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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#481

Post by legitster »

Up to now, the Gemini results they display are often worse and less accurate than the same question asked in Gemini. I'm guessing SEO has so thoroughly cooked Google's search results that they are actually holding back Gemini as a brand.

It looks like the new experience works backwards - it's more or less a Gemini prompt that they then stuff a "search experience" into.

Obviously the search feed and ads are so integral to Google's business model that they probably can't confidently just step away from it.

Re: Google changes its search box

#482

Post by loloquwowndueo »

elictronic wrote: post #232
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a pretty ineffective manager: wasn’t buying the correct ad placement in the first place, used a personal card to sign up for an ostensibly corporate service, didn’t keep track of expiration dates for the card, and was also ignoring email notifications from Google about the expired card. Let me know if I’m missing any other reasons why this manager should be fired instantly.

Most large corporations have company credit cards. The user is likely referring to his card being the company card.

Nah. Pretty sure he was using a personal card - corporate finance dept would likely better track where each card is being used and their expiration dates to avoid this happening. Also this better tracks with the rest of his sloppy behavior.

Re: Google changes its search box

#483

Post by rchaud »

afavour wrote: post #346
nine_k wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your site is all about disseminating information (like Wikipedia), then Google would provide a free mirror of sorts. If your site is about your product, Google won't be able to serve the sign-up page from AI; the traffic would come your way. Same for a site that sell something: the traffic you're interested in would arrive at your checkout page. Paid-content sites and ad-supported sites are screwed though, on top…

The really confusing part about the ad-supported sites is that most of them are supported by Google's ad products. So Google is eating their own lunch here.

Search Engine Result Page (SERP) ads shown on Google itself are far more valuable than display ads that get shown on random websites. Google has been slashing payouts to those sites for over a decade. More recentlt, they've been slashing search impressions to those sites as well. With search engine ads + Youtube ads + Play Store ads, they can probably cut out the third - party site ads business altogether and not miss a beat.

Re: Google changes its search box

#484

Post by xmcp123 »

data-ottawa wrote: post #299
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.

reCaptcha is a pretty strong wall to allow only Google to index websites, especially now that you need device verification. Throw in Cloudflare too. There’s not much room to squeeze in when your competitors hold the keys to 15 million top websites.

I write a lot of scrapers. Both of those are pretty trivial to bypass at scale.

Re: Google changes its search box

#485

Post by seriocomic »

mplanchard wrote: post #463

I know a lot of regular people who hate this, but Kagi can be a hard sell for regular people. What are y’all’s recommendations for free search engines at the moment? I used to rec DDG, but I feel like their results are much worse than Kagi’s at present

Happy Kagi user - what 'sold' me (albeit already working in the space) was the adage of "if you're not paying, then you're the product" - having my results being manipulated to be constantly advertised to was something I was prepared to pay a token amount to avoid.

Re: Google changes its search box

#486

Post by krackers »

dullcrisp wrote: post #480
divbzero wrote: post #445

It’s diverged quite a bit from the original: ... Search the web using Google! 10 results 30 results 100 results Index contains ~25 million pages (soon to be much bigger) ... https://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.sta...

When did they change the "query" to q?

Saving bytes on the wire?

Re: Google changes its search box

#488

Post by xmcp123 »

jgalt212 wrote: post #139

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.

I have to imagine that eventually ads will be integrated in, or they will change the layout so the ads are side by side with the AI and the SERP results underneath.

Re: Google changes its search box

#490

Post by rchaud »

thisisit wrote: post #251
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.

Or more likely move towards substack or newsletters where the pitch is - Don’t let the LLM chose the output for you, go directly to our Substack/newsletter instead. This will happen especially with things like conspiracy theories because the choice might be to pollute the output or share the general consensus. Like searches for Apollo landing conspiracy theories can either chose to present “alternate facts” so that p…

Newsletters have a webview fallback with a public URL that makes them just as susceptible to scraping. If that ever gets fixed, Google will just scrape the full-text content in Gmail instead.

Newsletters have been around forever and never taken off like the open web and free blogging have. Slapping a Stripe integration on the backend hasn't led to Substack becoming a sustainable business not propped up by VC cash.

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