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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#201

Post by monooso »

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…

That's some catch, that catch-22.

Re: Google changes its search box

#202

Post by maccard »

elevation wrote: post #182
wvenable wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What stories are they?

Re: Google changes its search box

#203

Post by BrunoBernardino »

charles_f wrote: post #39
hootz wrote: post #28

That's why Kagi is the only subscription I don't actively think about cancelling. For the love of god, keep me away from Google and all of THAT. If Kagi goes down the same path, I'll selfhost something or just return to monkey and use link indexes and the favorites list + the native search of websites.

Self hosting a web search engine is probably quite a feat

You can self-host Marginalia [1] or Hister [2], for example. Takes up some space, but it's totally doable. Your biggest problem (assuming you have disk space) will be crawling.

[1] : https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch

[2] : https://github.com/asciimoo/hister

Re: Google changes its search box

#204

Post by baggachipz »

raincole wrote: post #192
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.

Kagi relies on Google search.

True in large part, but they've been diversifying their providers in the expectation that Google shut everybody out.

Re: Google changes its search box

#205

Post by cesarb »

alt227 wrote: post #161
sublinear wrote: post #42

While I can certainly see this upsetting some people, I'm not sure if this is necessarily "bad". Web 2.0 was Yahoo Pipes, public APIs, IFTTT, etc. while this new "Web 3.0" acknowledges that those capabilities would rather be gatekept behind AI instead of entirely removed. At the very least we do get some of that functionality back without resorting to scraping anymore and it's now accessible to the layperson. I would…

Web 3.0 was very famously empty blockchain promises. I guess that makes this Web 4.0? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3

No, Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

Re: Google changes its search box

#206

Post by terribleperson »

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.

As a user and fan of kagi, the problem with kagi is that it reveals how badly degraded the web is.

The vast majority of original content is now in one or another social network or on discord. News articles are an exception, though the news has its own problems. Some wikis still exist and are actively maintained, of course, but not a ton. If it's a topic that's academically studied you might find information in papers, but those have poor web visibility and are better located with specialty tools. LLMs seem to be quite good at locating papers, though.

Re: Google changes its search box

#207

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

ivraatiems wrote: post #27
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'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.

LLM hallucinations are better than Google results these days and I'm not even trying to tell a silly joke. It's more useful for an LLM to lie to my face about 10% of my query, be suspicious and dig out that useful information than to try to parse the absolute slop returned by a normal, non-AI Google query.

I don't comprehend how the average person gets any useful information out of Google.

Re: Google changes its search box

#209

Post by themagician »

Search doesn’t work well anymore anyway. Half of what used to be searchable has either been consolidated or is gated.

Gmail search doesn’t work well either. It simply doesn’t find things. Almost as if they have stopped indexing and repurposed resources towards LLMs.

And whatever there is left to index and search has been completely overrun with slop.

Search is over. Internet as we knew it is over. Something new has emerged in its place, and we are still calling the new thing the old thing.

Re: Google changes its search box

#210

Post by edelbitter »

cortesoft wrote: post #56
Zigurd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there's a niche for a product for search nerds. Something that leans into inverted indexes like the classic Lexis/Nexis search. But it's got to have Google-like coverage.

Niche + Google-like coverage is not very economically viable. To store and update a search index of that size requires a lot of resources, and being niche means you don’t have a lot of resources. Very few of the smaller search engines actually do their own indexing for exactly this reason.

I wonder if the same coverage as before is now more economically feasible. The internet has gotten .. smaller, lately.
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