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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#131

Post by iamtedd »

pflenker wrote: post #110
ekidd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which as some running a website raises a fascinating question. If Google is just going to crawl my sites and present information as an AI summary on their site, then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?

A couple of years back I worked with a company which maintained specific data which was the main traffic driver on that page. Google approached them and wanted to pay for the rights to get the data and display it on top of the search results, a feature which was fairly new back then. This was an interesting dilemma because it was very clear that the money was way less than the loss in ad revenue due to traffic drop,…

Real-world Prisoner's Dilemma.

Re: Google changes its search box

#132

Post by swarnie »

ekidd wrote: post #65
simonw wrote: post #10

Nilay Patel has been talking about "Google Zero" - the moment when Google effectively stops sending any traffic to other sites - for a few years now: https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...

Which as some running a website raises a fascinating question. If Google is just going to crawl my sites and present information as an AI summary on their site, then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?

Allow? Deep down, do you think you have a choice?

Mechanisms might exist to make you think you have one, the same way copywrite should prevent millions of books being gobbled up by TheZuck but ultimately do you really have a choice?

Rules and laws don't exists for you.

Re: Google changes its search box

#134

Post by bigstrat2003 »

CooCooCaCha wrote: post #19

I think this will be one of those things that the hacker news crowd lambasts and calls a mistake but will either be neutral or seen as a positive to your average user.

The average user makes fun of how bad the Google AI generated responses are. I somehow don't think they're going to embrace a plan for that slop to be the only thing available.

Re: Google changes its search box

#135

Post by mghackerlady »

pclowes wrote: post #22

I understand why they are doing this. My Google search usage is easily down 50%+. I doubt I am unique here. While there are times where I want pure search (Kagi, Old Google) I mostly use LLMs to search now and have them provide me links for source data. When I do use LLMs as a search engine I always want it integrated into my AI workflows with access to tools and scripts etc. I never want to have a conversation with…

I think LLMs are good answer engines, but terrible search engines. For example, if I just want the answer to "How do I foo this bar with a thingamajig", or "what kind of foo exists for bar", LLMs are 100% better because they'll give me an answer without trying to sell me their thing or pump me with ads. It also lets me go more in depth than the very surface level seo spam sites that appear when you do a search like this. On the other hand, search engines should be more like "s released 1908" or " and give you results talking about what you searched. If I search for C algorithm design, I don't want to learn what C is, what an algorithm is, and various other seo garbage. I want to learn about C algorithms and their design. If I search for influential books from 1908, I don't want "top 10 classics from the 1900s" or "hidden gems of 1908".

Currently, search engines are pretty bad at the second one because people try to use them as the first one

Re: Google changes its search box

#137

Post by jolt42 »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #70
ivraatiems wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not at all in the same boat as you; I do not and likely will never primarily rely on LLMs for information. But it's fascinating to hear that even folks who do don't find this approach useful.

For me, Google search results have gotten so poor (and other engines aren’t any better), that I’d rather just ask an online LLM for what I’m looking for. I was once very good at advanced Google search queries but they seem to no longer respect such queries - either showing irrelevant results or none at all (that should exist). I don’t love LLMs, but they seem to not make up stuff very often these days and usually cit…

Yep, really advanced Google searches were never that good. LLM, yeah, it halucinates, it's never spot on but as sure as heck it knows what I'm trying to ask. It doesn't give me arborists if I say something like "list tree searches".

Re: Google changes its search box

#138

Post by SoftTalker »

simonw wrote: post #10

Nilay Patel has been talking about "Google Zero" - the moment when Google effectively stops sending any traffic to other sites - for a few years now: https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...

The web as we know it is over.

Websites will die on the vine if LLMs intermediate all the content.

The "website" of the future will be an API optimized for LLM crawlers, serving plain-text content that no end-user will ever view directly. The SEO game will change to LLMAO.

Re: Google changes its search box

#139

Post by jgalt212 »

How does this work for Google? I read it costs them $0.001 to perform a search. No matter how efficient their inference chips are, the new cost basis has to be 10X or more. And the zero click Internet not only kills ad supported content sites, it also kills Google SERP ad revenues.

Re: Google changes its search box

#140

Post by matltc »

Lots of people talking about Google being strictly worse than a number of search engines (bing, duck, etc) not been my experience. Brave default search is awful. Duck was terrible last I used it. Google still great for me, but I have a decent amount of "privacy controls" implemented (DNS, vpn, browser extensions) and i basically dork most searches--average search looks more like a find invocation than English. In this last regard especially, Google is peerless, imo Been a while since I looked around though. Is there an engine that supports all the operators that Google does and that provides results of better or equivalent quality?
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