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Google is dead. Where do we go now?
521–530 of 873 posts
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#522[deleted]
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#523“Google is dead” feels overstated. What is actually breaking is the click based retrieval and attribution model once answers start getting synthesized upstream.
When discovery is mediated by LLMs, ranking a page is no longer sufficient because the system is not choosing a single best document. It is assembling an answer from spans that fit its internal representation of the problem, which quietly invalidates many of the assumptions SEO and ads were built on.
You can see this shift in the kinds of services being offered now. Instead of focusing on links, keywords, or bid optimization, teams are spending time on structured content that breaks cleanly into answerable fragments, on entity relationships and schema that make concepts legible to models, and on persona driven content that anticipates how questions will be interpreted rather than how pages will rank.
Measurement is shifting as well. Instead of impressions and clicks, people are running prompt level tests, checking whether their content shows up across different models, and tracking inclusion and citation patterns rather than traffic. In many cases, strong traditional pages disappear entirely from answers while smaller, better structured sources surface.
From the outside this looks like traffic declining. Internally it feels more like a loss of observability, where you cannot tell whether you were excluded, partially used, or summarized away into latent knowledge.
Google will likely face the same issue as AI Mode expands. Generating answers is not the hard part. Defining what visibility means when the retrieval layer is no longer exposed is.
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
Revenue generation via advertising is an emergent property of humanity?
100%, but it's not a direct 1:1 relationship. First you need agriculture so people tend to settle in one place. After ag comes more specialization, farmers need houses, graineries, and as society grows social specialists in which we'd call government. These things in an area typically cause the area to grow because of their stability. As they grow you get more than one person/business doing the same line of work and…
An emergent property of scaling civilization then, not just humanity specifically. It does make me wonder how alien advertising might differ.
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see. Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's…
I don’t see any obvious evidence of bot activity on that thread (and all of my spot checks strongly leaned human). Were some comments removed or something?
I noticed a few people on HN have started complaining that anyone arguing with them is a bot. I think it's a coping mechanism at finding people who challenge them, but maybe they've been on too many bot-infested forums lately, or are just young (that might overlap with both users of bot-infested forums and those who haven't had their ideas challenged much).
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whatsapp, viber, line and tg groups are very much a thing too. Everybody is a chat of their apartment complex and district it seems
Why doesn’t Signal have the same mindspace that these (imo) marginal apps have? It’s actually private. I wonder if people find it hard to use or something…
It does in the Bay Area
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#527I 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…
> my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions
I can attest to this based on my circle of friends and acquaintances. Email not so much but yeah WA etc. I think people are done putting content that matters to them on public platforms. So all we see now on FB/Insta is memes, influencers or ads.
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see. Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's…
Most of her friends are probably women. Try making an account with an obvious female name and you will see a marked difference on most social platforms I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.
I think some of us have a fair idea. And I think both sexes have problems that we could solve but continue to ignore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book)
Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever solve that, not while we're still monkeys.
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still mourn G+. It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy. It made deciding who to share what with the central, most visible part of how it worked. And that's probably part of why it failed. Was it hard to choose? Nope. But I guarantee you that if Facebook added a little "hey, are you sure you want to share this post publicly with the whole world under your real name? Yes/…
Discovery was bad. I was the one to push G+ and Gwave on my friends and it did not take at all.
I remember that the (initial) invite-only aspect played out in the worst way. Some FOMO angle works, but it ended up just ... not working, and who joins a social media wastleland?
Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
‘Numbers go up’ is the exact type of thinking that caused the death of search. From a user perspective, google search results are awful and almost always a complete waste of time.
Again, this "death of search" I hear so much about, but doesn't exist in the numbers. If search results are such a waste of time, why do people keep using Google? In ever-increasing numbers? What's the explanation there?
Dead internet theory explains this perfectly well.
Google search results are a wasteland of ads and content farms, with vanishingly small value for humans