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Google is dead. Where do we go now?

circusscientist.com

21–30 of 873 posts

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#22
post #6

Please go anywhere but the platforms I use. Go fill Tiktok up with ads. Any of the "mainstream" platforms inbuilt ad posts are a good bet. Or a marketing agency that will disguse it as organic content.

Lol wish I could afford to "fill up Tiktok with ads"! Seriously though, I always felt like Google AdWords (we only used the search network) are the most honest way. Someone searches for what you offer and they see your ad. With these other platforms it's more about relying on the algorithm.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#23
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good riddance seriously i used to pay like $1~2 a click back in 2010s and remember feeling like a total scam. no way of knowing if those clicks were bots and any campaigns would always have inflation somehow even long tail words that shouldn't. AI should equal the playing field and promote businesses based on merit and capacity not how much they can spend.

For now. I give it maybe 12-18 months before AI results are polluted by advertising.

I don't even think this golden age actually exists today. Aask Google AI mode for the best product in some category - say, the best kitchen range - and it cites... a bunch of spammy "review" websites and a YouTube video.

If you're shopping around, an LLM you control can work for stuff like summarizing customer reviews or compiling a list of products with specific features (if you don't mind them being randomly wrong). But for general shopping advice / "plan my vacation" kind of queries, it's already firmly in the land of SEO-garbage-in-SEO-garbage-out.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#25
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good riddance seriously i used to pay like $1~2 a click back in 2010s and remember feeling like a total scam. no way of knowing if those clicks were bots and any campaigns would always have inflation somehow even long tail words that shouldn't. AI should equal the playing field and promote businesses based on merit and capacity not how much they can spend.

I will say I have no experience in the ad space, but surely the SEO/ad companies will figure out how to game LLMs to make their sites more likely to be picked up by it, no? Or OpenAI would just directly sell ads themselves.

Yes - we're in what I like to call the Socialist Phase of AI (user acquisition). We were once in this phase with Google. Eventually we'll move into the as-yet-unnamed-by-me phase that Google (and search in General, also the internet) have been in for quite some time, where they try and squeeze out all the money that they put in during the Socialist Phase.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#28

Look, the 90's Internet isn't cool anymore. Sorry. Things are cool for a while and then they're not. Franchises die. It's still cool to say "The originals were really cool", and always will be, but now we're talking about now. Star Wars is uncool. There are people who sort of automatically praise it and subtly put down those who don't like they're aligned with a magnetic field, sure, but they're in their own world. I…

Did you read the page? The context is very clear: a small business that had for years gotten a lot of its leads/customers from Adwords is seeing that Adwords ("Google" in context) is not working. They are then asking (other small businesses in the same situation, "where do we go now?").

There nothing about nostalgia, no real concern for Google as a company, or how the web used to work, etc. Just a small business trying to stay afloat.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#30

Look, the 90's Internet isn't cool anymore. Sorry. Things are cool for a while and then they're not. Franchises die. It's still cool to say "The originals were really cool", and always will be, but now we're talking about now. Star Wars is uncool. There are people who sort of automatically praise it and subtly put down those who don't like they're aligned with a magnetic field, sure, but they're in their own world. I…

"Cool" is precisely the problem. Cool is completely irrelevant to whether something is useful or valuable.
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