861–870 of 961 posts
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If it's wrong 2 out of 5 times, why even waste your time going to it in the first place? That's a massive failure rate.
I don't find it nearly that bad. If I really need factual information, it will generally go off and read the data from primary sources anyway. So unless it's really misunderstanding context, you're getting the data from the source.
I understand why they are doing this. My Google search usage is easily down 50%+. I doubt I am unique here. While there are times where I want pure search (Kagi, Old Google) I mostly use LLMs to search now and have them provide me links for source data. When I do use LLMs as a search engine I always want it integrated into my AI workflows with access to tools and scripts etc. I never want to have a conversation with…
Maybe I'm weird, but I find AI incredibly useful. I've barely used Google for over 2 years. I barely driven myself in a year. I haven't written code in 6 months.
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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…
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...
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.
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Ok, fair. Hard to understand why it would get that wrong.
Because LLMs aren't sentient, they don't draw on facts, and they don't have nuance. The answer given is similar to answers you might expect to see for similar questions. It's really amazing we can make machines do that, and it's really depressing that we think a stochastic bullshit machine is going to give us something we can rely on.
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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?
A couple of years back I worked with a company which maintained specific data which was the main traffic driver on that page. Google approached them and wanted to pay for the rights to get the data and display it on top of the search results, a feature which was fairly new back then. This was an interesting dilemma because it was very clear that the money was way less than the loss in ad revenue due to traffic drop,…
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I agree. For what it's worth, I think Google's business model is in trouble. They're putting in heroic effort to stay relevant during this shift to AI search, but how does their advertising model work when people expect summarised and accurate information instead of scrolling pages of ads? The search space is actually not that unhealthy. There are competitors. They just lack the reach of Google. These competitor will…
Hanging my comment here, not blaming the parent poster, it's just relevant... All the "AI search" I've tried is far less relevant than a proper search, using search engines without it seems much faster and more relevant. Whenever I get AI search results, its summaries lack substance, are often just plain wrong, and so on. When I check, it's often usong the wrong aggregate data to return results. Search engines these…
For average results, that can have an acceptable answer that tends to the mean or societal mainstream views along some subject, the google answer works for me. For others, which are well unfortunately most of my queries these days, the google answer is brainwashing and propaganda. It feels little more than a continuation of the SARS-COV-2 era fact checkers which were actually failed attempts at propaganda machines for enforcing certain views as true while others were cited as "evidence does not suggest" (hand selecting the evidence of course means this is nothing more than confirmation bias).
I think the AI technology used in most LLM models is an acceleration of this- it will tout mainstream views or hand-picked views as truth while calling others false. And without an ability to search any more for opposing views, you get left with a really warped view of reality that might work for most. Though not for everyone.
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Net neutrality was always about your ISP. It never meant pay sites couldn't exist.
Not pay sites. I’m talking about site owners having to pay ISP’s or risk being artificially throttled in favor of those who do pay them.
Peering is complicated too. It means an ISP carries your site's traffic without you paying them. Is that reasonable? I'd say common sense is: yes, if the traffic is only between you and the ISP's users, since the ISP is then getting paid. But who carries the cost of setting it up? Common sense would say the site operator should pay but the ISP shouldn't inflate the cost.
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…
Don't worry about the small web. Most people running the small web don't do it for others but themselves. They don't care whether they have 5 visitors or 1 million. Visitors are just the cherry on top, my main reason for maintaining a small web page is to put down my thoughts, organize them, go back to them if I need to, and helping whichever stranger stumbles upon them along the way. The small web and indie web audi…
We can have a small community somewhere, but people who search for niche things should find them -- which used to be search engines after the .com boom and the burst. Now we are back to the small forms again, which is lacking the reach because--- new people can't reach the forms as they can't find them in the first place.
If someone new to the internet find the website, then nothing else matters.