Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
205 points by jaredwiener 4 weeks ago | 236 comments- JKCalhoun 4 weeks ago
- iAMkenough 4 weeks ago[dead]
- iAMkenough 4 weeks ago
- MyPasswordSucks 4 weeks agoIn the old days - back before smartphones, back before widescreen monitors, back before broadband - the "Links" section was always a key part of any site. After spending time on a site, a visitor could find links to other pages - some of them on the same topic, some of them simply enjoyed by the creator of the site they were on. If one were to visualize the concept, they might well say that this formed a "web" of sorts.
The big publishers were the first to really reject the "Links" page. If it's not a link to our content, or the content of our sister publications, then why should we include it? Instead, they threw their resources into optimizing their placement on search engines. This took the "web" and turned it closer towards a hub-and-spoke system, as smaller sites withered and died.
Now, people have found a way to retrieve various pieces of information they're looking for that doesn't involve a search engine. It may not be perfect (gluey pizza, anyone?) but objectively, it's certainly more efficient than a list of places that have used the same words that a person is searching for, and honestly probably at least "nearly-as" reliable as said list, because the average Joe Sixpack always has, and always will, be a lot better at asking a question and getting an answer than he will be at finding an answer to his question within the confines of a larger story.
This devastates the large publishers' traffic.
I'd come up with a conclusion here, but I'm too distracted wondering where I placed my violin. It's really small, it could probably be anywhere...
- Eisenstein 4 weeks agoI think the conclusion is that changing your business model in a reactive way to internet developments is a bad idea if you want to have a stable business. If you want to run your business that way, you better be on top of everything and you better be lucky. They rode the social media wave and lost, and now they are going to try to ride the AI wave because they don't have anything to fall back on. They are going to lose.
Legacy media grew fat off of TV and local news. Captive attention markets did not teach them how to entice people's attention, they took it for granted. They are not equipped to compete with youtube and tiktok and reddit and they will lose. Trending news from the AP wire is not unique or in depth enough for anyone to want to read more than the AI summary of your article.
What should they do? What they are good at, and what they were always good at: journalism. Write in-depth articles that take time to research and talent to write. Hire real journalists, pay them to find stories that take time to write, and publish those stories. People will pay for it.
- arunabha 4 weeks ago> People will pay for it.
I would love it if it were true, but sadly, the data doesn't support this. A lot of local newspapers did real journalism relevant to their communities. However, the local newspapers were the hardest hit by the social media wave and few remain today. Fast forward to now, you cannot get any real local news easily.
The avg person never really valued real journalism to begin with and the hyper targeting/polarization of social media and closed echo chambers has made it worse.
- nitwit005 3 weeks agoThere generally hasn't been a way to buy just the local news, so who knows. I emphasize "news", rather than "newspaper", here.
I gave up on the local papers because they contained more Reuters and New York Times wire stories than any actual local content. That was two decades back. I don't think they were willing to give up on the business model of being an aggregator.
This seems a common enough complaint that there is a Texas news company that simply called itself Local News Only, and there are a few other similar names: https://localnewsonly.com/
- Eisenstein 4 weeks agoPeople get sick of it. Most people don't like living in a constant state of anger, ready to get into an argument all the time. We would rather have a shared notion of truth and a common bond. You can't predict the next 'thing' but you can usually count on it not being more of the same. Something new is going to take hold, and I would like it to involve substance and critique of narratives.
- rightbyte 4 weeks agoI don't think it is social media though. It started to go downhill for newspapers when they put their news on the internet for free subsidized by their papers.
- nitwit005 3 weeks ago
- rickydroll 4 weeks ago>People will pay for it.
I'm willing to pay, but not by individual subscriptions per news organization. I'm more interested in following journalists than news organizations.
- senderista 4 weeks agoSounds like the Substack model?
- senderista 4 weeks ago
- arunabha 4 weeks ago
- linguaz 4 weeks ago> ... the "Links" section was always a key part of any site. After spending time on a site, a visitor could find links to other pages - some of them on the same topic, some of them simply enjoyed by the creator of the site they were on.
Don't know how useful these are, but here are some links pages on a couple of websites I put together a while ago:
https://earthdirections.org/links/
Just personal non-commercial handcrafted sites. One day I'd like to figure out some tooling to manage / prune / update links, etc.
- jtbayly 4 weeks agoA recent article on HN was about small sites being destroyed in traffic, not large sites. And not just small, but small with essential human-written info.
- benob 4 weeks agoThe gemini web (smolweb) has no effective search engine, and therefore links also play a crutial role in content discovery...
- bluSCALE4 4 weeks agoThey were called webrings.
- DocTomoe 4 weeks agoNah, Webrings were an extension of the link page ... but not the same thing.
The Link page was curated by the site operator and usually a linear list. IT's main goal was to say "Hey, this is cool, too".
A webring was more like a collective, whereas individual webring members did not necessarily know or agree with every other site in the ring. And it usually was not a list either, but more of a mini topical directory, often with a token-ring-style "Visit the next / random / prev site" navigation you could add to your own page. Webrings were already geared to increasing visitor numbers to your own page ("Others will link to me").
Oh, those were easier times.
- grues-dinner 4 weeks agoWhat was the organisation of a webbing like? Did you have to email two people to arrange to insert yourself as a node at the same time to avoid breaking the ring? Or iframe'd in from a central point?
- grues-dinner 4 weeks ago
- pabs3 4 weeks agoActive webrings still exist surprisingly:
- DocTomoe 4 weeks ago
- wraptile 4 weeks agoThe publishers were just chasing traffic just like everyone else. Link pages were replaced by inline links which were preferred by both search engines and users. The goal was to provide relevant resources on relevant context rather in one big bucket dump no one's going to dig through anyway.
- Lu2025 4 weeks agoWell, the "links" part was an early SEO, mutual back scratching.
- WorldMaker 4 weeks agoEarly Google PageRank was notorious for how much additional trust a given page had based on many links back to it existed. It was why certain bloggers had massive ranks early on, because they would be in big webs of conversations with lots of high quality links out and back in.
Early SEO did weaponize that and broke it for everyone.
- WorldMaker 4 weeks ago
- rebuilder 4 weeks agoThe ”not perfect” part really kind of ruins it for me. I can’t trust the LLM search’s answers and have to go find the source anyway, so what’s the point?
I’m seeing people in chats post stuff like “hey I didn’t know this word also means this!” when it really doesn’t, and invariably they have just asked an LLM and believed it.
- david-gpu 4 weeks agoYou can't blindly trust sources, either. Or, sometimes, you ability to understand the sources correctly.
I think of LLMs as bookworm friends who know a little bit about everything and are a little too overconfident about the depth of their understanding. They tend to repeat what they have heard uncritically, just like so many other people do.
If you don't expect them to be the ultimate arbitrer of truth, they can be pretty useful.
- jtbayly 4 weeks agoDictionary.com isn’t likely to just outright make up word meanings. There is such a thing as a trustworthy source, even if you can’t “blindly” trust it. You can still trust it and quote it and cite it. You can’t do any of those things so far with an LLM.
- jtbayly 4 weeks ago
- david-gpu 4 weeks ago
- aaron695 4 weeks ago[dead]
- uses 4 weeks agoYou're gloating about the hardship which editors, journalists, writers, our informational institutions are facing because... sites stopped having a Links page in 1998? What the fuck, man.
- Eisenstein 4 weeks ago
- spankalee 4 weeks agoGoogle's damned if they do and damned if the don't here:
- If they don't make search AI centric, they're going to get lapped by AI-first competitors like Perplexity, OpenAI, etc. We saw many people here predict Google's pending demise from this. - If they do make search centric, they're unfairly consuming they world's content and hoarding the user traffic to themselves.
Since no reasonable company is just going to stand by and willing let itself be obsoleted, Google's obviously going to go for option 2. But had they for some reason stood down, then they would have been supplanted by an AI competitor and the headline would read "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Perplexity" - just a few years later.
- juujian 4 weeks agoThe one way forward for them would have been to maintain their quality, but they decided to cash in on their monopoly instead. Peak short-termis.
- ajross 4 weeks agoSeems to my untrained eyes like Google's AI search is actually the best on the market, no? Seems like a lot of HN users have trained themselves not to type queries into the search prompt anymore and then complain about the quality of a product they don't use.
- bcoates 4 weeks agoEvery once in a while I bother not ignoring a Google AI overview, then I waste some time fact-checking it and find out it's wrong. Most recently about a python library (where it hallucinated a function that doesn't exist, complete with documentation and usage examples) and breaking news (where it authoritatively said [non-culture war, non-controversial, local] thing doesn't happen, above a dog-bites-man story from a conventional news source about how thing happened again)
- waldrews 4 weeks agoThe model that's doing AI Summary for search results - that presumably needs to be fast and cheap because of the scale - is still sufficiently bad as to give people a bad taste. Presumably they're frantically working to scale their better models for this use case. If you could get Gemini Pro on every search result the experience would be effectively perfect (in the sense of better error rates than what a non-specialist educated human reading the top results and summarizing them would achieve). That's years away from a scaling/cost/speed perspective.
- marcus_holmes 4 weeks agoPossibly their AI search - I don't know, I switched to Kagi to get a search engine that actually did what I asked instead of just trying to put as many ads in front of me as it could.
- WorldMaker 4 weeks agoHaving reluctantly used both, Bing's Copilot seems a lot more grounded on current search results below it versus Google's Gemini seems a lot more likely to conduct its own searches from a different query than what was asked, so also a lot more likely to hallucinate things or to provide answers that seem way different from the rest of the search page.
In terms of "best on the market" for AI search, I know that I am much more likely to trust the one that seems more like a direct summary of the stuff the search engine is traditionally responding with (and presumably has been well tuned in the last several decades) versus the one more likely to make stuff up or to leave the realm of what you are actually asking for some other search it thinks is better for you.
Though admittedly that's a very personal judgment call; some people want the assistant to search for "what they really mean" rather than "what they asked for". It's also a lot of gut vibes from how these AIs write about their research and some of that can be hallucinations and lies and "prompt optimization" as much or more than any sort of "best on the market" criteria.
- hobs 4 weeks ago[flagged]
- bcoates 4 weeks ago
- 4 weeks ago
- dyauspitr 4 weeks agoThat’s a cheap argument. Even with high quality results (which I still think Google is the best at), LLMs are infinitely easier to use.
- ajross 4 weeks ago
- msgodel 4 weeks agoFor anything important I always ask LLMs for links and follow them. I think this will probably just create a strong incentive to cover important things and move away from clickbait.
It's probably a win for everyone in the long run although it means news sites will have to change. That's going to be painful for them but it's not like they're angels either.
- yummypaint 4 weeks agoI'm surprised the links work for you at all. 90+% of citations for non trivial information (i.e. not in a text book but definitely in the literature) I've gotten from LLMs have been very convincing hallucinations. The year and journal volume will match, the author will be someone who plausibly would have written on the topic, but the articles don't exist and never did. It's a tremendous waste of time and energy compared to old fashioned library search tools.
- input_sh 4 weeks agoAnd what happens when you follow them?
In my experience, the answers tend to be sourced from fringe little blogs that I would never trust in a Google search.
Google at least attempts to rank them by quality, while LLM web search seems to click on the closest match regardless of the (lack of) quality.
- msgodel 4 weeks agoHuh that's strange to hear. The HN I remember would have always said the opposite (the small web tends to be higher quality) as do I.
- msgodel 4 weeks ago
- im3w1l 4 weeks agoOne thing I did once with great success was asking chatgpt something like "I'm trying to find information about X, but when I Google it I just get results about the app named after X. Can you suggest a better query?"
X was some tehnical thing I didn't know a lot about so it gave me some more words to narrow down the query that I would not have known about myself. And that really helped me find the information I needed.
It also threw in some book tips for good measure.
So yeah I can highly recommend this workflow.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4 weeks ago> I think this will probably just create a strong incentive to cover important things and move away from clickbait.
But clickbait is how they make money...
That's like saying, "Oh, Apple will just have to move away from selling the iPhone and start selling hamburgers instead."
I mean, sure, but they're not going to like it, and it's going to come with a lot of lost revenue and profits.
I find myself regularly copying URLs, sending it to Gemini, and asking it to answer what I want to get out of the article.
I'm not wasting my time scrolling through a mile of website and 88,000 ads to find the answer to the headline.
- chgs 4 weeks agoThose adverts and clickbait will infect llms soon enough, just be far harder to block.
- chgs 4 weeks ago
- yummypaint 4 weeks ago
- bgwalter 4 weeks agoThey could simply restore the search quality they had in 2010. No one wants these "AI" summaries except for people looking to get promoted for "having an impact" inside Google.
What Google is doing right now is sabotage the search moat they do have. They are throwing it all away because of some "AI" rainmakers inside the company.
- kccqzy 4 weeks agoThat's impossible unless the web reverted back to 2010, when walled gardens weren't prevalent, making your own blog was common, doable and often done by those without programming experience, forums were alive and well, and people wanted to share things on the web rather than group chats.
- voxl 4 weeks agoThere are plenty of blogs, plenty of obvious low quality spam to block, plenty of features to enable allowlist and blocklists. To think for a second that the Google search experience couldn't be made significantly better at the snap of a finger by Google is to live in a fantasy world.
- o11c 4 weeks agoIt's perfectly possible if they start downranking sites full of ads.
But an ad company will never do that.
- voxl 4 weeks ago
- massysett 4 weeks ago> No one wants these "AI" summaries
Not true, I use them all the time. They have links available for when I want further information, which is not very often.
- userbinator 4 weeks agoI never use them. Especially when they can be completely wrong (and the problem is how will you know that it's wrong?): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142113
- userbinator 4 weeks ago
- ketzo 4 weeks agoThen what explains people doing millions of web searches on perplexity/chatgpt/claude?
- irjustin 4 weeks agoSimply untrue. I don't want it back. I use ChatGPT's voice transcribing to do 99% of my searches today.
Google does need to adapt or die
- bdangubic 4 weeks agothey are losing more and more search to “AI.” my 12-year old never uses Google and couple of times I asked her to “Google it” she literally rolled on the floor laughing and called me a “boomer” :)
- 4 weeks ago
- triceratops 4 weeks agoI wonder if "boomer" is going to become a generic term for "my parents' generation".
- 4 weeks ago
- kccqzy 4 weeks ago
- vgeek 4 weeks agoWe are getting to watch The Innovator's Dilemma play out, yet again. The downward trajectory of Google's utility has only been worsening over the past 10 years-- but only in the last 3-4 have mainstream audiences started to notice.
- bitpush 4 weeks agoThe first part of that statement is valid but the second one isn't.
If anything, most of big tech has shown exceptional humility against new threats
Instagram incorporating stories (Snapchat)
YouTube incorporating Shorts (tiktok)
Google search incorporating AI Mode (perplexity et al)
This is in stark contrast to Kodak and the likes who scoffed at digital camera and phone cameras as distraction. They were sure that their ways were superior, ultimately leading to their demise.
- vgeek 4 weeks agoMaybe you misunderstood the scope that Google is a search advertising company first and foremost? Alphabet ignores (yes, they essentially invented transformers, etc.., but actual productive efforts likely correlate to predicted TAM or protecting status quo, answering to shareholders while waiting to acquire threats) a market that will eventually usurp their cash cow of first party search ads, because the new market isn't initially as lucrative due to market size. There is also the consideration of cannibalizing their high margin search ads market with an error prone and resource intensive tech that cannot immediately be monetized in a second price auction (both from inventory and bidder participant perspectives). A $10 billion market for Google would be under 3% of revenue, but if the market grows 10x, it is much more attractive, but now the incumbent may be trailing the nascent companies who refined their offerings (without risk of cannibalizing their own offerings) while said market was growing. We are currently at the stage where Google is incorporating Gemini responses and alienating publishers (by not sending monetizable clicks while using their content) while still focusing on monetization via their traditional ad products elsewhere on the SERPs (text search ads, shopping ads). Keep in mind, they also control 3rd party display ads via DoubleClick and Adsense-- but inventory on 3rd party sites will drop and Google will lose their 30%+ cut if users don't leave the SERPs.
Dozens of major news publications have covered the decline of Google's organic search quality decline and emphasis on monetization (ignoring incorrect infoboxes and AI generated answers). See articles such as https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/googl... and a collection even posted here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348460 . This has played into reasons why people have shifted away from Google. Their results are focused solely on maximizing Google's earnings per mille, as leaked (https://www.wsj.com/tech/u-s-urges-breakup-of-google-ad-busi...) where the ads team has guanxi over search quality. Once Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts left their roles, the focus on monetization over useful SERPs becomes much more evident.
- vgeek 4 weeks ago
- bitpush 4 weeks ago
- skeaker 4 weeks agoI never really bought the idea of any AI company killing Google. They have too much momentum to really be seriously impacted, too many people who only use them exclusively and will continue to do so their whole lives on the name brand alone. They might risk a lack of "growth" but that only really matters to shareholders, not to end users.
- hadlock 4 weeks agoYahoo had 90%+ of the search market and they lost it in a few years to google because they were unable to innovate. I don't think anyone saw that coming. Everyone was building "portals" (remember those? AOL.com? I think verizon.com was one at some point with news and weather) to try and compete with Yahoo's dominance in search. It can happen again. LLM Chat is certainly an existential threat to the googs. Part of the OpenAI lore is that google originally viewed it as a threat to their search/advertising revenue model and defunded it on that basis.
The fact that people are willing to pay for LLM and use it over search seems to indicate that Google's free product isn't as good, and llm chat is better "Enough" that people are willing to pay for it.
- skeaker 4 weeks agoThe major flaw in your argument is that Yahoo is still around. They still have tons of traffic, some of the most in the world, just behind Reddit. They are not constantly growing, yes, but that is exactly my point. They have a satisfied userbase who will use them for life as does Google. Neither is going anywhere any time soon. Both make billions of dollars annually.
- skeaker 4 weeks ago
- hadlock 4 weeks ago
- marcuschong 4 weeks agoIt's funny most people are saying Google will win the AI wars, though that is precisely what will cannibalize their current business model, which had a much bigger moat than frontier LLMs, apparently.
- w-ll 4 weeks agoYou think we wont start seeing ads or paid for refs/links in those AI responses? Not defending Google here, when they turned that feature on I posted to some friends "another nail in the coffin for the web as we know it" or something to that effect.
- lostmsu 4 weeks agoEventually open models will be able to do the same, so why would anyone use ad-ridden service? The first LLM provider who turns on ads on their responses will disappear in a brink.
- lostmsu 4 weeks ago
- w-ll 4 weeks ago
- stormfather 4 weeks agoIs this really that bad for Google? Do Perplexity and OpenAI use paid SERP API under the hood? Google doesn't have to make money from ads on search, if its paid search.
- stefan_ 4 weeks agoSpare us the "woe is me" for they literally invented replacing the publishers. Yesterday its infoboxes, today its shitty AI summaries. Which is still the case, so good riddance.
- bitpush 4 weeks agoWhat is infobox?
- bitpush 4 weeks ago
- tehjoker 4 weeks agoA simple tale of how capitalism leads to unintended anti-social consequences through market mechanisms that no one participant can control.
- juujian 4 weeks ago
- oliwarner 4 weeks agoGoogle's demise is self-inflicted.
They broke search by prioritising ads, then trusting the wrong, big publishers (eg every listacle from a big media network), broke their advanced search controls (domain blacklists, quotes that mean quotes, plus-and-minuses to alter things).
Then they added their own LLM's analysis to searches, admitting that that their SERPs are dead. They were in this death-spiral well before LLMs became an alternative. I won't pretend that SEO wasn't making traditional search untenable, but the vector Google chose will make their key product obsolete.
The thing I worry about is what they'll do to retain revenue. They have knowledge systems that cater to a lot more than what we normally search on. They have address data, know where people physically are right now, have live communication data on billions of users, know their shopping habits, and a thousand etceteras. Meta too. They have communication data on billions of people. How are these older software companies going to monetise the data they've amassed in an age when they are getting close to being able to replicate personas, model actual human behaviours?
- busterarm 4 weeks agoThey've shown in their other products that they really don't even care anymore.
Roughly 30% of the YouTube ads I get served recently are 10minutes long or more. At least once a day I feel like I'm reporting some 50+ minute long alternative medicine scam ad.
- dgimla20 4 weeks agoI'm surprised Googles ad business stays afloat. It seems every video I watch on YouTube is preceded with a Grammarly advert, a service I have no use for and will not subscribe to/pay for in the future.
I feel like Google should be the one company that has enough data and the widespread scope to really excel in advertising, yet on every site I see their ads, its as if they have no idea who I am and what I might want.
Feels like a bubble to me..
- busterarm 3 weeks agoAs someone who worked in advertising...advertising isn't really about connecting you with things that you want. It's about putting something in your head to make you want it.
- busterarm 3 weeks ago
- dgimla20 4 weeks ago
- busterarm 4 weeks ago
- paradox460 4 weeks agoI don't use Google anymore, and haven't in over a year (I use kagi instead) but for finding information that could be buried deep within slow, ad ridden websites, the AI and quick question features are indispensable. Things like "is game XYZ available on gamepass" or "which is state is comparable in area to germany" are good examples of this
- bitpush 4 weeks agoDoes Kagi have AI Mode?
- paradox460 4 weeks agoThey have a few interfaces that you can trigger an AI answer through
The first, and most useful to me, is when you just append a ? to your query. This pops up the answer in an info box at the top of a search, and then shows related results below
The second is the assistant mode, which pops up either when you use the continuing link at the bottom of an info box, or trigger it directly via the assistant URL. This is the standard conversational interface
- ac29 4 weeks agoKagi assistant is hybrid search / LLM
- bitpush 4 weeks agoWhat model are they using?
- bitpush 4 weeks ago
- paradox460 4 weeks ago
- bitpush 4 weeks ago
- jaredwiener 4 weeks agoHonest question as I try to wrap my millennial brain around this --
for those of you who search for news -- with or without an AI -- what are you searching for? So much of news is finding out the unknown, it seems unsearchable by nature? Or are you asking for updates to a specific, ongoing story?
- yibg 4 weeks agoI've been taking a look at my own news consumption patterns and how they've changed. One thing I noticed is previously, news was going to a paper / news site and seeing what's "new". Lately I more and more find myself first getting a glimpse of the topic from other sources (e.g. Tiktok) first, and then going to a new site to either get more details or confirm (since it's hard to tell now if a piece of content is reliable or not).
So basically news sites for me is now less about finding out new information, but rather as a secondary source to get more details or a more "professional" account of something.
- Celeo 4 weeks agoGenerally, if I'm manually searching for news, it's either to get more information about something I heard from someone (searching by the event), or to see if news has been published about something nearby (searching by region).
- Baader-Meinhof 4 weeks agoI ask two types of questions:
1. Factual updates to an ongoing or recent story.
2. Analysis, e.g. "What were the economic effects of Brexit."
Without AI, I would try to read multiple opinions from different sides. But its hard for me to always know which experts to trust?
AI will present both sides, but even when AI is not hallucinating, there is still the issue of "are the experts that the AI is sourcing reliable?"
- chgs 4 weeks agoDo you trust an ai run by a shady company but not an attributable human editor.
- rozap 4 weeks agoYes, the AI is trained on a vast quantity of data therefore it is less likely to be manipulated vs a single editor that may have ulterior motives. Therefore it's much harder to manipulate. A corporation which represents many shareholders' interest has its own reputation on the line, which would be seriously damaged if they were caught doing anything like you suggest.
But this can only be understood within the context of the white genocide currently happening in South Africa. Some are saying it's not real, but there have been documented attacks on farms and chants of "kill the boer".
- Baader-Meinhof 4 weeks agoI think you have an outdated understanding of AI workflow. They generally cite their sources, which you should check, just like regular search.
- mlinhares 4 weeks agoWe’re so cooked, all the thinking outsourced to LLMs.
- rozap 4 weeks ago
- chgs 4 weeks ago
- bigthymer 4 weeks agoSometimes I look for a specific old article. Search is completely useless for this since it usually ignores what I'm searching for to show me more about whatever is recent.
- 1bpp 4 weeks agoUpdates on a specific topic, region, company, or ongoing story.
- hellisothers 4 weeks agoI “search” (using this word liberally here) by using a newsreader and adding sources to it over time that I find to have a high signal (whether I agree with them or not). This way new things come to me without having to explicitly look for them, often before others have heard about it, usually from several different angles. If I have to explicitly go search for something the results are usually low signal chum :(
- dreghgh 4 weeks agoI would assume a lot of what is losing views on news sites are the articles designed to capture "what time is the super bowl" type searches. The article features the question in the title or standfirst, the answer comes after 3 paragraphs of low value information about the super bowl.
- yibg 4 weeks ago
- torqueehmada 4 weeks agoIf nobody writes it, the LLM can't learn it. This is going to be a fascinating shift of resources. I suspect it will have the inverse effect of eroding traditional journalism outlets to retrofit for the new model, while boosting smaller competitors, but with everyone going to subscription based. The content creators could make a significant amount of money.
Then again, this would be a great time for state-sponsored media, if we didn't have such an anti-intellectual assclown as president and the lacky congress/scotus.
- timewizard 4 weeks agoI'm naturally conspiratorial; but, this is possibly why search results were intentionally degraded over the past 5 years. Which has had an impact on overall site traffic that has not gone unnoticed. Google's been trying their luck with "creator summits" over the past few years but the creators are starting to smell a rat.
So you have Google which famously does not want people to actually leave their property. Infoboxes, calculator, extraction of semantic data for direct display in search results.
Would a company like that intentionally downgrade search results making quality content harder for users to find, then train their LLMs on this highly valuable content, ultimately creating an unnatural shift away from the previous model to the "weak AI chatbot" model?
I know HN hates conspiracies but there's trillions of dollars at stake here. We know companies will poison entire communities and create flammable rivers just to shave a few million off the expenses. Who knows what Google will do to keep it's market position?
- _factor 4 weeks ago110% this.
Real web search is disappearing locked behind large datasets unavailable for normal users. The AI screen ensures you’re fed exactly what they intended while siloing off the web more and more to block competition. All the while signing exclusivity deals which should realistically be illegal (try finding current Reddit results anywhere but Google).
AI based interaction makes it much easier to manipulate users into buying your items as they add a layer of human-like trust on top of the machine. It won’t be long before prices are hidden behind LLMs generating prices based on who you are. I’m already noticing ChatGPT becoming more and more enthusiastic about any product it thinks I have the potential of buying. Try asking it if something is a good deal, 9 times out of 10 it will say, “Yes, go for it.”
We don’t want to live in a proprietary world where LLMs exist. This technology needs to be open. The search data needs to be open and not walled off to only monopolies. This is an inflection point.
- _factor 4 weeks ago
- timewizard 4 weeks ago
- felipeerias 4 weeks agoThe emergence of AI tools and closed platforms will reduce the importance of advertising on the open Web, and eventually of the open Web itself.
One possible way this plays out is that attention and investment move towards proprietary ecosystems, with large AI companies being able to secure exclusive access to closed information sources while everyone else is reduced to getting what they can from a dwindling open Web.
Another possibility might be that new standards allow interoperability between AI agents and open content providers, including microtransactions between them, and creating a new marketplace for information.
https://stratechery.com/2025/the-agentic-web-and-original-si...
- isaacremuant 4 weeks agoAds will come inside the LLM response and all around it. I'm quite positive. You don't know how much these businesses thrive in being the "drivers of customers to other businesses by showing their ads".
It's going to be there.
- potamic 4 weeks agoWhat will happen is that chatbots will start showing ads and publishers will bid over prompt keywords to have their content sponsored and boosted. I don't see the end result being very different from what it is today. Chatbots will eventually get enshittified to the level of google search today. It's inevitable, unless there's some dramatic shift in advertising economics.
- isaacremuant 4 weeks ago
- dataviz1000 4 weeks agoTake it to the next level, integrate the chatbot into a browser extension side panel. Let people navigate to websites that contain the information.
This will work. It will allow the chatbot to provide up to the minute data and information from the source. It will allow the user to maintain context -- like a popup dialog allows the user to maintain visual context. And, it will incentivize content creators to curate and provide information and data as people will be visiting their websites.
If anyone thinks this might be a good idea also, I've already laid down the foundation approaching a browser extension side panel as a framework like Electron or Playwright and did the grunt work. [0]
I put the VSCode IPC and other core libraries into this project. The IPC is important because a browser extension with this use case requires looking at a browser as a distributed system of javascript processes that communicate a a dozen different ways
> Environments: Node.js main process, Node.js child process, Node.js worker thread, browser main thread (window), iframe, dedicated Web Worker, Shared Worker, Service Worker, AudioWorklet.
> Communication: fetch/XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket, RTCDataChannel, EventSource, BroadcastChannel, SharedArrayBuffer + Atomics, localStorage storage events, MessageChannel/MessagePort, postMessage/onmessage, Worker.postMessage/worker.onmessage, parentPort.postMessage/parentPort.on('message'), ChildProcess.send/process.on('message'), stdin/stdout streams.
and VSCode provides a protocol interface with only `onMessage` and `send` so I can define my own that are not provided creating a consistent API for communication.
Regardless, I have it working but it needs to be completely rewritten.
- _thisdot 4 weeks agoThis is already a thing with Gemini in Chrome[0].
The Browser Company’s new browser, Dia[1], is supposedly another similar product
[0] = https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/?hl=en
- dataviz1000 4 weeks agoI wasn't aware of dia browser, thank you for sharing. I've been doing browser automation for a while and have become convinced the way to accomplish human in the middle is to fork Chromium and create a custom browser. However, there is one problem, there are 3.5B Chrome users. Getting someone to install a browser extension is hard enough, a whole new browser much, much more difficult.
I went with experimenting with stock trading as a demo because people need huge incentive and value to make the critical jump to install an app. There is potential for niche curated business intelligence in trading or real estate, for example, where not only providing the chat bot but also time series data embeddings ect.
I'm a little sad because I'm late to this party.
Nevertheless, there needs to incentive also for people to continue to publish the data, ideas, and information so the chatbots are going to have help the content creators help them curate and provide the data by getting users to navigate to the webpages.
I remember reading Google's Search Engine Optimization guide back in 2009 when I built a news publishing website for an industry newpaper. The tone was here is how to optimize your website for google crawlers to help us help you get traffic to your website. Google is nothing without people creating.
- dataviz1000 4 weeks ago
- eikenberry 4 weeks agoThis and many other applications of this sort will depend on AIs becoming ubiquitous, cheap and not metered. Metered access (like most current SAS AIs) will deter these sorts of heavy use cases. Running locally will be best, both for pricing and so you can have it build up context over time.
- dataviz1000 4 weeks agoAs an experiment, because p47's social media posts move the markets $60 in a day, and the last thing on Earth I want to be doing is reading them so the system makes an API request for any new ones, then checks for links, video, and images. It uses OpenAI whisper running with transformers.js on the local machine using webgpu for the inference to transcribe the video and audio and image to text for ocr. I tried to do the text generation locally but any decent model although will run caused my Macbook M3 to get so hot I could cook a steak on it while freezing the rendering for the whole computer.
image-to-text and video, audio-to-text works fine, there are lot of uses for text generation that work but to get high quality analysis to see if a social media post might cause the stock market to crash requires sending the data out to an api. If the side panel requires searching for links to navigate to it requires a third party api.
Working with it, I think the next hardware race will be getting these models to run on personal computers in next 2 - 5 years and I have a suspicion Microsoft is ahead of Apple.
- dataviz1000 4 weeks ago
- _thisdot 4 weeks ago
- awongh 4 weeks agoI was considering starting a business where the main traffic source would be SEO based, but based on all the gloom and doom around search I decided to hold off.
Hard to say exactly how bad it’s getting right now. Lots of horror stories out there.
- mmanfrin 4 weeks agoI built a protein comparison site (aggregating nutrition, ingredients, electrolytes, prices) and I expected a little bit of traffic, but I'm getting less than a single visitor every 2 days from google. It's absolutely dead.
A year ago I threw together a tiny little site with some datamined assets from a game (deadlock) that randomly got indexed and saw a couple hundred visits a month from google.
- bcoates 4 weeks agoHonestly that might be a mistake, when the consensus is greedy get scared and when it's scared get greedy
- mmanfrin 4 weeks ago
- simonw 4 weeks agoThis story has a few instances of suspicious numbers like these:
> When Dotdash merged with Meredith in 2021, Google search accounted for around 60% of the company’s traffic, Vogel said. Today, it is about one-third. Overall traffic is growing, thanks to efforts including newsletters and the MyRecipes recipe locker.
If traffic is up but percentage of that traffic from search is down, does that mean search traffic is down overall? Or does it mean that strategies to diversify their traffic sources are working as planned?
- jmyeet 4 weeks agoPreviously, if you searched for "mortgage calculator" in Google, you'd get one at the top, embedded in the page. It was fast, simple and did what you wanted. I guess because of "competition" it was removed at some point. Now all the top results are terrible. The sites are slow. They ask too many questsions. They're clearly trying to generate leads and sell ads. Whereas Google's just... worked. There are good calculators out there but they don't rank as highly.
How exactly is this good for consumers?
My point is that a lot of publishers are what I call "low value". They're rent-seekers. They have easily obtained information, often user-generated, and their role is to gatekeep that and make you click just one more page to get a result because hey that's another slew of ads they can show you.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that LLMs steal. At the same time, we have to recognize that a lot of publishers are intentionally useless rent-seekers so it's hard for me to feel sorry for them.
- ryao 4 weeks agoThis seems appropriate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZXwdRBxZ0U
It took a little longer than predicted, but “Googlezon” is finally happening, with or without Google and Amazon.
- oytis 4 weeks agoBut... Google's AI summaries are wrong like at least 50% of the time.
- blindstitch 4 weeks agoA lot of the time it's a just a near-verbatim rephrasing of the top result, too.
- physix 4 weeks agoI read them to get an idea of the quality that the AI produces, but mostly ignore the content after reading and click on to find actual sources, since I don't yet trust that content.
I was thinking that the drop in traffic to news sites is due to AI summaries, which might have the effect of filtering out people who are happy with a snippet. And was postulating that it would have two effects: improving the relevance of those who go to the news site (good) and feeding people with poor quality AI generated information (bad).
But then I tested out various news- ish search terms and never got an AI summary from Google. So I think the primary cause for a drop in traffic to news sites is probably not the AI summary itself.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 4 weeks agoYou can help save the planet by asking AI less questions!
Yeah I have 0 trust in the responses I am getting so instead of verifying random claims I'm taking my own turns
- bombcar 4 weeks agoBut 95% of the time it doesn’t matter.
- blindstitch 4 weeks ago
- Mehuleo 4 weeks agoThis is definitely bad. But on a different note, I think this was inevitable, as the new generation's attention span keeps dropping rapidly with all the TikTok and Instagram shorts. I believe publishers will need to figure out shorter written content formats as well. Until then, Google and others that offer alternatives will have an edge. I'm not saying this is the only way forward—just part of the evolution. I believe publishers will evolve to adapt to this too.
- Agingcoder 4 weeks agoI don’t really care about google’s ai features - I’m fine with regular old fashioned search engines. I’ve stopped using google because it doesn’t work anymore - I used to be able to find what I want , and now I can’t. Everything is lost in a mess of ads and what seems to be a collection of random answers.
I now instruct chatgpt to search the web for me and I read the result, since it works. I also read the news directly from various newspapers that I subscribe to to make sure they actually get money.
- dieortin 4 weeks ago> I’m fine with regular old fashioned search engines
> I now instruct chatgpt to search the web for me and I read the result
I wouldn’t exactly classify ChatGPT as an old fashioned search engine
- kwanbix 4 weeks agoI use ublock origin and it works just fine for me. AS much as I like to leave the google ecosystem, I tried bing and duckduckgo and they are not as good.
- dieortin 4 weeks ago
- 4 weeks ago
- Aziell 4 weeks agoI use AI a lot myself and it definitely makes getting information faster but it feels like something’s missing, like the fun of digging for the truth yourself. These AI tools can just give you the answers, which saves time, but it also takes away a lot of depth and variety. Without realizing it, we might also be losing our ability to think independently.
Do you think AI can really replace all the value traditional news brings?
- thrwaway55 4 weeks agoIsn't this already the case but you can replace traditional news with personal investigation? What is another layer of indirection?
I recall going to a townhall vote on some legislation a company I was employed with at the time wanted vs what the Teamster Union wanted and both sides doing body double line rigging to get their viewpoint in during "open comments" but I couldn't find a single news article about the obvious tactic by both sides.
Do you think traditional news can really replace all the value personally verifiable data brings?
- thrwaway55 4 weeks ago
- Hobadee 4 weeks agoThis one trick will cut down on listicles and click-bait!
- iambateman 4 weeks agoIf the vast majority of Google revenue comes from search, and search is under siege, why is the stock so unfazed?
It seems like the market thinks Google will be just fine.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4 weeks agoWindows and Office used to make up >90% of Microsoft's revenue, back when Microsoft was the biggest company in the world around DotCom.
Windows especially has been a sinking ship for a decade and yet Microsoft is bigger than ever.
Google is well positioned to monetize LLMs. Cloud, Gemini, and Waymo are all growing and could easily be Fortune 50 companies each within a few years.
Gsuite continues to do well.
Google Search revenue was still growing as of last quarter.
It's possible for Search revenue to still grow while Google Search total market share of search (if including LLM "search") goes down drastically (LLM users search more, not less).
It's also possible that total traditional Google Search volume could decline substantially without a huge impact to Search revenues.
Remember, only about ~15% of searches are Monetized. Google will be focused on keeping THOSE searches going.
It's possible Google could lose TONS of marketshare and still keep the frothiest part of the market...
OpenAI could take off more than any expects and be the biggest company in the world, and it's possible that only takes a small dent out of Search.
It's also possible Google could end up having a significant (if not dominant) part of the LLM search market.
- TulliusCicero 4 weeks agoWaymo is a particularly good one. Yes, it's been harder and taken longer than expected to get cars self driving, but it's starting to show real results now, and the sheer difficulty could act as quite the moat -- right now in the Western world, nobody is even close to Waymo in operational L4 or higher self driving cars, and the incumbent automakers in particular seem to have mostly given up.
And it's not just that Waymo will inevitably expand beyond robotaxis into personal cars as well, they could take their expertise in vision and robotics and apply it to adjacent domains. Maybe we'll actually start seeing the humanoid helper robots of the 50's a decade or two from now!
- iambateman 4 weeks agoThis is interesting, thanks. Thinking about the share of monetized searches is helpful.
- TulliusCicero 4 weeks ago
- rglover 4 weeks ago
- tokioyoyo 4 weeks agoAds in AI query results.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4 weeks ago
- amarant 4 weeks agoHonestly, it's at least partially on the publishers in this case.
I've started using AI to summarise articles for me because the endless SEO fluff has gotten to completely unbearable levels.
If you publish an article with a sidetrack that's 8 pages long and completely irrelevant, don't get upset when I have some LLM summarize it to 3 bullet points instead. I'm not made of time, nor patience!
- darqis 4 weeks agoWould you say that Google's search taking results from other sites and compiling them and presenting them as their own is piracy?
- deadbabe 4 weeks agoThese days chatbots are good enough that when I do use a search engine, I really just want pure search results, I’m not interested in getting another AI opinion. I am sick and tired of getting AI overviews for a google search. What’s a better search engine? Heck, it doesn’t even have to be “better”, I’m looking for different results, not just perfect matches.
- gkanai 4 weeks agoI do a lot of product searches in Japanese and there is a ton of SEO spam on domains (.br but also many others) that are basically irrelevant to Japan. Google should be blocking all of that SEO spam but they can't seem to walk away from the ad revenue. There's no good domestic Japanese search engine so it's a defacto monopoly of bad search.
- ipsum2 4 weeks agoIs Yahoo Japan not good?
- ipsum2 4 weeks ago
- phantom_wizard 4 weeks agoThey did it to themselves. I'm sure we will read books about their failure and the replacement of Google search with chats and llms. The outcome is quite peculiar, because those chats are a blessing but should we really give them our data away. Scary what they will do with it. It was already scary enough with Google.
- jgalt212 4 weeks ago1. This is self-limiting. If they drive the content producing sites out of business, what is Google AI search going to summarize?
2. These chatbots must also be killing ad revenue on SERP pages. It's safe to assume these summaries are also reducing clicks on ad links just as they are reducing clicks on content links.
- bitpush 4 weeks agoIf Google doesn't do it, perplexity would. Or ChatGPT or Arc (browser)
It's one of those game theory situations. Best outcome is of everyone cooperates but if you think another party is going to defect (perplexity doing AI search) then the best move is to also defect (Google doing ai search)
- bitpush 4 weeks ago
- scotty79 4 weeks agoLast decade or two was gradual exploration of how terrible and ad-infested you can get without people going away to somewhere else entirely. Now that a new elsewhere popped up everybody suddenly found out that instead of being knee deep in sewage, it already reached their mouth and nose.
- crest 4 weeks agoHow ironic that the WSJ decided to make the text unreadable themselves just in case anyone cared to read it.
- AaronAPU 4 weeks agoThe other day I used Google to research something I didn’t know the answer to. It gave back a slightly reformatted piece of text which had been directly stolen from my own blog post.
So not only did it steal my traffic, it elevated my random opinion to pseudo “official” truth.
- wnevets 4 weeks agoGoogle simultaneously making search worse as more people use AI chatbots isn't helping their cause.
- mattl 4 weeks agoNews sites have way too much invasive advertising on them, but AI is a scam.
Pay for your news.
- teeray 4 weeks agoBut how? I usually have never heard of some publication and literally want to read one article and never visit the site again. I don’t want to whip out my credit card, fill out a form, have a subscription on the books that I have to cancel, just so I can read that one article. I want the web equivalent of an ezPass transponder.
- teeray 4 weeks ago
- wslh 4 weeks agoGoogle devastated search for small and medium sized companies, with AI or without it they have not improved the search engine to get accurate results with very concrete searches that are not prompts.
- 725686 4 weeks ago"Searching" using AI is much faster and direct that traditional search. And with no ads.
- TiredOfLife 4 weeks agoSame publishers that demanded Google to pay them for the privilege to link to them?
- niemandhier 4 weeks agoAll I want is to go to the site of my favorite newspapers and see stuff that matters.
Instead I get things like this:
“Modern fathers have failed”
“Man need to ditch the dadbod”
“Equality means only man should be drafted”
They have tons of great and deeply investigated content, but they throw engagement bait into your face. In the end I use a search engine to extract a relevant subset of articles.
- Fairburn 4 weeks agoGoogle, Bing etal.. are fast becoming irrelevant. At least as a search engine
- patatero 4 weeks agoThis is Google's fault.
They made Search worse so people have to resort to AI chatbots.
- bananalychee 4 weeks agoI don't believe that Google's AI Overviews or even LLMs in general are to blame for the decline in traffic to news websites. ChatGPT launched with the GPT-3.5 model in November 2022 without a web search function, and had a training data cutoff date of September 2021. Google AI Overviews launched in May 2024 to generally poor reception initially, and ChatGPT Search launched in July 2024. The graph presented in the article reveals a trend starting as far back as April 2022, well before mass-market LLM products could extract useful information in real time, and it doesn't look like it's accelerated significantly. In fact, the WSJ series contradicts it. Prior data would likely reveal that the broad decline began much earlier, since it's well-known[1] that younger generations prefer to get their news from social media these days. Paywalls, quality degradation in search results, and mistrust in the objectivity of news coverage are likely contributing factors.
I don't doubt that the shift from web searches to automated information extraction will pose new challenges to websites that rely on search engine optimization to drive new user traffic, especially for small/individual operators, and I'll be happy to witness the death of SEO if it comes to that, but blaming a new Google Search feature[2] for a long-running decline in traffic to online newspapers strikes me as a deflection from the slow death of their business model.
P.S.: Google's AI Overviews are fairly respectful of content providers and link back to source material from the generated text.
[1] https://theconversation.com/young-people-are-abandoning-news...
[2] The current title of the article is "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools"
- rubyfan 4 weeks agoWho would have thought we’d be looking for a better experience after Google let search turn to a steaming pile of shit filled with spam, popups and clickbait while violating our privacy with every vector possible?!?
- sreekanth850 4 weeks agoA day will come when auth is an essential part of blogging sites.
- DidYaWipe 4 weeks agoWhat chatbots? The article talks about Google's (shitty) "AI"-generated answer summaries, but that's not a chatbot, and as far as I can see the article doesn't say where all these "chatbots" are hosted. How are people finding them?
Very disappointing for WSJ.
- 4 weeks ago
- incomingpain 4 weeks agoPractically every news site now needs archive.ph because of paywall.
There's also a problem around trust in journalists being tremendously low.
- kevin_thibedeau 4 weeks agoGoogle destroyed Google's search. You can't surface any factual, non-slop content through them any more.
- mitchbob 4 weeks agoPreviously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44235951
- BlazeNova 4 weeks ago[dead]
- lakomen 4 weeks ago[dead]
- aucisson_masque 4 weeks agoWell I didn’t expect some good coming from the ai revolution and yet.
If it helps to annihilate the « news » sites that depended over advertisement to be profitable, that’s great.
Advertisement and journalism should never have been in the same sentence, no one can provide full independent news when you’re at the mercy of advertiser threatening to bail out if you say something bad on them.
- jmsdnns 4 weeks agoHere is Ben Franklin addressing this issue back in 1731 by essentially saying, "that's true, but then how would news ever get printed?"
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-00...
- aucisson_masque 4 weeks agoNewspaper really took off during Industrial Revolution, I’m not sure that a 1731 text is pertinent.
On that matter, people used to print newspaper for a variety of different reasons, some were to rally public to an opinion (political parties for instance), some were printed to exerce control over their reader (a factory owner making a newspaper for his employee) and there have always been people who wanted to report facts and get paid for that.
Still today, there are many newspaper and online news that don’t have any advertisement, sponsoring and are in a really good financial situation.
In France, I can think of mediapart (fully online), le canard enchaîné (online and paper). People pay for them because their paper is worth more than just lightening up a barbecue.
- jmsdnns 4 weeks agoNo. Printing presses were used for news well before then. That's why Franklin wrote what he wrote in 1731.
- jmsdnns 4 weeks ago
- hy4000days 4 weeks ago[dead]
- aucisson_masque 4 weeks ago
- coffeefirst 4 weeks agoThere are two choices here:
1. Create an elite only product that’s way too expensive for the general public.
2. Subsidize the costs of the newsroom with some form of advertising. There’s several of different forms that can take.
That’s the trade off. You can make it but there really is a need for ad supported reporting.
For what it’s worth I’ve been in this business 15 years and can’t name a single incident of your influence scenario. I can’t speak to every outlet in the world but this is not a thing that happens.
- aucisson_masque 4 weeks ago> For what it’s worth I’ve been in this business 15 years and can’t name a single incident of your influence scenario.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_proprietor
Its mostly a business with very little profit, why all these wealthy men buy more and more newspapers ? Media is the third power after politician and justice, it’s a well known fact.
And they don’t need to intervene directly, the lead editor in these companies just know that there are some subject he shouldn’t speak about or speak in a specific way if he wants to keep his job, get bonus, etc.
Believing it doesn’t interfere with the editorial line is naive, they wouldn’t build empire of news media if they couldn’t benefit from it.
- aucisson_masque 4 weeks ago
- mvdtnz 4 weeks agoHow much do you pay for your news?
- aucisson_masque 4 weeks ago8€/months.
It’s as much about paying for news than it is about supporting people doing a great job that is extremely valuable for democracy.
- SoftTalker 4 weeks agoI was thinking about this today. $40/month for home delivery of the NYT. Add in maybe $5/month for postage to pay my bills and other correspondence. That's still less than half what I pay per month for internet. It's tempting to just drop the home internet service and go back to the 1990s way of doing things.
- aucisson_masque 4 weeks ago
- 4 weeks ago
- jmsdnns 4 weeks ago
- ValveFan6969 4 weeks ago[dead]
- syndraiofficial 4 weeks ago[dead]
- homeonthemtn 4 weeks ago[flagged]
- Infinity315 4 weeks agoWe still need people on the ground reporting on these things. AI can't (yet) have connections and conversations with relevant parties. Many interviews would not be possible without a reporter developing a rapport with the interviewee beforehand.
- charcircuit 4 weeks agoIf they are actually needed they shouldn't have any issue finding funding.
- Infinity315 4 weeks agoHow do you define what is needed? The vast majority of reporting does not affect one's own behaviour at all. For example, consider the Snowden leaks, I guarantee you the vast majority of people did not even attempt to modify their own behaviour at all in light of this new information--despite having read or heard about it.
I'd argue that this reporting was still needed, despite it having very little material impact on one's life.
- Infinity315 4 weeks ago
- charcircuit 4 weeks ago
- dineol 4 weeks agountil the moment they'll built ads into AI responses
- miltonlost 4 weeks agoYou're blaming news sites when the problem behind a lot of those issues is entirely Google's.
- egypturnash 4 weeks agoyyyyep, outsourcing all your ads to Google turned out to be a terrible idea.
- egypturnash 4 weeks ago
- skywhopper 4 weeks agoAnd where will the AI get the news from?
- georgemcbay 4 weeks agoI agree with your assessment of how terrible online news sites are, but I'm sure the same problem is true for not just news sites but any sort of site where searchable content is shown for ad eyeballs, news sites are just the ones that you're going to hear about it first and most loudly from for pretty obvious reasons.
Regardless of which side you take on any of this (anti/pro-SEO clickbait, anti/pro-AI), it is still ultimately a serious ouroboros problem for Google and other "AI" companies because their "AI" relies on these sites for ongoing training. Kill them all off and where does new content for their AIs to slurp come from?
- 4 weeks ago
- Infinity315 4 weeks ago
- p1dda 4 weeks agoGreat news to see the abominable corporate news media wither and hopefully die.
- Tarsul 4 weeks agoAnyone surprised? I mean that's just what Google does and did from the very early days. I am more ashamed that politicians worldwide have done basically nothing to help media companies in the last 25 years.
We can always ask ourselves: What is more important for our society: independent media or our search overlords?
- rmah 4 weeks agoWhy should they help media companies?
- junto 4 weeks agoI think that’s a good question. If they did their jobs properly, acting as the 4th estate, then I’d be much more supportive.
However the last action I can remember that fulfilled checks and counterbalances was the publication of the Snowden files. After that the press died and it’s never recovered.
Journalists are too scared and media companies neutered, and no longer have what it takes to call out the executive.
- Spivak 4 weeks agoI mean Fox News seemed to be pretty darn good at calling out Biden and made it their personal mission to hate everything Obama touched. Why aren't people comfortable calling out Trump? Because he's made it clear he will and has retaliated against anyone who does.
We've implicitly relied on the "courtesy" of the executive to just sit there and take it for the good of the country and public discussion. But now that time seems to have passed. No more high road and turning the other cheek.
- Spivak 4 weeks ago
- teeray 4 weeks agoBecause an informed public helps the proper functioning of a democracy (I know, I know, it’s a hilarious thing to say in the US)
- tehjoker 4 weeks agoThere should be a national media company. Instead we have national media companies with no democratic oversight and labor abuse.
- tqi 4 weeks agoYou mean like NPR?
- tqi 4 weeks ago
- skywhopper 4 weeks agoThey have to get the content they repurpose without permission from somewhere.
- aaronbaugher 4 weeks ago[flagged]
- input_sh 4 weeks agoDo you usually get your news from The Christian Post or is this a one off thing?
- input_sh 4 weeks ago
- junto 4 weeks ago
- asadotzler 4 weeks agoGoogle used to send traffic to my site. Now it scrapes my site and serves summaries of my site on its site, sending me zero human traffic but a whole lot of expensive bot traffic.
- triceratops 4 weeks ago> politicians worldwide have done basically nothing to help media companies
Is that really surprising? Good journalists consider it their job to hold politicians accountable.
- Tarsul 4 weeks agobut that cuts both ways. They hold not only your own party accountable but also the other parties. Thus, if you are a politican that has a moral compass and believe you are the one who does the best job, then you would like a well-respected media organisation because you would think that it hits the other guys more often than yourself.
But yes.. this only works so long as the amount of politicans with a moral compass are a majority... the moment this changes is the moment that the media is the enemy.
- Tarsul 4 weeks ago
- ekianjo 4 weeks agoMedia companies are heavily subsidized everywhere in the world and that's precisely because of politicians.
- holoduke 4 weeks agoWhat? Media companies sold their souls to big capital and Journalists write to serve engagement.
- rightbyte 4 weeks agoGoogle is doing some sort of LLM copyright laundering. The earlier version was bad for the sites but with the new one most likely decreases click throughs even more.
- bamboozled 4 weeks agoPoliticians hate Media companies, sometimes they deserve the hate but there is almost no reality where having accurate, objective news reporting is beneficial for politicians.
- DaSHacka 4 weeks ago> there is almost no reality where having accurate, objective news reporting is beneficial for politicians.
Well it's a good thing for politicians they haven't had to deal with that for a long, long time.
- DaSHacka 4 weeks ago
- rmah 4 weeks ago
- OutOfHere 4 weeks agoI think that requiring PoW (proof-of-work) could take over for simple requests, rejecting requests until a sufficient nonce is included in the request. Unfortunately, this collective PoW could burden power grids even more, wasting energy+money+computation for transmission. Such is life. It would be a lot better to just upgrade the servers, but that's never going to be sufficient.
- GuB-42 4 weeks agoWorse than that. Such computations are nothing to a desktop computer, or a server in a datacenter. But they are definitely going to be a problem for cheap smartphones.
Ironically, the computers that are the best suited for solving these proof-of-work problem are the same kind of computers that are used to train and run AIs.
And for even more irony, chatbots are relatively lightweight on the client side, being just text, while news sites tend to be bloated even without considering PoW.
So there is a good chance for PoW not to affect AI scrapers much (they have powerful computers to solve the challenges) while driving away smartphone users towards chatbots and other AI-based summaries.
- OutOfHere 4 weeks agoIf the PoW difficulty is IP or subnet specific, then the IP addresses or subnets that hammer the server more can be given increasingly greater PoW requirements. The smartphones, assuming they're not being used as proxies, will have few requests, so the server can go very easy on them with the PoW difficulty.
- OutOfHere 4 weeks ago
- daedrdev 4 weeks agowhat?
- GuB-42 4 weeks ago