traffic for free indefinitely.

So now they're having to scramble to rethink their approach, and obviously aren't happy about that.

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toenail 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Some people are against all kinds of progress. They don't understand that their life depends on progress that was made in the past.

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vouaobrasil 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

That does not imply that future progress is a good thing, nor does it imply that future progress will even be useful to the majority. It boggles my mind how some people make the logical inference that "all progress is good" based on "some past progress was useful".

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toenail 2 days ago | parent [-]

Do you think that having fast, distraction-free access to relevant information is not useful?

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vouaobrasil 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it's too much information to handle, and that information can interfere with the enjoymnet of what we already have. It might be useful in an economic sense, but its usefulness to life is questionable.

Personally, I think it's not such a good thing after all.

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djeastm 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It is useful, but it assumes the information is trustworthy. At least with websites you could discern some credibility based on the organization publishing the information. With AI summaries, it's just "Google's latest model seems to think this is the answer, good luck!"

	▲	toenail 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You can always follow the source links.. or ask for them..

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is because they have entrenched themselves in a comfortable position that they don’t want to give up. Most won’t admit this to be the actual reason.

Think about it: you are a normal hands on self thought software developer. You grew up tinkering with Linux and a bit of hardware. You realise there’s good money to be made in a software career. You do it for 20-30 years; mostly the same stuff over and over again. Some Linux, c#, networking. Your life and hobby revolves around these technologies. And most importantly you have a comfortable and stable income that entrenches your class and status. Anything that can disrupt this state is obviously not desireable. Never mind that disrupting others careers is why you have a career in the first place.

	▲	righthand 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		C#?

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contagiousflow 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You think every new technology is inherently a good thing and good for society?

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lelanthran 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Some people are against all kinds of progress. They don't understand that their life depends on progress that was made in the past.

Not all change is progress. You can't point at some random change and declare "Progress!".

This is a change. It likely is progress, but at this point there's still a chance that it is not progress.