In 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 · 40m ago
I 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.
spankalee · 5h ago
Google'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 · 3h ago
The 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 · 3h ago
Seems 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 · 2h ago
Every 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)
ajross · 1h ago
> Every once in a while
Pretty much what I said, no? You don't use the product and when you do, do it through a filter[1] where you only remember the bugs. Do you use other AI search products and find that they don't show this behavior?
[1] I mean, come on: framing it as "bother not ignoring" is just a dead giveaway that you aren't doing a product evaluation in good faith!
bcoates · 14m ago
I am doing the review in good faith though--by default, I scroll past to the first result, then if it seems unsuitable and I'm desperate enough I check the LLM thingy. If it were providing any value it would sometimes be both novel and correct.
Usually it's non-novel (correctly-harmelessly but unhelpfully, restating the web search results). When it's novel it's because it's wrong.
I would remember the situation where reading the LLM thingy added any value if it ever happened. The weird little UI thing they do where they only show the LLM result if you wait for it to render makes this very easy, I have to scroll up to even consider it.
waldrews · 2h ago
The 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.
bionhoward · 29m ago
One funny thing about Google summaries is “copy text” merges all of the links into a giant blob which gets interpreted as a single extremely long broken link. Not a great sign for attention to detail if they don’t even copy their own pasta (it’s been like this for months)
flokie · 1h ago
In the US (to start) there's now a flavor of Gemini 2.5 to power Search experiences like AI Mode and AI Overviews. Should be sufficiently good at this point.
I've been pleasantly surprised at the quality of the answers, but they've been wrong enough that I'll never not double check them anyway.
marcus_holmes · 2h ago
Possibly 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.
msgodel · 4h ago
For 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 · 1h ago
I'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 · 2h ago
And 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 · 2h ago
Huh 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.
onlyrealcuzzo · 4h 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 · 4h ago
Those adverts and clickbait will infect llms soon enough, just be far harder to block.
nitwit005 · 3h ago
Yes, unfortunately for those saying AIs will only get better, advertising is a major reason we should expect them to get worse.
techjamie · 3h ago
Ironically, I wonder if it would inspire a slew of downstream services that use LLMs to clean advertising out of the mainstream LLM responses.
downsplat · 3h ago
With the huge usage that LLM APIs are getting in all sorts of industries, they cannot be going away, and they're cheap.
If consumer AI chatbots get enshittified, you can just grab some open source bring-your-api-keys front-end, and chat away for peanuts without ads or anything anti-user.
Plus, anyone enterprising can just write a web front-end and sell it as "the ad-free AI chatbot, only $10/mo, usage limits apply".
bgwalter · 1h ago
They 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 · 1h ago
That'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.
o11c · 6m ago
It's perfectly possible if they start downranking sites full of ads.
But an ad company will never do that.
voxl · 1h ago
There 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.
ljlolel · 48m ago
All that means less revenue, that’s a fantasy
voxl · 3m ago
Sure, sure, except for this minor issue that the argument I was responding to didn't mention revenue, they talked about the state of the internet. So why again are you responding to my counter with a straw man?
massysett · 46m 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.
you are linking to “AI responses can make a mistake” post???! Google’s top 86 search results are ads :)
ketzo · 1h ago
Then what explains people doing millions of web searches on perplexity/chatgpt/claude?
irjustin · 1h ago
Simply 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 · 1h ago
they 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” :)
triceratops · 54m ago
I wonder if "boomer" is going to become a generic term for "my parents' generation".
bdangubic · 34m ago
100%
vgeek · 5h ago
We 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 · 1h ago
The 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.
marcuschong · 2h ago
It'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 · 2h ago
You 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 · 1h ago
Eventually 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.
olyjohn · 1h ago
People use, and pay for, ad-ridden services all the time. I mean, just look at Cable TV and the direction all the streaming services are going.
bitpush · 1h ago
Data won't be open and free for scraping in the future. And news worthy sites will ask for $$.
So nope, open models won't be a threat in the future.
stefan_ · 4h ago
Spare 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 · 1h ago
What is infobox?
tehjoker · 4h ago
A simple tale of how capitalism leads to unintended anti-social consequences through market mechanisms that no one participant can control.
paradox460 · 4h ago
I 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 · 1h ago
Does Kagi have AI Mode?
ac29 · 54m ago
Kagi assistant is hybrid search / LLM
bitpush · 28m ago
What model are they using?
jgeurts · 10m ago
They offer most models from the large AI players (anthropic, openai, mistral, meta, grok, google, deepseek)
Aziell · 23m ago
I 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 · 14m ago
Isn'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?
simonw · 33m ago
This 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?
jaredwiener · 5h ago
Honest 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 · 2h ago
I'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 · 5h ago
Generally, 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 · 4h ago
I 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 · 3h ago
Do you trust an ai run by a shady company but not an attributable human editor.
Baader-Meinhof · 3h ago
I think you have an outdated understanding of AI workflow. They generally cite their sources, which you should check, just like regular search.
rozap · 3h ago
Yes, 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".
marcus_holmes · 2h ago
I see what you did there :)
throw_m239339 · 3h ago
> Yes, 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.
Gemini was caught stuffing prompts with "custom" keywords on certain requests, so there is still an editor between you and the AI.
rozap · 2h ago
Read my whole comment :)
mlinhares · 3h ago
We’re so cooked, all the thinking outsourced to LLMs.
bigthymer · 5h ago
Sometimes 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 · 5h ago
Updates on a specific topic, region, company, or ongoing story.
dreghgh · 4h ago
I 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.
wslh · 4m ago
Google 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.
dataviz1000 · 4h ago
Take 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.
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.
I 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.
eikenberry · 3h ago
This 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 · 2h ago
As 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.
awongh · 3h ago
I 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.
bcoates · 2h ago
Honestly that might be a mistake, when the consensus is greedy get scared and when it's scared get greedy
jmyeet · 11m ago
Previously, 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.
gkanai · 2h ago
I 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 · 2h ago
Is Yahoo Japan not good?
Agingcoder · 3h ago
I 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.
kwanbix · 2h ago
I 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.
Hobadee · 3h ago
This one trick will cut down on listicles and click-bait!
amarant · 3h ago
Honestly, 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!
iambateman · 4h ago
If 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 · 3h ago
Windows 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 · 3h ago
Waymo 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!
But... Google's AI summaries are wrong like at least 50% of the time.
blindstitch · 5h ago
A lot of the time it's a just a near-verbatim rephrasing of the top result, too.
ThatMedicIsASpy · 4h ago
You 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 · 4h ago
But 95% of the time it doesn’t matter.
725686 · 1h ago
"Searching" using AI is much faster and direct that traditional search. And with no ads.
wnevets · 4h ago
Google simultaneously making search worse as more people use AI chatbots isn't helping their cause.
kevin_thibedeau · 1h ago
Google destroyed Google's search. You can't surface any factual, non-slop content through them any more.
sreekanth850 · 1h ago
A day will come when auth is an essential part of blogging sites.
DidYaWipe · 1h ago
What 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.
deadbabe · 1h ago
These 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.
jgalt212 · 1h ago
1. 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 · 1h ago
If 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)
rubyfan · 4h ago
Who 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?!?
mattl · 4h ago
News sites have way too much invasive advertising on them, but AI is a scam.
Pay for your news.
teeray · 3h ago
But 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.
mattl · 3h ago
Apple News+ is one way.
Another is what 404media does. You pay $10 a month for no ads and extra stuff.
But yes, I know what you want and sadly there’s nobody doing it yet.
hobs · 3h ago
Oh its been done dozens of times, it just always fails.
mattl · 3h ago
Yeah, Ted Nelson even talked about it. It requires a level of cooperation that we may see eventually.
What is an article worth to read?
crest · 5h ago
How ironic that the WSJ decided to make the text unreadable themselves just in case anyone cared to read it.
Well 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 · 4h ago
Here is Ben Franklin addressing this issue back in 1731 by essentially saying, "that's true, but then how would news ever get printed?"
Newspaper 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.
coffeefirst · 3h ago
There 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.
mvdtnz · 4h ago
How much do you pay for your news?
SoftTalker · 3h ago
I 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 · 4h ago
8€/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.
OutOfHere · 5h ago
I 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 · 5h ago
Worse 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 · 4h ago
If 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.
daedrdev · 5h ago
what?
Tarsul · 5h ago
Anyone 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 · 5h ago
Why should they help media companies?
junto · 5h ago
I 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 · 5h ago
I 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.
fumar · 4h ago
Manufacturing consent from the media owners owners.
xboxnolifes · 3h ago
> Why aren't people comfortable calling out Trump?
I feel like all the new I ever see is calling out Trump. I don't think it's doing anything though.
teeray · 3h ago
Because 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 · 4h ago
There should be a national media company. Instead we have national media companies with no democratic oversight and labor abuse.
tqi · 3h ago
You mean like NPR?
tehjoker · 3h ago
NPR is funded by private donations too and doesn't do enough on-the-ground reporting. It would need significantly more funding to achieve this level of functionality.
skywhopper · 4h ago
They have to get the content they repurpose without permission from somewhere.
aaronbaugher · 5h ago
And doesn't funneling money to over 700 media organizations through USAID count as helping?
Do you usually get your news from The Christian Post or is this a one off thing?
asadotzler · 4h ago
Google 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 · 5h 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 · 5h ago
but 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.
ekianjo · 4h ago
Media companies are heavily subsidized everywhere in the world and that's precisely because of politicians.
bamboozled · 4h ago
Politicians 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 · 2h 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.
holoduke · 5h ago
What? Media companies sold their souls to big capital and Journalists write to serve engagement.
rightbyte · 5h ago
Google 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.
No comments yet
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...
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.
- 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.
Pretty much what I said, no? You don't use the product and when you do, do it through a filter[1] where you only remember the bugs. Do you use other AI search products and find that they don't show this behavior?
[1] I mean, come on: framing it as "bother not ignoring" is just a dead giveaway that you aren't doing a product evaluation in good faith!
Usually it's non-novel (correctly-harmelessly but unhelpfully, restating the web search results). When it's novel it's because it's wrong.
I would remember the situation where reading the LLM thingy added any value if it ever happened. The weird little UI thing they do where they only show the LLM result if you wait for it to render makes this very easy, I have to scroll up to even consider it.
source: https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-ai-mode-up...
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.
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.
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.
If consumer AI chatbots get enshittified, you can just grab some open source bring-your-api-keys front-end, and chat away for peanuts without ads or anything anti-user.
I use https://github.com/sigoden/aichat , but there are GUIs too.
Plus, anyone enterprising can just write a web front-end and sell it as "the ad-free AI chatbot, only $10/mo, usage limits apply".
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.
But an ad company will never do that.
Not true, I use them all the time. They have links available for when I want further information, which is not very often.
Google does need to adapt or die
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.
So nope, open models won't be a threat in the future.
Do you think AI can really replace all the value traditional news brings?
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?
> 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?
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?
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.
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?"
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".
Gemini was caught stuffing prompts with "custom" keywords on certain requests, so there is still an editor between you and the AI.
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.
[0]https://github.com/adam-s/doomberg-terminal
The Browser Company’s new browser, Dia[1], is supposedly another similar product
[0] = https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/?hl=en
[1] = https://www.diabrowser.com/
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.
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.
Hard to say exactly how bad it’s getting right now. Lots of horror stories out there.
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.
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.
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!
It seems like the market thinks Google will be just fine.
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.
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!
Yeah I have 0 trust in the responses I am getting so instead of verifying random claims I'm taking my own turns
Very disappointing for WSJ.
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.
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)
Pay for your news.
Another is what 404media does. You pay $10 a month for no ads and extra stuff.
But yes, I know what you want and sadly there’s nobody doing it yet.
What is an article worth to read?
No comments 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.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-00...
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.
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.
It’s as much about paying for news than it is about supporting people doing a great job that is extremely valuable for democracy.
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.
We can always ask ourselves: What is more important for our society: independent media or our search overlords?
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.
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.
I feel like all the new I ever see is calling out Trump. I don't think it's doing anything though.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/4-things-to-know-abo...
Is that really surprising? Good journalists consider it their job to hold politicians accountable.
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.
Well it's a good thing for politicians they haven't had to deal with that for a long, long time.