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Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

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Re: Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

#22

Post by [deleted] »

airza wrote: post #17
chias wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and it's wild to celebrate innovation that was literally default behavior 20 years ago, which they themselves worked hard to break. Used to be you'd look at your server logs and see referrer headers of google.com/?q=search+terms Then they broke that (deliberately, well before cross origin header concerns were a thing) so you'd have to sign up for their webmaster tools.

I don’t think google should be held responsible for “breaking” this. It was crazy that one website got to see what i was doing on a second completely unrelated website.

[deleted]

Re: Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

#23

Post by redsymbol »

The most interesting part of the official announcement [0]:

"As people gravitate toward firsthand perspectives..."

That implies Google is seeing a shift away from people relying on just AI-generated summaries, and checking the cited sources more.

I have certainly found that when I ask a chat tool something, and then go to the human-written source webpage, it's not uncommon I get a different insight than what the AI implied. Not always of course, but often enough that I have noticed it.

[0] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/07/search-con...

Re: Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

#26

Post by swatcoder »

redsymbol wrote: post #23

The most interesting part of the official announcement [0]: "As people gravitate toward firsthand perspectives..." That implies Google is seeing a shift away from people relying on just AI-generated summaries, and checking the cited sources more. I have certainly found that when I ask a chat tool something, and then go to the human-written source webpage, it's not uncommon I get a different insight than what the AI i…

> "a different insight"

What a generous euphemism. Depending on the topic, it's not unusual to see Google AI search referencing links that indicate the exact opposite of what it presents in its prose.

So many of these tools are presented as if they're doing something you'd intuitively expect of a human operator, like collating search results and then summarizing them in this case, but the actual operation of them is so alien to us that our intuitions don't apply and these presentations are all but fraudulent.

Because it's presentation cites references, and because those references sometimes reinforce the expression of the AI prose, we grant it trust, but it doesn't use those references in the way a human would and so the relevance of them being cited is radically different (and weaker) than we're accustomed to.

The closest example in human behavior might be the rushed, naive student who just pastes citations into an already written paper at the last minute, but even that's an anthropomorphism that misrepresents the alien ways in which the tool works.

Re: Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

#27

Post by AlienRobot »

redsymbol wrote: post #23

The most interesting part of the official announcement [0]: "As people gravitate toward firsthand perspectives..." That implies Google is seeing a shift away from people relying on just AI-generated summaries, and checking the cited sources more. I have certainly found that when I ask a chat tool something, and then go to the human-written source webpage, it's not uncommon I get a different insight than what the AI i…

I don't think that means anything. It's just some random words to add pretense to an arbitrary change.

I mean, just stop to think about it. You have a Youtube account, you post videos. Analytics shows traffic from Google but can't show you the keywords.

At one point, Google merged Youtube with Google+. Just did it outright without asking anybody.

Youtubers link their Youtube accounts with Google AdSense.

You can link your Youtube account with your Google Ads account if you want to advertise.

One of the latest features added to the Search Console was... an AI chatbot.

So Google showed us they can link anything with Youtube when it wants, and they can add new features to GSC if it's AI, but for some reason showing Google search terms for Youtube channels took 20 years.

I wish I knew a word like enshittification but for when something improves but at a rate so slow you don't even feel like celebrating it anymore. I think I'd use such word a lot...

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