51–60 of 466 posts
To me it seems either ... A) Google will do a good job of this, people will find their summaries more useful, and the web will evolve into a more closed system that better serves its users or ... B) They're gated AI community will suck, and people will start using a different search engine that better serves its users. My money isn't on A), but they do have a lot of clout so I wouldn't rule it out.
I'm confused how the strategy works in the long run. If fewer people are incentivized to build websites on novel topics, there will be less content in general and less training data... plus AI overview results see less ad conversions and therefor less ad revenue. Whats the long game? I get that the paradigm is changing but this seems like its not going to help them maintain their dominance.
I don't know if it's Google AB-testing something, but the summaries below usual search result entries (the non-AI ones) are unbelievably bad today. Sometimes the link is a Reddit or SO post, but the summary is from a reply/answer with no vote contradicting the highest-voted ones. It's conspiracy, but it feels like Google is actively making the usual search worse so everyone will use AI overview more.
Don’t worry when I track down most AI answers it is usually just some Redditor’s comment, which is quite scary when you think about it and Redditors in general.
It is not just about replacing search results with text blurbs generated on Alphabet premise either. They're making it so that unless you have an Android certified (Or Apple) smartphone you will not be a human being, you will be assumed to be a bot and blocked by their captchas.
Honestly the bigger problem for me. I use SearXNG, but DDG is acceptable, or people like Kagi. But if ReCAPTCHA won't consider me human unless i have a certified phone, having search alternatives doesn't matter -- the websites themselves are just gonna block me
As a website owner I have seen major upticks in viewership myself but really it hits hard when you see an Ai summary that is wrong and your sites there. The whole Ai for everything push unfortunatly will downskill the world I fear and nothing can be done about it.
I feel this. I asked a developer today a question about how our product is programmed to handle something, and he just sent me a summary from the internal AI assistant they've started using.
He used to provide really good, thoughtful answers, but now it's just copy/paste from the AI.
That would allow people to still let Google to access their site, but restrict its usage. Similar for open source projects on GitHub, etc.
We abrogated getting traffic to our websites to Google long ago. Mostly because Google was so good at it that the alternatives became significantly less useful. Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation. Anyone miss StumbleUpon?
There is also old-fashioned marketing. Go find your audience to be heard.
I'm confused how the strategy works in the long run. If fewer people are incentivized to build websites on novel topics, there will be less content in general and less training data... plus AI overview results see less ad conversions and therefor less ad revenue. Whats the long game? I get that the paradigm is changing but this seems like its not going to help them maintain their dominance.
We abrogated getting traffic to our websites to Google long ago. Mostly because Google was so good at it that the alternatives became significantly less useful. Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation. Anyone miss StumbleUpon?
(sorry, nit pick, but I don't your usage of 'abrogate' is quite correct here, you can't abrogate to something)
If Google stops driving traffic to websites, won't those websites stop allowing Google to crawl their pages? The pendulum might be in motion, but it seems like there should still be some natural equilibrium that it's heading to.
Communities have moved from public forums to private discords. Most of the major social media’s are unviewable without an account.