Google's AI Overviews now link to Wikipedia and LinkedIn more than Reddit, study finds

Nemeski@lemm.ee to Technology@lemmy.world – 276 points –
Google's AI Overviews now link to Wikipedia and LinkedIn more than Reddit, study finds
businessinsider.com
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Ah, LinkedIn, exactly where I want to get nuanced answers to weird questions from.

Somehow this is worse than Reddit. Sure Reddit isn't good, but at least Reddit was sane enough to understand concepts like 'working too much is deeply unhealthy both physically and mentally' and 'corporations should not hold absolute power'

at least Reddit was sane enough

That's the issue, a veneer of anonymity. These fucking wagies lost any sense of fear and saying the truth. Disgusting.

"wagies"?

Losers who have to work for money in order to survive

The fuck? Get off the internet for a bit and touch some grass

truth hurts tho huh

Only way you aren't a "wagie" is if you're a trust-fund baby lol

So are you a trust-fund whiny bitch baby?

My body of work speaks for itself, dear.

PS. nice handle but i know westoid tankies worship him in the wrong way... which is u?

There is a large collection of poorly written articles/blogs on LinkedIn, actually. They are just bad enough to be good enough for Google.

Strangely enough, LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. If Microsoft actually let Google use it as a data source, it was to sabotage Google's AI training.

Wonder how good Google is feeling about that 60 million dollar deal to scrape all of Reddits wisdom

Reddit wisdom:

"This"

"Bacon"

"OK, boomer"

pun thread 37 levels deep

How long before the AI answer to every question is simply "username checks out"? :-P

I wonder how Reddit investors are feeling when they find out even Google couldn't pull something valuable out of the Reddit data

Yet I still add "Reddit" to a search query when looking for product reviews or technical/home maintenance support, lol

I can do it really well manually...but Google's AI sucks at it.

They forgot to account for trolls...and how often trolls would get upvoted for the lulz

sarcasm is already hard to understand online, even harder for generative AI

I know sometimes I would take a peek at the person's comment history to see if they were well informed / a shill for the product. The AI can't do that

Generative AI doesn't understand anything, it just adds it to it's model. If more people are being sarcastic than genuine in the data set, that'll be more represented in the generated text.

AI could categorize users by competency (i.e. how often they discuss specific topics and agree with some corpus), but I doubt it does that. It's probably just taking posts at face value.

Doing that would require significantly more compute power, so there’s little economic incentive.

AI could categorize users by competency (i.e. how often they discuss specific topics and agree with some corpus), but I doubt it does that. It’s probably just taking posts at face value.

This is not being done though right? I haven't heard anything about content ranking with connections outside of Google seemingly using authors name is articles from large news sources.

We need to stop calling it AI. It's LLM and there is no intelligence.

I know it's not "intelligent", but I don't get gatekeeping the phrase "AI".

We were perfectly happy to use "AI" to refer to the logic of computer-controlled enemies in video games for probably decades.

I'd imagine 60 million dollars to google is like 60 cents to most of us.

Unfortunately it's pocket change for them.

Meaningless wager that despite not paying off still probably taught them an enormous amount about reddit and its users.

I would have taught Google everything they wanted to know about Reddit and Redditors for only $30 million.

It's never too late to take up shitposting on LinkedIn.

You mean... LinkedIn? If there's any site that perfects the shitpost, it's LinkedIn. Everyone is bullshitting their pants off there.

It's an honour and a privilege to tell you how awesome I am.

Dude, do you know how much ass I beat at my last gig? It was tremendous (parts hands away from myself).

"wait what if someone asks a question and Google AI quickly directs that person to the most relevant resources. Now wouldn't that be a great innovation."

-Some shareholder or CEO probably

LinkedIn is Facebook, if the people you follow could fire you for not being a total brown-nosing boot licker.

Well, the other option is an unemployable dipshit that needs somewhere to rant, thereby making themselves even less employable.

I started using the app regularly as I was looking for a job and I’m surprised by how many post and comment about politics, especially on public posts and treat it like it’s Facebook.

Its extremely helpful that people post that stuff. It shows that they lack the boundaries needed to work in a professional environment and you should avoid hiring them.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


The SEO marketing platform analyzed 100,000 keywords in June and found Reddit was no longer in the top 10 linked domains in Google's AI Overviews.

One incident included when it told a user to put glue on pizza to keep the cheese intact — a suggestion that seems to have been based on a Reddit comment more than a decade ago.

SE Ranking's study also shows that LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and YouTube are in third, fourth, and sixth positions of the top 10 linked domains, respectively.

The SEO tool provider carried out a similar study in February before Google rolled out the AI feature to the public, which found that the overviews included many snippets from forums Reddit and Quora.

Google showed significantly fewer AI Overviews, previously called SGE (Search Generative Experience), in the June study than it did in February.

Liz Reid, the Search VP, addressed the pizza glue fiasco at a recent all-hands meeting, according to audio obtained by CNBC, saying the company would not "hold back features" if there were "occasional problems."


The original article contains 333 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 48%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Well, here's the part where I hope people are able to make a Wikipedia alternative so we can turn Wikipedia into a cesspool to ensure the enshitification of gøøg|e. That, and if I ever get a Wikipedia article made about me (which will probably never happen), I'm signing up with an account and absolutely trashing it to say things that will cause whatever any AI looking at it to spout the most absurd shit.