Who would have thought we’d be looking for a better experience after Google let search turn to a steaming pile of shit filled with spam, popups and clickbait while violating our privacy with every vector possible?!?
Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
61–70 of 254 posts
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#62Google'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.
> I think this will probably just create a strong incentive to cover important things and move away from clickbait.
But clickbait is how they make money...
That's like saying, "Oh, Apple will just have to move away from selling the iPhone and start selling hamburgers instead."
I mean, sure, but they're not going to like it, and it's going to come with a lot of lost revenue and profits.
I find myself regularly copying URLs, sending it to Gemini, and asking it to answer what I want to get out of the article.
I'm not wasting my time scrolling through a mile of website and 88,000 ads to find the answer to the headline.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#63If the vast majority of Google revenue comes from search, and search is under siege, why is the stock so unfazed?
It seems like the market thinks Google will be just fine.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#64I don't use Google anymore, and haven't in over a year (I use kagi instead) but for finding information that could be buried deep within slow, ad ridden websites, the AI and quick question features are indispensable. Things like "is game XYZ available on gamepass" or "which is state is comparable in area to germany" are good examples of this
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#65Well 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...
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Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#66If the vast majority of Google revenue comes from search, and search is under siege, why is the stock so unfazed? It seems like the market thinks Google will be just fine.
Ads in AI query results.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#67Honest question as I try to wrap my millennial brain around this -- for those of you who search for news -- with or without an AI -- what are you searching for? So much of news is finding out the unknown, it seems unsearchable by nature? Or are you asking for updates to a specific, ongoing story?
I ask two types of questions:
1. Factual updates to an ongoing or recent story.
2. Analysis, e.g. "What were the economic effects of Brexit."
Without AI, I would try to read multiple opinions from different sides. But its hard for me to always know which experts to trust?
AI will present both sides, but even when AI is not hallucinating, there is still the issue of "are the experts that the AI is sourcing reliable?"
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I think this will probably just create a strong incentive to cover important things and move away from clickbait. But clickbait is how they make money... That's like saying, "Oh, Apple will just have to move away from selling the iPhone and start selling hamburgers instead." I mean, sure, but they're not going to like it, and it's going to come with a lot of lost revenue and profits. I find myself regularly copying…
Those adverts and clickbait will infect llms soon enough, just be far harder to block.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#69Honest question as I try to wrap my millennial brain around this -- for those of you who search for news -- with or without an AI -- what are you searching for? So much of news is finding out the unknown, it seems unsearchable by nature? Or are you asking for updates to a specific, ongoing story?
I ask two types of questions: 1. Factual updates to an ongoing or recent story. 2. Analysis, e.g. "What were the economic effects of Brexit." Without AI, I would try to read multiple opinions from different sides. But its hard for me to always know which experts to trust? AI will present both sides, but even when AI is not hallucinating, there is still the issue of "are the experts that the AI is sourcing reliable?"
Do you trust an ai run by a shady company but not an attributable human editor.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#70I was considering starting a business where the main traffic source would be SEO based, but based on all the gloom and doom around search I decided to hold off.
Hard to say exactly how bad it’s getting right now. Lots of horror stories out there.