Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

elenaverna.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 318 posts

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#41

Post by boilerupnc »

vecter wrote: post #36

I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT chat log has the most mundane things like: - What is platos frios - Can you download Netflix videos to your local device - Who composed the Top Gun theme - Who ha…

I wonder how many new, strange, surprising and wonderful things you indirectly stumbled into during those sifting exercises. Hyper-optimized search has some downsides. I love getting answers to my specific questions, but that always encompasses the "known unknowns" space. Through skimming and sifting using websites as proxies, I enjoyed surprises from the "unknown unknowns" space.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#42

Post by moi2388 »

RandallBrown wrote: post #39
vecter wrote: post #36

I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT chat log has the most mundane things like: - What is platos frios - Can you download Netflix videos to your local device - Who composed the Top Gun theme - Who ha…

I really like having the site where the answer came from so I can instantly judge how likely the answer is to be correct. Chat GPT does correctly answer your question about airline bags, but I have no way of knowing if it made that answer up or not because so many airlines have the same policy. Google at least gives you links to the United baggage policies. The AI overview in Google also "cites its sources", which so…

Gpt has web search with links to the website.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#43

Post by FireBeyond »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #5
dimgl wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Content marketing is dead. I mean... good? The quality of search results has gotten increasingly worse over time...

I'm pretty sure you could drop at least 60% of domains from search engine indexes with no reduction in result quality. (And it would probably be a net quality increase to get rid of all the domains that just copy content from other domains, content-farms, scam sites, etc.)

Apropos of anything else, it's one of the things I like about Kagi for search. You can tune a domain to be heavily bumped, bumped, deranked or heavily deranked.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#44

Post by hunter-gatherer »

RandallBrown wrote: post #39
vecter wrote: post #36

I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT chat log has the most mundane things like: - What is platos frios - Can you download Netflix videos to your local device - Who composed the Top Gun theme - Who ha…

I really like having the site where the answer came from so I can instantly judge how likely the answer is to be correct. Chat GPT does correctly answer your question about airline bags, but I have no way of knowing if it made that answer up or not because so many airlines have the same policy. Google at least gives you links to the United baggage policies. The AI overview in Google also "cites its sources", which so…

I might misunderstand, but can't you just ask for the reference? I've also been using (Gemini) a lot to basically replace my search engine, but I always tell it to give me a reference. I've had pretty good results with this approach.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#45

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

vecter wrote: post #36

I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT chat log has the most mundane things like: - What is platos frios - Can you download Netflix videos to your local device - Who composed the Top Gun theme - Who ha…

After some experience and testing, I've become well aware not to use LLMs to ask questions like "who did X" and "what is company Y's policy about Z", because they tend to hallucinate responses (even for well-known people).

What I've not yet figured out how to deal with is how to handle being surrounded by a society of people who go ahead and trust LLMs for their factual answers anyway. I think even if I'm careful about selecting my sources, the background noise floor is going to climb up to the point that there's no signal-to-noise ratio left.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#46

Post by upcoming-sesame »

vecter wrote: post #36

I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT chat log has the most mundane things like: - What is platos frios - Can you download Netflix videos to your local device - Who composed the Top Gun theme - Who ha…

Same for me. The only thing I still use Google for is for up to date data as LLMs are not great with that yet

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#47

Post by hunter-gatherer »

boilerupnc wrote: post #41
vecter wrote: post #36

I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT chat log has the most mundane things like: - What is platos frios - Can you download Netflix videos to your local device - Who composed the Top Gun theme - Who ha…

I wonder how many new, strange, surprising and wonderful things you indirectly stumbled into during those sifting exercises. Hyper-optimized search has some downsides. I love getting answers to my specific questions, but that always encompasses the "known unknowns" space. Through skimming and sifting using websites as proxies, I enjoyed surprises from the "unknown unknowns" space.

10 years ago I'd agree with you completely. I definitely get your point and share some of that same sentiment, but search results these past 10 uears have become overwhelming absurd, shallow, and barely tangentially related to what I'm looking for

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#48

Post by mvdtnz »

_benj wrote: post #26

I’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I haven’t visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding questions… I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many

It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is absolutely appalling beyond belief.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#49

Post by pestaa »

dougb5 wrote: post #34

AI is killing my website but in a different way than what's discussed in the article: Content scrapers are completely out of control, spiking my serving costs and degrading performance for human users. There seem to be hundreds of them and they've gotten very good at looking like human users so they're hard to block or throttle. I can't prove they're all AI-related scrapers, but I've been running the site for 25 year…

Do you use a CDN in front of it?

Would something like Cloudflare help with bot detection?

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#50

Post by famouswaffles »

dig1 wrote: post #10

The actual trend these days is that if your company struggles, blame AI ;) I can't say about WebMD and Chegg, but Quora and SO started going downhill before this AI (boom or bubble, whatever you call it) due to their policies, politics, and management. IMHO, of course.

Those thing aren't mutually exclusive. You can be on a decline and something comes along and tanks your visits well beyond what a natural decline would have been.
Post reply on HN