Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kagi assistant is hybrid search / LLM
What model are they using?
They offer most models from the large AI players (anthropic, openai, mistral, meta, grok, google, deepseek)
Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
161–170 of 254 posts
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could simply restore the search quality they had in 2010. No one wants these "AI" summaries except for people looking to get promoted for "having an impact" inside Google. What Google is doing right now is sabotage the search moat they do have. They are throwing it all away because of some "AI" rainmakers inside the company.
That's impossible unless the web reverted back to 2010, when walled gardens weren't prevalent, making your own blog was common, doable and often done by those without programming experience, forums were alive and well, and people wanted to share things on the web rather than group chats.
It's perfectly possible if they start downranking sites full of ads.
But an ad company will never do that.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#163Google devastated search for small and medium sized companies, with AI or without it they have not improved the search engine to get accurate results with very concrete searches that are not prompts.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of blogs, plenty of obvious low quality spam to block, plenty of features to enable allowlist and blocklists. To think for a second that the Google search experience couldn't be made significantly better at the snap of a finger by Google is to live in a fantasy world.
All that means less revenue, that’s a fantasy
Sure, sure, except for this minor issue that the argument I was responding to didn't mention revenue, they talked about the state of the internet. So why again are you responding to my counter with a straw man?
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#165In the old days - back before smartphones, back before widescreen monitors, back before broadband - the "Links" section was always a key part of any site. After spending time on a site, a visitor could find links to other pages - some of them on the same topic, some of them simply enjoyed by the creator of the site they were on. If one were to visualize the concept, they might well say that this formed a "web" of sor…
> ... the "Links" section was always a key part of any site. After spending time on a site, a visitor could find links to other pages - some of them on the same topic, some of them simply enjoyed by the creator of the site they were on.
Don't know how useful these are, but here are some links pages on a couple of websites I put together a while ago:
https://earthdirections.org/links/
Just personal non-commercial handcrafted sites. One day I'd like to figure out some tooling to manage / prune / update links, etc.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are getting to watch The Innovator's Dilemma play out, yet again. The downward trajectory of Google's utility has only been worsening over the past 10 years-- but only in the last 3-4 have mainstream audiences started to notice.
The first part of that statement is valid but the second one isn't. If anything, most of big tech has shown exceptional humility against new threats Instagram incorporating stories (Snapchat) YouTube incorporating Shorts (tiktok) Google search incorporating AI Mode (perplexity et al) This is in stark contrast to Kodak and the likes who scoffed at digital camera and phone cameras as distraction. They were sure that th…
Maybe you misunderstood the scope that Google is a search advertising company first and foremost? Alphabet ignores (yes, they essentially invented transformers, etc.., but actual productive efforts likely correlate to predicted TAM or protecting status quo, answering to shareholders while waiting to acquire threats) a market that will eventually usurp their cash cow of first party search ads, because the new market isn't initially as lucrative due to market size. There is also the consideration of cannibalizing their high margin search ads market with an error prone and resource intensive tech that cannot immediately be monetized in a second price auction (both from inventory and bidder participant perspectives). A $10 billion market for Google would be under 3% of revenue, but if the market grows 10x, it is much more attractive, but now the incumbent may be trailing the nascent companies who refined their offerings (without risk of cannibalizing their own offerings) while said market was growing. We are currently at the stage where Google is incorporating Gemini responses and alienating publishers (by not sending monetizable clicks while using their content) while still focusing on monetization via their traditional ad products elsewhere on the SERPs (text search ads, shopping ads). Keep in mind, they also control 3rd party display ads via DoubleClick and Adsense-- but inventory on 3rd party sites will drop and Google will lose their 30%+ cut if users don't leave the SERPs.
Dozens of major news publications have covered the decline of Google's organic search quality decline and emphasis on monetization (ignoring incorrect infoboxes and AI generated answers). See articles such as https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/googl... and a collection even posted here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348460 . This has played into reasons why people have shifted away from Google. Their results are focused solely on maximizing Google's earnings per mille, as leaked (https://www.wsj.com/tech/u-s-urges-breakup-of-google-ad-busi...) where the ads team has guanxi over search quality. Once Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts left their roles, the focus on monetization over useful SERPs becomes much more evident.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#167Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#168If nobody writes it, the LLM can't learn it. This is going to be a fascinating shift of resources. I suspect it will have the inverse effect of eroding traditional journalism outlets to retrofit for the new model, while boosting smaller competitors, but with everyone going to subscription based. The content creators could make a significant amount of money.
Then again, this would be a great time for state-sponsored media, if we didn't have such an anti-intellectual assclown as president and the lacky congress/scotus.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#169I 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.
I built a protein comparison site (aggregating nutrition, ingredients, electrolytes, prices) and I expected a little bit of traffic, but I'm getting less than a single visitor every 2 days from google. It's absolutely dead.
A year ago I threw together a tiny little site with some datamined assets from a game (deadlock) that randomly got indexed and saw a couple hundred visits a month from google.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eventually open models will be able to do the same, so why would anyone use ad-ridden service? The first LLM provider who turns on ads on their responses will disappear in a brink.
People use, and pay for , ad-ridden services all the time. I mean, just look at Cable TV and the direction all the streaming services are going.
Provided there are no identical alternatives without ads.