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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

#221

Post by busterarm »

oliwarner wrote: post #204

Google's demise is self-inflicted. They broke search by prioritising ads, then trusting the wrong, big publishers (eg every listacle from a big media network), broke their advanced search controls (domain blacklists, quotes that mean quotes, plus-and-minuses to alter things). Then they added their own LLM's analysis to searches, admitting that that their SERPs are dead. They were in this death-spiral well before LLMs…

They've shown in their other products that they really don't even care anymore.

Roughly 30% of the YouTube ads I get served recently are 10minutes long or more. At least once a day I feel like I'm reporting some 50+ minute long alternative medicine scam ad.

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

#222

Post by Lu2025 »

MyPasswordSucks wrote: post #113

In 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…

Well, the "links" part was an early SEO, mutual back scratching.

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

#223

Post by WorldMaker »

Lu2025 wrote: post #222
MyPasswordSucks wrote: post #113

In 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…

Well, the "links" part was an early SEO, mutual back scratching.

Early Google PageRank was notorious for how much additional trust a given page had based on many links back to it existed. It was why certain bloggers had massive ranks early on, because they would be in big webs of conversations with lots of high quality links out and back in.

Early SEO did weaponize that and broke it for everyone.

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

#224

Post by senderista »

rickydroll wrote: post #210
Eisenstein wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the conclusion is that changing your business model in a reactive way to internet developments is a bad idea if you want to have a stable business. If you want to run your business that way, you better be on top of everything and you better be lucky. They rode the social media wave and lost, and now they are going to try to ride the AI wave because they don't have anything to fall back on. They are going to l…

>People will pay for it. I'm willing to pay, but not by individual subscriptions per news organization. I'm more interested in following journalists than news organizations.

Sounds like the Substack model?

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

#225

Post by stormfather »

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…

Is this really that bad for Google? Do Perplexity and OpenAI use paid SERP API under the hood? Google doesn't have to make money from ads on search, if its paid search.

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

#226

Post by uses »

MyPasswordSucks wrote: post #113

In 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…

You're gloating about the hardship which editors, journalists, writers, our informational institutions are facing because... sites stopped having a Links page in 1998? What the fuck, man.

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

#227

Post by WorldMaker »

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.

Having reluctantly used both, Bing's Copilot seems a lot more grounded on current search results below it versus Google's Gemini seems a lot more likely to conduct its own searches from a different query than what was asked, so also a lot more likely to hallucinate things or to provide answers that seem way different from the rest of the search page.

In terms of "best on the market" for AI search, I know that I am much more likely to trust the one that seems more like a direct summary of the stuff the search engine is traditionally responding with (and presumably has been well tuned in the last several decades) versus the one more likely to make stuff up or to leave the realm of what you are actually asking for some other search it thinks is better for you.

Though admittedly that's a very personal judgment call; some people want the assistant to search for "what they really mean" rather than "what they asked for". It's also a lot of gut vibes from how these AIs write about their research and some of that can be hallucinations and lies and "prompt optimization" as much or more than any sort of "best on the market" criteria.

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

#228

Post by AaronAPU »

The other day I used Google to research something I didn’t know the answer to. It gave back a slightly reformatted piece of text which had been directly stolen from my own blog post.

So not only did it steal my traffic, it elevated my random opinion to pseudo “official” truth.

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

#229

Post by skeaker »

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…

I never really bought the idea of any AI company killing Google. They have too much momentum to really be seriously impacted, too many people who only use them exclusively and will continue to do so their whole lives on the name brand alone. They might risk a lack of "growth" but that only really matters to shareholders, not to end users.

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

#230

Post by dieortin »

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’m fine with regular old fashioned search engines

> I now instruct chatgpt to search the web for me and I read the result

I wouldn’t exactly classify ChatGPT as an old fashioned search engine

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