261–270 of 961 posts
Time to pay for Kagi everyone!
I'd never pay for, let alone use , a search engine* that has an official Discord group. * Kagi seems to just scrape and provide a mix of other search engine's results, meaning it's really just a metasearch engine.
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.
Not a stretch to go from there to “Of course the model should recommend Mountain Dew. It’s got electrolytes!”
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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. But with google crawling your site, you also might not get any traffic. I may be strange and unusual, but I just have never cared about my Google ranking. I know this makes me out of the ordinary among site owners but I have been humming along fine. This certainly will disrupt traffic but for some of my sites I honestly think this is a good thing. I…
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> allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites As far as I know, you don't have a choice. They have no obligation to respect your wishes, and LLMs are legally allowed to scrape & republish your content.
> They have no obligation to respect your wishes I have no obligation to not send all scraper-looking traffic to a black hole full of zip bombs.
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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. But with google crawling your site, you also might not get any traffic. I may be strange and unusual, but I just have never cared about my Google ranking. I know this makes me out of the ordinary among site owners but I have been humming along fine. This certainly will disrupt traffic but for some of my sites I honestly think this is a good thing. I…
Do you depend on site visitors for making a living? That's what this is about.
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Google famously dragged on development of Glass for more than a decade stubbornly failing to admit that nobody wants to look like a cyborg the entire time only to be swept aside by Meta when they built a device that was glasses first with some recording and interactions built in. If their leadership has an itch they'll scratch it until it's raw.
Was this a difference in strategy or more random luck having to do with fashion trends in different time periods? Did Meta patiently wait until exaggerated glass frames were viable in the market? Or did they get lucky? Or did they have some Machiavellian plot to steer this fashion for years and pave the way for their product..? ;-)
I think wearable tech is awesome and was interested in this (I was much more interested in the earlier pendant projectors though) but the fact that you're constantly reminding people they're being recorded without their consent is just a big issue. The meta glasses themselves might suffer a similar fate if hacks to disable the LED become commonplace. Much like Sony's (I think?) nightvision cameras if stuff like this gets abused by creeps it will isolate you to use it yourself even for perfectly reasonable intentions.
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You can ask them to cite their sources. It's very good practice to do so, and to check those sources, because I've found that about 30-40% of the time their source doesn't support their answer at all.
If it's wrong 2 out of 5 times, why even waste your time going to it in the first place? That's a massive failure rate.
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…
Maybe I'm weird, but I find AI incredibly useful. I've barely used Google for over 2 years. I barely driven myself in a year. I haven't written code in 6 months.
It makes me wonder why like 90% of the apps on my phone exist. I just want everything to be markdown files, skills, MCPs/API and then a nice TUI or voice to text.
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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?
Free speculation: I could see a future where Google populates a footer on results with the website logos of the sources. Presumably, the new web will require users to memorize websites/brands and go directly to those sites if they see a lot of their results are being provided by one source. Websites may go back to being simply labors of love.
Similarly, if I use Gemini uses a website for an answer, it should pay something to those sites for the information it gathered. Sites would need to sign up to earn via Google, and I'd imagine there would be a certain threshold to cross to make it worth cutting checks... but that would make all these AI search tools feel much less scummy while providing site owners an incentive to keep sharing information on the internet.
Where a model like this would get messy is with sites like reddit. It's a very popular source for AI search, but the value comes from the users, not the platform itself.
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You can ask them to cite their sources. It's very good practice to do so, and to check those sources, because I've found that about 30-40% of the time their source doesn't support their answer at all.
If it's wrong 2 out of 5 times, why even waste your time going to it in the first place? That's a massive failure rate.