this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
321 points (97.9% liked)

Technology

59569 readers
3825 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Google's notoriously wonky AI Overviews feature — you know, the one that repeatedly makes up facts and literally tells users to eat rocks — is about to get a whole lot more annoying.

On Thursday, the tech giant announced that its AI-generated search summaries will now begin to show ads above, below, and within them, as a way of demonstrating that the technology is capable of actually making money.

It will also serve to assuage concerns that AI chatbots could eat into search ad revenues, which are Google's biggest cash cow.

Now, if you search how to get a grass stain out of jeans, as seen in an example in Google's blog post, you'll get an AI summary which contains a carousel of relevant website links, plus a heavy helping of "Sponsored" ads for stain removers. Revolutionary stuff.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] subspaceinterferents@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (8 children)

Done with Google. Now paying $5 a month to use Kagi.com. Worth it.

[–] BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one 38 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

In case anyone reading this is curious, Kagi is not capable of storing the impossibly vast and expensive data storage and speeds required to query large indexes of the internet, and so leverages Google and Bing indexes in its search, which is exactly what SearXNG and DuckDuckGo both do for free.

What you pay for is honestly a fancy UI and the ability to quality control the search results for them, again already done for free by other search engines.

[–] degen@midwest.social 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Wait, for real? I really thought kagi had its own thing going on, and that was why people would pay for it. Not like a fully bespoke index, but I assumed it was more than that. I guess the "quality control" is what I had heard about.

[–] BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one 8 points 1 month ago

There's no way on Satan's green earth that a small startup company started in 2018 has a search engine index as large and fast as the one started 30 years ago and has been indexing the entire internet since then (Google). Even Microsoft can't compete without dumping billions of dollars into Bing by forcing people to use it as default on their operating systems, renting/purchasing the now ancient Yahoo indexing databases, leeching software engineer talent from competitors with promises of huge paychecks, and greasing hands in China.

load more comments (5 replies)