Same publishers that demanded Google to pay them for the privilege to link to them?
Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
231–240 of 254 posts
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#232Google'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.
Yahoo had 90%+ of the search market and they lost it in a few years to google because they were unable to innovate. I don't think anyone saw that coming. Everyone was building "portals" (remember those? AOL.com? I think verizon.com was one at some point with news and weather) to try and compete with Yahoo's dominance in search. It can happen again. LLM Chat is certainly an existential threat to the googs. Part of the OpenAI lore is that google originally viewed it as a threat to their search/advertising revenue model and defunded it on that basis.
The fact that people are willing to pay for LLM and use it over search seems to indicate that Google's free product isn't as good, and llm chat is better "Enough" that people are willing to pay for it.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People will pay for it. I would love it if it were true, but sadly, the data doesn't support this. A lot of local newspapers did real journalism relevant to their communities. However, the local newspapers were the hardest hit by the social media wave and few remain today. Fast forward to now, you cannot get any real local news easily. The avg person never really valued real journalism to begin with and the hyper t…
I don't think it is social media though. It started to go downhill for newspapers when they put their news on the internet for free subsidized by their papers.
> started to go downhill for newspapers when they put their news on the internet for free subsidized by their papers
To bolster this argument, the local papers that hard paywalled seem to have done just fine.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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?
Potentially, yes. However, the same problem I have with current subscription models also exists with Substack. I added up all the subscriptions necessary to bypass paywalls I encountered every month, and it came to roughly $3,000 a year. I'll have to do the same thing with Substack subscriptions. I expect they'll be like $50 a year for the basic subscription, so it would probably only be a few hundred to a thousand per year.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#235In 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…
A recent article on HN was about small sites being destroyed in traffic, not large sites. And not just small, but small with essential human-written info.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ”not perfect” part really kind of ruins it for me. I can’t trust the LLM search’s answers and have to go find the source anyway, so what’s the point? I’m seeing people in chats post stuff like “hey I didn’t know this word also means this!” when it really doesn’t, and invariably they have just asked an LLM and believed it.
You can't blindly trust sources, either. Or, sometimes, you ability to understand the sources correctly. I think of LLMs as bookworm friends who know a little bit about everything and are a little too overconfident about the depth of their understanding. They tend to repeat what they have heard uncritically, just like so many other people do. If you don't expect them to be the ultimate arbitrer of truth, they can be…
Dictionary.com isn’t likely to just outright make up word meanings. There is such a thing as a trustworthy source, even if you can’t “blindly” trust it. You can still trust it and quote it and cite it. You can’t do any of those things so far with an LLM.
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#237I 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
Does Kagi have AI Mode?
They have a few interfaces that you can trigger an AI answer through
The first, and most useful to me, is when you just append a ? to your query. This pops up the answer in an info box at the top of a search, and then shows related results below
The second is the assistant mode, which pops up either when you use the continuing link at the bottom of an info box, or trigger it directly via the assistant URL. This is the standard conversational interface
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
They offer most models from the large AI players (anthropic, openai, mistral, meta, grok, google, deepseek)
Why would you use Kagi instead of any of these models directly?
You get all of them for the price of one kagi sub instead of a half dozen subs
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#239Honest 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 “search” (using this word liberally here) by using a newsreader and adding sources to it over time that I find to have a high signal (whether I agree with them or not). This way new things come to me without having to explicitly look for them, often before others have heard about it, usually from several different angles. If I have to explicitly go search for something the results are usually low signal chum :(
Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
#240Google, Bing etal.. are fast becoming irrelevant. At least as a search engine