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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#181

Post by svieira »

dweinus wrote: post #113

So to make this profitable they need ads revenue from it, right? Imagine for a moment the ways AI can manipulate responses and conversations for marketers, because I guarantee the marketers have already thought about it.

Anthropic was talking about this as a "oh nifty, look at this" back in 2024: https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude

The fact that steering one of these things is trivial nowadays and the vectors are close-to-free-to-store (since you don't need anything large to influence the space, see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahtbcExEKng) means that this is very likely already happening.

Re: Google changes its search box

#182

Post by elevation »

wvenable wrote: post #165
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?

It's a catch-22. Without google crawling your site, you don't get any new traffic. But with google crawling your site, you also might not get any traffic. AI summarization has already causes issues for sites like rtings where people are no longer visiting the site but still making use of the data presented there. Leading to rtings not getting enough traffic to continue to post their data. It is an existential crisis…

> Without google crawling your site, you don't get any new traffic

What about the stories of marketing managers who learned months after the fact that their credit card had expired and their google ad spend had ceased with no affect on traffic? Google isn't always an effective promotional vehicle.

Re: Google changes its search box

#183

Post by wvenable »

gnatolf wrote: post #95
embedding-shape wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you can express "Only show me websites run by Italian companies incorporated by Greece owners born in Turkey" for example, and it'll be able to filter through a bunch of stuff, just makes searching so much easier. Fuzzy-search is also on another level with language models.

Interestingly enough, precise search is on the way out.

Precise search has been dead for a long time.

Re: Google changes its search box

#184

Post by rolph »

alt227 wrote: post #142
swarnie wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, Google advertises its crawler IP ranges and it is quite easy to keep track of this and block them. But only if you control the infrastructure that your site runs on of course.

stego your site, google sees the red herring version, intended users see the payload.

this has been done before, quite often, but toward ends morally askew.

Re: Google changes its search box

#185

Post by SoftTalker »

ben_w wrote: post #169
SoftTalker wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Websites will die on the vine if LLMs intermediate all the content. The current zeitgeist of them will, but I think not all. My first website (GeoCities) was either before Google existed or very close to it. Connected to people via WebRings and directory listings. More recently, RSS feeds.

Yeah there will likely continue be a small underground of old-style websites I guess. But you'll have to be in the loop on how to find them, and very few people will pay to advertise on them.

Re: Google changes its search box

#186

Post by BrunoBernardino »

torben-friis wrote: post #12
ivraatiems wrote: post #4

Kind of Google to create a market opening for its competitors like this. I hope Kagi, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are taking notes.

My literal first thought was "do I seriously need to use bing now?".

While there are good options like DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Ecosia, there are plenty of (better) alternatives, where you're not the product [1], I'd recommend looking into!

[1]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=co...

Re: Google changes its search box

#187

Post by comboy »

alt227 wrote: post #159

So how does google now make money when it is just providing us with direct answers from ai, instead of showing us both paid for search results and directing us to sites which host targetted ads? How does adsense work when there are no search results?

Obviously if you pay, the AI will really like your product.

"Here is the table of related highest paying customers, incorporate these into your answer to maximize the income"

Well any other prompt for the search model would frankly be illegal for a publicly traded company.

Re: Google changes its search box

#188

Post by wvenable »

snailmailman wrote: post #80
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.

LLMs are so frequently inaccurate its crazy to think of it fully replacing search. I've been trying to use LLMs for things and it makes mistakes all the time . Just this week i had multiple instances of various LLMs basically saying "just run the software with --flag-that-fixes-your-problem" or "edit the config and add solve-your-issue=true" hallucinating non-existant options. Even if i manually link the relevant doc…

Perhaps I've just internalized it -- I know that's unreliable and I just deal with it. LLMs are certainly capable of searching the web and finding the right answer directly so you still don't have to read the documentation.

Re: Google changes its search box

#189

Post by travisgriggs »

sonofhans wrote: post #155
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Kagi is better. Kagi is damn good, as much a revelation as the Google of old. Not free, though.

Been using Kagi search for more than a year. Been happy. I use GPT/et al for the little things (e.g. unit conversions, rather than search for and then try to use an enshittified web page from 10 years ago). But for actual real tech leaning content, Kagi has been pretty good.

Re: Google changes its search box

#190

Post by nostrademons »

ivraatiems wrote: post #7
embedding-shape wrote: post #3

Basically people who want to search, will now not be able to, they'll be forced into a UI they might have consciously avoided, otherwise they'd be using their chatbot in the first place. Seems like a strange UX decision, rather than recommending "Hey maybe you want to try our chatbot", they just force the user into a chat straight up.

That's the whole shape of AI for consumer-facing functions like this. It's not superior to the previous experience, but huge sunk costs and a misguided belief it's the "next thing" is leading companies to try to force the issue. It's the Apple removing the headphone jack of the modern Internet. A change for the worse that we'll all have to find ways to work around.

There's a measure of game theory here too. If Google didn't hop on the AI train, people would use ChatGPT or Claude to fill the Internet with slop and 10-blue-links Google would cease working anyway (which it kinda has already). So their only option is to hop on the AI train and disrupt themselves, lest they be disrupted by others.

It's very much a Prisoner's Dilemma. Legacy search and the open Internet was an equilibrium that only existed while the majority of people co-operated. Once you allow an individual actor the ability to create large chunks of the Internet, it dies. Your only option is to be that individual actor.

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