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.
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.