Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google changes its search box

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 961 posts

Re: Google changes its search box

#241

Post by franze »

ekidd wrote: post #65
simonw wrote: post #10

Nilay Patel has been talking about "Google Zero" - the moment when Google effectively stops sending any traffic to other sites - for a few years now: https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...

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?

well its already happening and people are fighting over traffic crumbs already, they call it GEO

Re: Google changes its search box

#242

Post by oh_no »

coldpie wrote: post #149
ekidd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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.

except google does respect robots.txt so you do have a choice?

Re: Google changes its search box

#243

Post by chickenbutts »

nostrademons wrote: post #162
nilamo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I'm going to an LLM (as with websearch before it), it's usually because I don't know the answer, don't have anyone close to me that knows the answer, and can't pay anyone (or don't know who to pay) for the answer. In other words, my failure rate without the LLM would be 100%.

[dead]

Re: Google changes its search box

#244

Post by ndiddy »

sonofhans wrote: post #155
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Google search results have gotten so poor (and other engines aren’t any better), that I’d rather just ask an online LLM for what I’m looking for. I was once very good at advanced Google search queries but they seem to no longer respect such queries - either showing irrelevant results or none at all (that should exist). I don’t love LLMs, but they seem to not make up stuff very often these days and usually cit…

Kagi is better. Kagi is damn good, as much a revelation as the Google of old. Not free, though.

I've used Kagi for a few years but it's gotten significantly worse for me the last year or so. I'm curious if anyone else has seen the same thing happen. I'll search for something and usually see a bunch of barely relevant SEO sites. Avoiding this is why I started paying for Kagi in the first place, so it's been disappointing to see. Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/) seems to be better at finding content written by humans rather than SEO specialists, but it's not a silver bullet (for example, the last time I checked they didn't index non-English sites).

Re: Google changes its search box

#245

Post by lacewing »

thedelanyo wrote: post #126
ekidd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites? Mention

It's worse than that. They train their models preferentially on what they consider to be high-quality data. But if you look at the usual "references" on search queries, they're often just a post-hoc BS justification that links to spam blogs or Tiktok videos.

Re: Google changes its search box

#246

Post by Hackbraten »

BrunoBernardino wrote: post #195
Hackbraten wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you realize that Kagi only works well because it uses a (paid) third-party API which behind the scenes does a classic Google search, scrapes its results in real time, throws out the ads, and then returns the cleaned-up results. If Google Search changes, then Kagi's search will be impacted directly.

This isn't entirely true, because they use more than one search index.

The other search indexes are largely negligible in comparison: [0]

> This is not a competitive market. It is a monopoly with a distant second place.

> The search index is irreplaceable infrastructure. Building a comparable one from scratch is like building a parallel national railroad. Microsoft spent roughly $100 billion over 20 years on Bing and still holds single-digit share. If Microsoft cannot close the gap, no startup can do it alone.

[0]: https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search

Re: Google changes its search box

#247

Post by lyu07282 »

BrunoBernardino wrote: post #179
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.

Alternatively, we can collectively "fight back" by not using Google and teaching others around us to do so as well. There are plenty of decent [1] and great (better) alternatives, where you're not the product [2]! [1]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=fr... [2]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=co...

There is actually another way that was just hinted at a few days ago demonstrated by the EU courts reaffirming a law from 2019 against Meta, just force google et al to compensate publishers:

https://www.epceurope.eu/post/epc-welcomes-landmark-cjeu-rul...

Re: Google changes its search box

#249

Post by thefourthchime »

pclowes wrote: post #22

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.

Re: Google changes its search box

#250

Post by nozzlegear »

victor106 wrote: post #199
Andrex wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>I could see a future where Google populates a footer on results with the website logos of the sources. ChatGPT/Claude does this today. I barely click or care for the source when they already have me the info I wanted. My speculation is all information worth anything is going to be behind some kind of wall.

> ChatGPT/Claude does this today. I barely click or care for the source when they already have me the info I wanted.

Maybe I'm just #builtdifferent, but I click these a lot. Especially if I'm trying to research or make a decision on something, I want the actual source and not the potentially-fudged summary.

Post reply on HN