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

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

#51

Post by msgodel »

spankalee wrote: post #21

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 st…

For anything important I always ask LLMs for links and follow them. I think this will probably just create a strong incentive to cover important things and move away from clickbait.

It's probably a win for everyone in the long run although it means news sites will have to change. That's going to be painful for them but it's not like they're angels either.

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

#52

Post by aucisson_masque »

mvdtnz wrote: post #44
aucisson_masque wrote: post #42

Well I didn’t expect some good coming from the ai revolution and yet. If it helps to annihilate the « news » sites that depended over advertisement to be profitable, that’s great. Advertisement and journalism should never have been in the same sentence, no one can provide full independent news when you’re at the mercy of advertiser threatening to bail out if you say something bad on them.

How much do you pay for your news?

8€/months.

It’s as much about paying for news than it is about supporting people doing a great job that is extremely valuable for democracy.

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

#53

Post by Infinity315 »

charcircuit wrote: post #48
Infinity315 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still need people on the ground reporting on these things. AI can't (yet) have connections and conversations with relevant parties. Many interviews would not be possible without a reporter developing a rapport with the interviewee beforehand.

If they are actually needed they shouldn't have any issue finding funding.

How do you define what is needed? The vast majority of reporting does not affect one's own behaviour at all. For example, consider the Snowden leaks, I guarantee you the vast majority of people did not even attempt to modify their own behaviour at all in light of this new information--despite having read or heard about it.

I'd argue that this reporting was still needed, despite it having very little material impact on one's life.

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

#54

Post by tehjoker »

rmah wrote: post #11
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?

Why should they help media companies?

There should be a national media company. Instead we have national media companies with no democratic oversight and labor abuse.

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

#57

Post by stefan_ »

spankalee wrote: post #21

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 st…

Spare us the "woe is me" for they literally invented replacing the publishers. Yesterday its infoboxes, today its shitty AI summaries. Which is still the case, so good riddance.

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

#58

Post by aucisson_masque »

jmsdnns wrote: post #43
aucisson_masque wrote: post #42

Well I didn’t expect some good coming from the ai revolution and yet. If it helps to annihilate the « news » sites that depended over advertisement to be profitable, that’s great. Advertisement and journalism should never have been in the same sentence, no one can provide full independent news when you’re at the mercy of advertiser threatening to bail out if you say something bad on them.

Here is Ben Franklin addressing this issue back in 1731 by essentially saying, "that's true, but then how would news ever get printed?" https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-00...

Newspaper really took off during Industrial Revolution, I’m not sure that a 1731 text is pertinent.

On that matter, people used to print newspaper for a variety of different reasons, some were to rally public to an opinion (political parties for instance), some were printed to exerce control over their reader (a factory owner making a newspaper for his employee) and there have always been people who wanted to report facts and get paid for that.

Still today, there are many newspaper and online news that don’t have any advertisement, sponsoring and are in a really good financial situation.

In France, I can think of mediapart (fully online), le canard enchaîné (online and paper). People pay for them because their paper is worth more than just lightening up a barbecue.

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

#59

Post by dataviz1000 »

Take it to the next level, integrate the chatbot into a browser extension side panel. Let people navigate to websites that contain the information.

This will work. It will allow the chatbot to provide up to the minute data and information from the source. It will allow the user to maintain context -- like a popup dialog allows the user to maintain visual context. And, it will incentivize content creators to curate and provide information and data as people will be visiting their websites.

If anyone thinks this might be a good idea also, I've already laid down the foundation approaching a browser extension side panel as a framework like Electron or Playwright and did the grunt work. [0]

I put the VSCode IPC and other core libraries into this project. The IPC is important because a browser extension with this use case requires looking at a browser as a distributed system of javascript processes that communicate a a dozen different ways

> Environments: Node.js main process, Node.js child process, Node.js worker thread, browser main thread (window), iframe, dedicated Web Worker, Shared Worker, Service Worker, AudioWorklet.

> Communication: fetch/XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket, RTCDataChannel, EventSource, BroadcastChannel, SharedArrayBuffer + Atomics, localStorage storage events, MessageChannel/MessagePort, postMessage/onmessage, Worker.postMessage/worker.onmessage, parentPort.postMessage/parentPort.on('message'), ChildProcess.send/process.on('message'), stdin/stdout streams.

and VSCode provides a protocol interface with only `onMessage` and `send` so I can define my own that are not provided creating a consistent API for communication.

Regardless, I have it working but it needs to be completely rewritten.

[0]https://github.com/adam-s/doomberg-terminal

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

#60

Post by asadotzler »

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?

Google used to send traffic to my site. Now it scrapes my site and serves summaries of my site on its site, sending me zero human traffic but a whole lot of expensive bot traffic.
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