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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#721

Post by conradfr »

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?

Who can lobby the EU for the right to abstain a website from being used for training data?

Re: Google changes its search box

#722

Post by Rp8yXmdmr »

abirch wrote: post #196
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.

Here is what I think the future web may look like: 1) Sites will have mcp / APIs for LLMs. So that when I ask my AI Agent du jour. It can call any of the sites where I have subscriptions for information. 2) Sites that are passion projects will be harvested by our LLM overlords. 3) Sites that people don't type into their web browser and need ad revenue will die. 4) SEO will finally die.

> 4) SEO will finally die.

I recently search for some generic home appliance term and google's AI Overview blurb ended with "For more information about repairing home devices check samsung.com" (non clickable)

I am sure SEO companies will claim they can make that happen on purpose, and people will pay them for that.

Re: Google changes its search box

#723

Post by iLoveOncall »

imoverclocked wrote: post #37

I don't trust facts from LLMs. When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources. As soon as a number is involved, I do my best to not even look at the AI output. Even though the result is often good and combines information from multiple sources, it can also get things wrong by combining information from different eras or just plain outdated advice. AFAICT, without primary sources, the result…

> Even though the result is often good

From the past hundreds of Google searches I've done where I got an AI summary, I'd say the result is actually rarely good. At the very least 80% of the outputs contain critical mistakes, often exactly about the specific thing you're asking.

Re: Google changes its search box

#724

Post by RealCodingOtaku »

Most of all websites will lose their traffic, some already did.

- People using the search console see the drop

- Product owners scratch their head

- Investors backing out because not having many visitors

- Small bloggers adding more ads because their revenue is dropping

- Sponsors backing out from their blogs because it's loosing more visitors

- Small web crumbling

- People google what is happening

- Google says 'The "small web"—independent blogs, personal forums, and niche websites—is disappearing due to corporate consolidation, aggressive AI-driven search indexing, and high maintenance costs. These factors have pushed independent creators onto walled-garden social media apps, leaving personal websites to suffer from "link rot".'

Re: Google changes its search box

#725

Post by nicbou »

RyanHamilton wrote: post #699
mrighele wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those who won’t were doing it for the money. Those who continue are those who do it for passion, or those whose recipe is just a way to attract people to their business (e.g. kitchenware company). I don’t think it is necessarily bad, the quantity will decrease but the quality may even improve

I built a passion reference site. A large part of that passion came from knowing and talking to the people I was helping. One person emailing or saying thanks would later help power me through to create more useful articles. Enriching openai/claude/ms/google and no thanks from an individual, has disincentivized me from writing more.

Same here. People knew the website and it was immensely flattering to meet users in the wild. It motivated me to really sweat the small stuff, because people noticed. Now I'm just feeding the slop machine, and it feels pointless.

Re: Google changes its search box

#726

Post by Rp8yXmdmr »

bryanhogan wrote: post #543
nkingsy wrote: post #503

I had an interesting one yesterday. Someone responded to me on Reddit with very official sounding words to make their argument. I was still dubious and googled a few of the concepts they threw out there. The AI confidently told me they were right. Then I checked the sources, and found the only source that agreed with them was their own Reddit comment!!!

Reddit is heavily filled with bots at this point, feels like every question is made to then promote their product or service using multiple bot accounts.

They are not even hiding. I stumbled upon on some niche subreddit where autor asked for advice on maintaining pool of about 50 accounts, as he has trouble to keep up with attrition by his own, yet it is too small to justify investment in "commercial" tools.

Re: Google changes its search box

#727

Post by dust-jacket »

voidUpdate wrote: post #708
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...

How does google get the information to create an LLM-generated response without sending traffic to any other sites?

By scraping them, same as always.

The difference is where once they scraped, wrote a summary and invited users to go to the site, now they just provide the summary.

Re: Google changes its search box

#728

Post by microtherion »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #291
victor106 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I click those all the time if it is something that matters and I wanna verify that the AI got it correctly.

Absolutely! And I also click them to get an idea how good the source is.

Re: Google changes its search box

#729

Post by agmater »

arionhardison wrote: post #218

I'm old enough to remember when "Google" was something that ended conversations. People — myself included — would literally say "Google it," the facts would be located, and that was that. Now that Google wants to be the conversation, I'm worried there will no longer be a bias-free source of information for the masses. This is all new, so I may be a bit hyperbolic, but the reason OpenAI introducing ads bothers me is t…

I'm reading a book on Vim and the author mentioned the old "Google is your friend". That aged poorly as well :')

Re: Google changes its search box

#730

Post by BrunoBernardino »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #386
BrunoBernardino wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can self-host Marginalia [1] or Hister [2], for example. Takes up some space, but it's totally doable. Your biggest problem (assuming you have disk space) will be crawling. [1] : https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch [2] : https://github.com/asciimoo/hister

Emphasis on "doable". At least if we're speaking a more generalist web search it requires dedicated hardware, that's pretty costly. Marginalia's production server cost about $20k back when RAM and SSDs were cheap. It used to run on $5k of PC hardware before, but that was very limiting. So no data center, but at the same time, not everyone has that sort of cash to throw around.

Right. It depends on who you're trying to serve (yourself for a niche or the world for a bigger niche). :)
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