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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#821
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not at all in the same boat as you; I do not and likely will never primarily rely on LLMs for information. But it's fascinating to hear that even folks who do don't find this approach useful.

As a concrete example, some advertising supported topics place search as an unwanted middleman, may as well ask a LLM directly. Consider "chocolate chip cookie recipe". Using google search, will return roughly infinite recipe sites. The sites were generated to spam AI generated recipes surrounded by advertisements. None of them are really any good because they were generated by a script and not looked at by a human u…

> If you want to coon food, the internet is near dead at this time

This is a wild take, as someone that cooks a lot, and largely from the internet (though I do own a lot of cookbooks)

The reality is that just googling for recipes was never good to begin with. People have been complaining about SEO spam and ads on recipe sites forever, but those recipes were always trash even before they got to the absurd state they're in now. Serious eats, bon appetit, food 52, smitten kitchen, chefsteps, all have great recipes. Some of these have paywalls, although you can get around them. Serious eats though is totally paywall free and has a pretty wide range of recipes. There are other sites for more niche cuisines.

You'll still have ads, and you'll still have a wall of text before the recipe. But the ads are slightly less obtrusive, and the wall of text on the quality sites is why those SEO techniques exist in the first place: a recipe that is just "list of ingredients + instructions" and doesn't include any context is ultimately a crapshoot. The thinking that goes into a recipe shows that you're not going to be wasting your time because it's been tested and optimized.

Re: Google changes its search box

#822
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?

honest question here, why there are lot of comments about SEO is dead?

Search engines are dead. The industry has moved to GEO.

Re: Google changes its search box

#823
post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rely far more on bookmarks and memorised URLs now.

This is the future I see happening. And, I don't think it will be a total apocalypse. The web will endure.

It's kind of like any extinction scenario though: Yeah, there will still be a big ball of rock after the nuclear apocalypse, there will still be life on the rock, and probably even still humans, but that only makes it slightly less tragic.

Re: Google changes its search box

#824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, nix the zip bombs. What's my obligation to treat bot-shaped traffic as something I should reply to?

Your obligation is not to cause harm to the requester.

Sending them a zip bomb didn't cause harm. It was their choice to unzip it. Is jwz liable if a child sees his testicle eggcup macro when visiting via HN?

Re: Google changes its search box

#825
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allow? Deep down, do you think you have a choice? Mechanisms might exist to make you think you have one, the same way copywrite should prevent millions of books being gobbled up by TheZuck but ultimately do you really have a choice? Rules and laws don't exists for you.

Yes, Google advertises its crawler IP ranges and it is quite easy to keep track of this and block them. But only if you control the infrastructure that your site runs on of course.

You think they'll stick to those IPs any more than robots.txt when it comes to that?

Re: Google changes its search box

#826

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...

We can fight back better by falsifying information when the crawler is detected to be Google.

Re: Google changes its search box

#827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of Walmarts squeezing strategy with all the manufacturers. Business with us at the price we say or out of business.

But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right? In this context, if Google is going to give me the recipe without having to scroll through the story, that seems like a win to me. The ad-revenue driven Internet of web 2.0 is finally dead and I'm not sure I'm all that sad.

Not even the summary of the recipe, I think a lot of the "value" AI provides is decluttering the interface. All these perverse incentives conspire to make it undesirable for web publishers to simply show you a cake recipe. They need to meet SEO metrics for being higher on googles index, they need to monetize with ad and chum boxes. They need to distract and dazzle your senses. In the end, AI strips all these anti patterns out and shows you the meat. Or the "summary" of what should have been there all along. The "AI" isn't learning about what the words mean, it's stripping out cruft and filler that was deliberately added!

I'm not saying LLMs are worthless, but I'm saying if you had a magic browser add-on that simply stripped the BS out and showed you the relevant content, it would meet the use cases of the majority of people using AI (regarding search).

Said differently, Google are bringing you a solution to a problem they (largely) created.

Re: Google changes its search box

#828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ask them to cite their sources. It's very good practice to do so, and to check those sources, because I've found that about 30-40% of the time their source doesn't support their answer at all.

Dont they all do that ? I know that deepseek has links for every chain it makes where you can read the source and it's actually a good thing to check on that.

Asking an LLM to cite sources just leads to hallucinated sources, same as any other attempt to make it explain its thinking process. It doesn't have actual visibility into its internal processes, just rationalizes an explanation.

Re: Google changes its search box

#829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's a horrible solution:

- It assumes google should be the arbiter who gets paid.

- It assumes the only damage here is financial.

We have more than enough of these misguided schemes that just enrich small interest groups while inconveniencing everyone.

Re: Google changes its search box

#830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My takeaway is that the internet would be a dramatically cooler place today if people were just willing to pay for stuff. The ad version of the web, where ~60% of people carry the ad burden for everyone, and defacto aligns the service providers with advertisers, is just a guaranteed bad outcome. The only real upside, which frankly people take for granted, is that the ad-web is classless web. Broke or rich you get the…

My other main issue with the no-net neutrality world is that it also means websites would have to pay ISP’s or be artificially throttled. That’s a huge problem. It’s one thing to say we need to pay. It’s another for ISP’s to get 3 pulls at the hose (paid for a connection, paid for what we can browse, paid for who provides the sites) when some of those elements don’t even require more (or at least much) effort or infr…

Net neutrality was always about your ISP. It never meant pay sites couldn't exist.
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