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Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

wsj.com

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Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

#21

Post by spankalee »

Google's damned if they do and damned if the don't here:

- If they don't make search AI centric, they're going to get lapped by AI-first competitors like Perplexity, OpenAI, etc. We saw many people here predict Google's pending demise from this. - If they do make search centric, they're unfairly consuming they world's content and hoarding the user traffic to themselves.

Since no reasonable company is just going to stand by and willing let itself be obsoleted, Google's obviously going to go for option 2. But had they for some reason stood down, then they would have been supplanted by an AI competitor and the headline would read "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Perplexity" - just a few years later.

Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

#22

Post by daedrdev »

OutOfHere wrote: post #12

I think that requiring PoW (proof-of-work) could take over for simple requests, rejecting requests until a sufficient nonce is included in the request. Unfortunately, this collective PoW could burden power grids even more, wasting energy+money+computation for transmission. Such is life. It would be a lot better to just upgrade the servers, but that's never going to be sufficient.

what?

Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

#23

Post by holoduke »

Tarsul wrote: post #6

Anyone surprised? I mean that's just what Google does and did from the very early days. I am more ashamed that politicians worldwide have done basically nothing to help media companies in the last 25 years. We can always ask ourselves: What is more important for our society: independent media or our search overlords?

What? Media companies sold their souls to big capital and Journalists write to serve engagement.

Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

#28

Post by GuB-42 »

OutOfHere wrote: post #12

I think that requiring PoW (proof-of-work) could take over for simple requests, rejecting requests until a sufficient nonce is included in the request. Unfortunately, this collective PoW could burden power grids even more, wasting energy+money+computation for transmission. Such is life. It would be a lot better to just upgrade the servers, but that's never going to be sufficient.

Worse than that. Such computations are nothing to a desktop computer, or a server in a datacenter. But they are definitely going to be a problem for cheap smartphones.

Ironically, the computers that are the best suited for solving these proof-of-work problem are the same kind of computers that are used to train and run AIs.

And for even more irony, chatbots are relatively lightweight on the client side, being just text, while news sites tend to be bloated even without considering PoW.

So there is a good chance for PoW not to affect AI scrapers much (they have powerful computers to solve the challenges) while driving away smartphone users towards chatbots and other AI-based summaries.

Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

#29

Post by georgemcbay »

homeonthemtn wrote: post #25

[flagged]

I agree with your assessment of how terrible online news sites are, but I'm sure the same problem is true for not just news sites but any sort of site where searchable content is shown for ad eyeballs, news sites are just the ones that you're going to hear about it first and most loudly from for pretty obvious reasons.

Regardless of which side you take on any of this (anti/pro-SEO clickbait, anti/pro-AI), it is still ultimately a serious ouroboros problem for Google and other "AI" companies because their "AI" relies on these sites for ongoing training. Kill them all off and where does new content for their AIs to slurp come from?

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