That site loosing revenue mentioned in the post (https://bigtop.co.za/) doesn't even load for me.
Google is dead. Where do we go now?
191–200 of 873 posts
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#192I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself. The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch. As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you). What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where…
> The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
And to add to this, the dark pattern of the time was to register in the Phone Book as “AAA Your Real Business Name” which was exactly what my first job did.
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want a list of links that I have to then click through in a kind of Russian roulette—hoping I don't get some kind of SEO crap.
Google seems relatively good at never giving me SEO crap near the top of most of my search results. And a list of links to original sources or close to it is precisely what I do want. If you want an LLM to generate an answer from its training data, that's fine, but go use a different search engine instead of demanding that the one many of us have relied on for decades has to do that.
My experience was quite the opposite, and the reason why I switched to Kagi: any search that was anywhere adjacent to a product would be almost nothing but SEO garbage. Non-product related searches were better, but I also think they had noticeably degraded over the past several years to a decade.
And I actually agree with the last point. While there are entire categories of questions that I now prefer an LLM to to any search engine, when I want a search engine, I specifically do not want LLM summaries, which is another thing I like about Kagi: they allow me to choose when I want to see an LLM summary and to turn off summaries altogether.
(this is really not meant to be an ad for Kagi, I presume that most HN users are familiar with it already and don't need yet another random endorsement, but I honestly don't know how to talk about my experiences with search over the past several years and my dissatisfaction with google without talking about it)
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#194I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself. The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch. As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you). What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where…
In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regula…
It's the people with money, houses, and kids that departed the 'simple local' lifestyle when the Internet and social media become large. It's them that are re-discovering the joys of the simple local lifestyle.
The simple local lifestyle is that which was lived by all of humanity for all of history up until the last ~75 years (give or take).
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#195The way people get information online is changing rapidly. I run a local makerspace. It is not quite the same thing as a local entertainment business, but there are certainly some similarities. We are local, and we are very event-based. For the last 10 years, the way we would get new members was to host Meetups. Meetups are slowly bringing in fewer members. When I ask tour guests how they found out about us, they rec…
The question is how LLMs will get that kind of information in the future, if not from the web. By scraping TikTok and Discords?
I anticipate a cottage industry of “AI optimization” types similar to the current SEO crowd. I have not seen too much of it yet, though.
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kagi is building their own index. There are also other open indexes. Over time these can replace the big corporate indexes. The hard truth is that the big players in search are dead. They are now the yahoo of search, with landing pages full of ads and results that are primarily ads.
See their revenue (number of paid users is not a secret): something around $7M annually? It was half of that not so long ago (glad, that the userbase is growing). With their current pricing they are out of their league of having any full-blown index, crawlers, people, what have you. I would say year ago I was amazed how they are alive at all (unless I am missing something in their funding).
A little over 15 years ago you could index the web with a small cluster. I remember people doing doing it with Cassandra or Elasticsearch. I'm sure you'd need a much bigger cluster, but outside video and images I imagine it's still doable even for a small organization, especially if you're filtering out content farms. Plus, there are many organizations interested in having access to an index, and I'm pretty more than a few currently running their own index and selling to analytics firms.
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#197Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bang on. It's advertising, so literally looking at where people are getting their info from is the way to go. Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results. The answer is self evident. If, before, you were relying on clicks resulting from go…
> Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results. I haven't asked Google a question it has failed to provide a more than adequate answer to in ... months? years? And on all my devices, I run google search with &udm=14, so I am not talking abo…
Maybe because you have the personalization disabled. My complaint isn't the SEO stuff; that hits me when I search on a tech item I want to learn (I get slammed with crappy vendor blogs), or food recipes (long story about a Sicilian Grandma before the recipe at the end). My complaint with Google is it fights me on keywords, and I have to constantly add quotes, add minuses, and it seems to silently override it.
It's easier to add Reddit at the end to get a more accurate question repeated, and skip the sponsored SEO crap.
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#199I think the author intended the title to be, "Google Ads is dead, Where do I promote my business now?" When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief). They mention running ads on tiktok or instagram but no mention of youtube ads... Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful. So my next steps would be, Reddit Ads Youtube Ads Instagram Ads Increase…
I’d suggest that the title should be, “Competition for Google AdWords is so strong that unsophisticated advertisers can no longer get a good return. Where do I promote my business now?”
I have a feeling that it is mostly unsophisticated advertisers bidding up the price of AdWords.
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#200Perhaps, click fraud? Is there any new powerful platform/aggregator in your market?
I don't know what click fraud is but it's a very small entertainment agency market in Durban, South Africa's 3rd largest city. We only advertised locally (specified in AdWords)
Click fraud is malicious activity where someone runs bots that click on ads for specific category keywords. For example, if this is a villa rental website, someone like competitors or a large platform, might use ad agencies that perform click fraud against the villa rental website to exhaust their budget and therefore get more traffic themselves. In the case of an entertainment agency, it might be other competitors interested in your traffic.
The first step you might take is to check that you are not advertising with AdWords partner networks, as they might be the reason for the clicks on your ads.
Second, you can check your server logs and verify clicks from Google Ads, especially the geolocation of those clicks. If they are not from your region and the visitors perform no action after viewing the first page, this is most probably click fraud.
I use our own open-source security platform (I'm a co-founder) for this purpose (1), as it's server-side and works even if bots aren't running JS. However, your website analytics might also be useful if they can collect events without JS.