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No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

bradt.ca

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Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#71

Post by JustExAWS »

fabian2k wrote: post #64
kleiba wrote: post #13

The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…

But AI is also going to kill some of your positive examples. Stack Overflow for example is in a steep decline, only a small fraction of questions are posted today compared to the peak. And the effects are more than financial, so even non-profit examples like forums would be hit. If new people don't discover your site with useful user-created content, they won't contribute to it. You're also cutting off the pipeline f…

Stack overflow was a shit show way before LLMs became popular.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#72

Post by tehjoker »

I don't understand why all these companies want to replace links to human curated high quality information with slightly more convenient to access AI hallucinations. Whenever I have an important question, the AI generated answer is only useful to the extent that it provides links (i.e. search).

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#73

Post by panstromek »

watwut wrote: post #27
kleiba wrote: post #13

The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…

AI will kill the volunteers run websites and blogs faster then it will kill corporate ones. It will kill free information first. It will basically finish the process google search engine started when it started to require seo to find stuff. People will have less or no motivation to create them, because well, why would they? It will be just a food for AI of some corporation. And more importantly, people won't be findi…

I have no intention to stop writing on my blog for AI reasons and I don't even see why I should. I suspect a majority of people who post here are the same.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#74

Post by verdverm »

fabian2k wrote: post #64
kleiba wrote: post #13

The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…

But AI is also going to kill some of your positive examples. Stack Overflow for example is in a steep decline, only a small fraction of questions are posted today compared to the peak. And the effects are more than financial, so even non-profit examples like forums would be hit. If new people don't discover your site with useful user-created content, they won't contribute to it. You're also cutting off the pipeline f…

Stuck overflow may not be the greatest example. I have switch to using GitHub discussions and Discord on the "where to get help for my projects" side of things. I ignore SO when it comes to support. Lots of other open source projects doing similar.

This trend was happening before LLMs entered the arena.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#76

Post by znort_ »

danielfalbo wrote: post #65

We just need to go back at reading books in libraries

books will be around for a while.

but i wouldn't mind getting back to the internet of the 80/90s where you could easily find more genuine content and less aggregators, replicators, marketeers and clickfarms. if that's "killing the internet" then it couldn't happen soon enough (i guess marketeers will not go away no matter what, that's a given).

the fear of decline of original content doesn't seem serious. much of what there is now is endless regurgitation anyway. while most of the free stuff nowadays is indeed just noise, the most valuable, original and quality stuff is free, has always been, and it's there. people have been contributing interesting stuff for multiple reasons and in multiple ways for decades, and still do; it is just buried under tons of rubbish. i see no reason why they would stop. if anything, a less noisy internet could be an incentive, and if gaps in knowledge form that will be even more reason to share and contribute, and things like stackoverflow will come back once llms become obsolete enough.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#77

Post by verdverm »

quectophoton wrote: post #58
VladStanimir wrote: post #29

I use copilot for search, in one of two ways. The first is as an advanced search where i use the answer to gauge if it found what i am looking for then follow the links for details. The second is when i am looking for some information i once knew and i remember some details, like the title of a book i remember the plot points too, then when i find it i go do something with that information.

A fuzzy search engine with a better "semantic index"[1] than classic search engines, but the trade-off is that instead of returning links it returns a generated soup of words that are semantically close to your "query". Mostly useful when you're only looking for the presence of words or terms in the output (including the presence of related words), rather than a coherent explanation with the quality of human-written…

> the trade-off is that instead of returning links it returns a generated soup of words that are semantically close to your "query".

I get links in my responses from Gemini. I would also not describe the response as soup, the answers are often quite specific and in the terms of my prompt instead of the inputs (developer queries are a prime example)

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#78

Post by kingstnap »

tehjoker wrote: post #72

I don't understand why all these companies want to replace links to human curated high quality information with slightly more convenient to access AI hallucinations. Whenever I have an important question, the AI generated answer is only useful to the extent that it provides links (i.e. search).

Human curated high quality information on google is getting rare, its as simple as that.

There is a renaissance of extremely high quality YouTube videos from creators with very few subscribers. Particularly in Math and Science content.

But the general web is full of a lot really bad websites that effectively just waste people's time.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#79

Post by verdverm »

tehjoker wrote: post #72

I don't understand why all these companies want to replace links to human curated high quality information with slightly more convenient to access AI hallucinations. Whenever I have an important question, the AI generated answer is only useful to the extent that it provides links (i.e. search).

Most of the high quality human content has already been drowned out by the low quality human content for clicks. AI does the filtering process for me now. I'm using AI because greedy humans already made it bad and it's a really good tool to have in the current environment

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#80

Post by duncanfwalker »

p_ing wrote: post #75

Injecting ads into answers will be the next step for the search market. Reddit is doing it already. And unlike reddit post or comment ads, it may be very difficult to block.

Oh god, this has just made me reflect that we're in the golden age of generative AI - not in technology terms, in user experience terms. We're in the period where the major products are competing against each other before they switch into enshitfication mode. You're certainly right, there's going to be ads in the answers and probably worse. I'm imagining companies paying to introduce ideas as subtle subtexts to millions of unrelated answers or platforms deliberately engineering the ux to maximise understanding of our drives and preferences purely so it can be sold.
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