Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

81–90 of 254 posts

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

#81
post #45

News sites have way too much invasive advertising on them, but AI is a scam. Pay for your news.

But how? I usually have never heard of some publication and literally want to read one article and never visit the site again. I don’t want to whip out my credit card, fill out a form, have a subscription on the books that I have to cancel, just so I can read that one article. I want the web equivalent of an ezPass transponder.

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

#82

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…

The one way forward for them would have been to maintain their quality, but they decided to cash in on their monopoly instead. Peak short-termis.

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

#83
post #82

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…

The one way forward for them would have been to maintain their quality, but they decided to cash in on their monopoly instead. Peak short-termis.

Seems to my untrained eyes like Google's AI search is actually the best on the market, no? Seems like a lot of HN users have trained themselves not to type queries into the search prompt anymore and then complain about the quality of a product they don't use.

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

#84
post #44

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?

I was thinking about this today. $40/month for home delivery of the NYT. Add in maybe $5/month for postage to pay my bills and other correspondence. That's still less than half what I pay per month for internet. It's tempting to just drop the home internet service and go back to the 1990s way of doing things.

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

#85

If 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.

Windows and Office used to make up >90% of Microsoft's revenue, back when Microsoft was the biggest company in the world around DotCom. Windows especially has been a sinking ship for a decade and yet Microsoft is bigger than ever. Google is well positioned to monetize LLMs. Cloud, Gemini, and Waymo are all growing and could easily be Fortune 50 companies each within a few years. Gsuite continues to do well. Google Se…

Waymo is a particularly good one. Yes, it's been harder and taken longer than expected to get cars self driving, but it's starting to show real results now, and the sheer difficulty could act as quite the moat -- right now in the Western world, nobody is even close to Waymo in operational L4 or higher self driving cars, and the incumbent automakers in particular seem to have mostly given up.

And it's not just that Waymo will inevitably expand beyond robotaxis into personal cars as well, they could take their expertise in vision and robotics and apply it to adjacent domains. Maybe we'll actually start seeing the humanoid helper robots of the 50's a decade or two from now!

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

#86
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those adverts and clickbait will infect llms soon enough, just be far harder to block.

Yes, unfortunately for those saying AIs will only get better, advertising is a major reason we should expect them to get worse.

Ironically, I wonder if it would inspire a slew of downstream services that use LLMs to clean advertising out of the mainstream LLM responses.

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

#87
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those adverts and clickbait will infect llms soon enough, just be far harder to block.

Yes, unfortunately for those saying AIs will only get better, advertising is a major reason we should expect them to get worse.

With the huge usage that LLM APIs are getting in all sorts of industries, they cannot be going away, and they're cheap.

If consumer AI chatbots get enshittified, you can just grab some open source bring-your-api-keys front-end, and chat away for peanuts without ads or anything anti-user.

I use https://github.com/sigoden/aichat , but there are GUIs too.

Plus, anyone enterprising can just write a web front-end and sell it as "the ad-free AI chatbot, only $10/mo, usage limits apply".

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

#88

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 an…

This and many other applications of this sort will depend on AIs becoming ubiquitous, cheap and not metered. Metered access (like most current SAS AIs) will deter these sorts of heavy use cases. Running locally will be best, both for pricing and so you can have it build up context over time.

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

#89
post #81
post #45

News sites have way too much invasive advertising on them, but AI is a scam. Pay for your news.

But how? I usually have never heard of some publication and literally want to read one article and never visit the site again. I don’t want to whip out my credit card, fill out a form, have a subscription on the books that I have to cancel, just so I can read that one article. I want the web equivalent of an ezPass transponder.

Apple News+ is one way.

Another is what 404media does. You pay $10 a month for no ads and extra stuff.

But yes, I know what you want and sadly there’s nobody doing it yet.

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

#90

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 an…

This is already a thing with Gemini in Chrome[0].

The Browser Company’s new browser, Dia[1], is supposedly another similar product

[0] = https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/?hl=en

[1] = https://www.diabrowser.com/

Post reply on HN