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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

#101

Post by marcus_holmes »

ajross wrote: post #83
juujian wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Possibly their AI search - I don't know, I switched to Kagi to get a search engine that actually did what I asked instead of just trying to put as many ads in front of me as it could.

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

#102

Post by dataviz1000 »

eikenberry wrote: post #88
dataviz1000 wrote: post #59

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.

As an experiment, because p47's social media posts move the markets $60 in a day, and the last thing on Earth I want to be doing is reading them so the system makes an API request for any new ones, then checks for links, video, and images. It uses OpenAI whisper running with transformers.js on the local machine using webgpu for the inference to transcribe the video and audio and image to text for ocr. I tried to do the text generation locally but any decent model although will run caused my Macbook M3 to get so hot I could cook a steak on it while freezing the rendering for the whole computer.

image-to-text and video, audio-to-text works fine, there are lot of uses for text generation that work but to get high quality analysis to see if a social media post might cause the stock market to crash requires sending the data out to an api. If the side panel requires searching for links to navigate to it requires a third party api.

Working with it, I think the next hardware race will be getting these models to run on personal computers in next 2 - 5 years and I have a suspicion Microsoft is ahead of Apple.

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

#103

Post by kwanbix »

Agingcoder wrote: post #94

I don’t really care about google’s ai features - I’m fine with regular old fashioned search engines. I’ve stopped using google because it doesn’t work anymore - I used to be able to find what I want , and now I can’t. Everything is lost in a mess of ads and what seems to be a collection of random answers. I now instruct chatgpt to search the web for me and I read the result, since it works. I also read the news direc…

I use ublock origin and it works just fine for me. AS much as I like to leave the google ecosystem, I tried bing and duckduckgo and they are not as good.

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

#104

Post by input_sh »

msgodel wrote: post #51
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.

And what happens when you follow them?

In my experience, the answers tend to be sourced from fringe little blogs that I would never trust in a Google search.

Google at least attempts to rank them by quality, while LLM web search seems to click on the closest match regardless of the (lack of) quality.

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

#105

Post by marcus_holmes »

rozap wrote: post #76
chgs wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you trust an ai run by a shady company but not an attributable human editor.

Yes, the AI is trained on a vast quantity of data therefore it is less likely to be manipulated vs a single editor that may have ulterior motives. Therefore it's much harder to manipulate. A corporation which represents many shareholders' interest has its own reputation on the line, which would be seriously damaged if they were caught doing anything like you suggest. But this can only be understood within the context…

I see what you did there :)

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

#106

Post by marcuschong »

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…

It's funny most people are saying Google will win the AI wars, though that is precisely what will cannibalize their current business model, which had a much bigger moat than frontier LLMs, apparently.

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

#107

Post by w-ll »

marcuschong wrote: post #106
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…

It's funny most people are saying Google will win the AI wars, though that is precisely what will cannibalize their current business model, which had a much bigger moat than frontier LLMs, apparently.

You think we wont start seeing ads or paid for refs/links in those AI responses? Not defending Google here, when they turned that feature on I posted to some friends "another nail in the coffin for the web as we know it" or something to that effect.

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

#109

Post by msgodel »

input_sh wrote: post #104
msgodel wrote: post #51

Earlier 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.

And what happens when you follow them? In my experience, the answers tend to be sourced from fringe little blogs that I would never trust in a Google search. Google at least attempts to rank them by quality, while LLM web search seems to click on the closest match regardless of the (lack of) quality.

Huh that's strange to hear. The HN I remember would have always said the opposite (the small web tends to be higher quality) as do I.

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

#110

Post by bcoates »

ajross wrote: post #83
juujian wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every once in a while I bother not ignoring a Google AI overview, then I waste some time fact-checking it and find out it's wrong. Most recently about a python library (where it hallucinated a function that doesn't exist, complete with documentation and usage examples) and breaking news (where it authoritatively said [non-culture war, non-controversial, local] thing doesn't happen, above a dog-bites-man story from a conventional news source about how thing happened again)
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