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Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

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Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#441

Post by bradgessler »

sersi wrote: post #376
paradox460 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's intentional. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ Traditional search still works. Ask anyone who uses kagi. Google makes more money (for now) with garbage search, so they're optimizing for garbage. Thing is, garbage in, garage out, and it will eventually catch up with them (might already have given the disparity between Gemini and Claude/cgpt)

As an aside, I tried to love ddg before using kagi but I'd always revert to google with !g and end up not finding anything because google has sucked for the past 5 years I've been using kagi and I've noticed that the only time I ever switch to google is for things that are truly local to where I am at the moment (restaurants, etc..). Kagi is really great. I've also been testing perplexity and I'm not that convinced y…

The thing I don’t like about Kagi is how you have to be logged in with an email to search.

I wish they’d setup something like Mullvad where you get an account number, pay for said account, and that’s it.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#442

Post by jazzypants »

glenstein wrote: post #395
Lewton wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A week ago, I was looking for the name of a semi obscure late 90ies computer game. Google could not help me given the description i gave Described it to ChatGPT, and we had a back and forth where I explained why the games it suggested me weren’t right, it eventually found the correct game (Nocturne) and was able to explain to me that half of the things I remembered from the game were just plain wrong, and that’s why…

I've had a conversation almost exactly like this too, about an obscure dos based 3d fighting game. And some pessimistic instinct tells me I should worry, like this capability will be optimized away in future versions. It's like that precise pang of satisfaction is tied to a jaded feeling that I can't trust it to last if it ultimately depends on infrastructure and incentives that will lead openai toward eating the wor…

Let me guess: One Must Fall 2097 or FX Fighter?

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#443

Post by d0mine »

marcus0x62 wrote: post #277
d0mine wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hospitals are increasingly owned by insurance companies. The customers are not doctors but shareholders. That is why a cure is seen as a threat.

1) I was making an analogy. 2) I took at look at the most recent CMS data[0] I could find (from 2022,) and out of the top ten owners of hospitals in the United States, zero are payers. I only recognize about half of the parties in the 11-20 part of the list, but of the ones I do recognize, one is related to a payer. I can find no data to support your assertion that insurance companies are purchasing hospitals. They a…

Hospitals vs. physicians groups is a distinction without a difference in this context (people responsible for making you better). It is like on paper J&J is not responsible for cancer its baby powder causes (some bankrupt entity left holding the bag).

To make sure I'm not misremembering, I've asked deepseek in web search mode: "Is it true that hospitals are increasingly owned by insurance companies in US" It says: "In summary, the ownership of hospitals by insurance companies is a growing trend in the U.S. healthcare system, driven by the desire to control costs and integrate care delivery. While this model offers potential efficiencies, it also raises significant concerns about the quality of care and the balance of power in the healthcare industry." I've looked at several links it provided and they are consistent with the conclusion. Try it for yourself.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#444

Post by d0mine »

lostlogin wrote: post #265
d0mine wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hospitals are increasingly owned by insurance companies. The customers are not doctors but shareholders. That is why a cure is seen as a threat.

That doesn’t make sense - a sick patient costs the shareholders money.

One would think so. Unless there are programs that pay you for sick patients (risk adjustment) and you control how much you are willing to spent on a patient.

I've made a mistake of consuming healthcare related content due to the recent ceo assassination. Do not recommend.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#445

Post by squiggleblaz »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #389
jerf wrote: post #211

Don't bet on AI staying clean. A lot of HN readers conceptualize the forces attacking the integrity of the search results as just some isolated people taking occasional potshots, and then maybe slinking away if their trick gets blocked. It is probably a lot more accurate to visualize the SEO industry as a Dark Google. Roughly as well resourced, with many smart people working on it full time, day in, day out, with inf…

> And if Dark Google has not yet figured out how to scam AI... it is only a matter of time. There is one thing the AI companies have going for them that Google doesn't: They don't have 90% market share. That's a huge problem that only Google has, because if your black hat SEO stops working against Google, you dedicate all your efforts to fixing it until it does, and then Google has to win against the combined efforts…

If beating SEO was something a company with a different algorithm could do, then it would have happened by now. Google remains the default search engine because the alternatives are perhaps even more susceptible to SEO than Google, so there just isn't the motivation to use them. Why do I have to go to the second or third page to find an answer with a naive search on DDG?

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#446

Post by nicbou »

carlosjobim wrote: post #310
nicbou wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guide immigrants who settle in Germany

Have you noticed a decline in sales from AIs? I'd think that for such a service, people who don't want to pay wouldn't pay you anyway even if they went to your website first for the information, and people who do want to pay will find your business through the AI.

I don’t sell my services. My income comes from affiliate links on some pages (e.g. for choosing a first bank). A vast majority of the content is not monetised.

I noticed a drop in traffic, despite having added a lot of valuable guides this year. The traffic per page is way down, and only for Google.

You are correct that people don’t pay for this, even when they email me and I personally assist them. There’s just an expectation that things on the internet are free and that’s fine.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#447

Post by nicbou »

JustExAWS wrote: post #283
mrkramer wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and others are the missed opportunities for the Open Web. Google nor any other search engine can't crawl their information, so Web users who are not on the aforementioned sites are missing a lot of useful information and social dynamics that would otherwise take place on the Open Web.

At least for Facebook, if the information is not publicly available via Google it’s because the content creator has decided not to make their content public. Google very much can crawl information on Facebook and Instagram that people have made “public” As far as “social dynamics”, do you remember Cambridge Analytics? Why would I want my social graph to be publicly available. It’s bad enough that people have their co…

If most information on Facebook is private, it’s because everything else gets spammed to hell. Same with discord. They are not a replacement to public, curated information put out by relatively knowledgeable people.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#448

Post by BehindBlueEyes »

BoorishBears wrote: post #440
jvanderbot wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but yes, when it asks questions they are trivial disambiguation of mainly language, and never information seeking like you might expect when doing more than superficial investigation

If you can't tell if I'm being sarcastic about an LLM asking clarifying questions, you are possibly not great at using LLMs. Prompting isn't necessarily the career some people wanted was sold as, but it's not a bad idea to practice a bit and build a sense of what a clear and effective prompt looks like. - To be clear, I get telling people it's a "you" problem every time an issue with LLMs comes up isn't helpful... bu…

I think it depends a lot on what llm and tooling you have access to.

I had great results prototyping agents at work for specific tasks and answering in a specific style including asking appropriate clarification questions.

But at home with just free/local options? I've nowhere near the same settings to play with and only had very mixed results. I couldn't get most models to follow simple instructions at all.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#449

Post by BlueTemplar »

phil21 wrote: post #384
Lewton wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A week ago, I was looking for the name of a semi obscure late 90ies computer game. Google could not help me given the description i gave Described it to ChatGPT, and we had a back and forth where I explained why the games it suggested me weren’t right, it eventually found the correct game (Nocturne) and was able to explain to me that half of the things I remembered from the game were just plain wrong, and that’s why…

This is great, never thought to use ChatGPT for this use. I have been trying to remember a game from extremely early memories where I was able to play it for a single weekend at an uncle's house in my youth when my parents were out of town. Bugged me on and off for the better part of a decade and I couldn't figure it out from describing it to google - the only thing I knew for sure were a few graphical UI screens sea…

I must now point out how, paralleling this article, MoO 1 is known for its elegant simplicity compared to most of the game of the 4X genre it created / popularized.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#450

Post by GeoAtreides »

jayd16 wrote: post #190
Beijinger wrote: post #183

This! "I don't want to watch a 10-minute video for a quick answer." And this: "OpenAI's search is becoming Google in the 2000s, if it can remain trustworthy." The problem I see: People use OpenAI/Perplexity for knowledge. Not to seek website. I think sooner or later, most website will block AI crawlers. What does a website gets out of it?

I'm still waiting for the AI service that turns those 10 minute videos into a text tutorial with photos. I think it's pretty damning that it's not a built in YouTube feature by now.

let's go kantian and imagine everyone would use such a service

why would someone create a 10 minute video if no one would watch it and they would get no money for it?

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