Live data from Hacker News

Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

chuckwnelson.com

91–100 of 504 posts

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#91
post #7

> Enter 2024 with AI. The top 20% of search results are a wall of text from AI... I'll be the contrarian here and say I actually like Google's AI Overview? For the first time in a long time, I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer. Google is finally useful again. That said, once Google screws with this and starts making sear…

[deleted]

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#92
post #8

SEO ruined the web, guided by Google's ranking algorithm. Things will get even worse as scammy companies start flooding the web with LLM generated content pushing their products to bias LLMs to increase the probability of outputing their name for keywords related to their business.

Libraries and librarians are starting to seem very relevant again. As are journalistic institutions.

A library is similar to search engine - it can't have (display) all possible items (results), so there is also a bias for selection.

It's not easy for a truly creative, new and unique content to get into your local library.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#93

Just sharing an anecdote: I was searching for a quote that I'd heard in an audiobook the other day. I just had the general paraphrase, and didn't feel like scanning through the chapters to go find it. This was a somewhat obscure source. Google had just straight garbage for me. The quote was political in nature, and I felt like the results were fighting general tone-policing filters and were tuned for recent events. o…

I couldn’t remember the phrase “oral history” and Google was terrible at figuring out what I wanted to search for, but ChatGpt got it for me after a few back and forths.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you monetizing your website? Is it with ads?

Who says they need to monetize it? Is that the only value we ascribe to traffic, now?

Either I’m monetizing my site and I care about traffic or why else would I care if people visit my site as long as information gets out there?

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libraries and librarians are starting to seem very relevant again. As are journalistic institutions.

Journalistic institutions have been requiring so much fact-checking, cross referencing and research lately it's a full time job to get informed. Whenever I read or hear anything from the medias now, I'm now always asking myself "what are their political inclinations? who is owning them ? what do they want me to believe? how much of a blind spot do they got ? how lazy or ignorant they are in that context ? etc." They…

What I was taught is this is just the labor of being critical, or just "having a critical mind about things." I can maybe see how it is exhausting, but I am not sure I understand the implication that it could be better or different. If it is particularly exhausting to you, it is perfectly fine to suspend your judgement about certain things!

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#96
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "search" and "getting an answer to a question" are two different things, aren't they? I realize that the trend has been going this way for a long time - probably since Ask Jeeves started blurring the line - and this is indeed how a lot of people try / want to use search engines, but still... I wish that Google (and competitors) would have separate pages for something like "Ask Google" vs. traditional search (wher…

I get very wrong and dangerous answers from AI frequently. I just searched "what's the ld50 of caffeine" and it says: > 367.7 mg/kg bw This is the ld50 of rats from this paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27461039/ This is higher than the ld50 estimated for humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeinism > The LD50 of caffeine in humans is dependent on individual sensitivity, but is estimated to be 150–200 milli…

Hmm my search returns “between 150 to 200 mg per kilogram”, which is maybe more correct?

Also, in what context is this dangerous? To reach dangerous levels one would have to drink well over 100 cups of coffee in a sitting, something remarkably hard to do.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#97
post #7

> Enter 2024 with AI. The top 20% of search results are a wall of text from AI... I'll be the contrarian here and say I actually like Google's AI Overview? For the first time in a long time, I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer. Google is finally useful again. That said, once Google screws with this and starts making sear…

They are also wrong just slightly too often. After the fifth time I was twenty minutes in to trying to use command line options that just don’t exist before realizing that I was being led down the winding path by an ai hallucination that I mistook for a stack overflow quote, I broke and paid for Kagi. Which then immediately added an AI drek feature, fml.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#98
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you monetizing your website? Is it with ads?

It doesn't matter anymore. There won't be monetary reward, citation, personal brand building, or anything. Google just rips off the information, presents it as fact, and a visitor will never visit an author's original website again. Websites are training data and will become an anachronism.

If I care about my “personal brand”, what are the chances that people are going to find me organically on the web?

If I want to get my name our there - which I don’t - I’m going to post to LinkedIn, give in person talks at conferences, try to get on popular podcasts that have guests, etc.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#99
post #7

> Enter 2024 with AI. The top 20% of search results are a wall of text from AI... I'll be the contrarian here and say I actually like Google's AI Overview? For the first time in a long time, I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer. Google is finally useful again. That said, once Google screws with this and starts making sear…

> I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer.

You get the average of the seo optimized answers

Post reply on HN