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> Google is still about sources. That deserves respect. This isn’t true. They are well-known for taking information from the crawled pages and displaying it di

> Google is still about sources. That deserves respect. This isn’t true. They are well-known for taking information from the crawled pages and displaying it directly on the results page so people stop visiting the sources altogether. This will only accelerate with LLM “search engines”, but let’s not pretend Google’s above doing the same thing. They happily do this themselves. How Google eats a business whole: https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...

davidy123 4y ago
I think the proposition for that feature is fair. Some of them are also based on metadata people intentionally add to sites to be used this way. Source content is featured, people can choose to follow it. Everyone wins. In fact you pretty much have to follow the source, because by now we know the answer is not as simple or correct as it seems. Not sure how that translates into a completely synthetic summary that appears to be authorative. Of course, it would be suicidal for Microsoft to just provide answers, they also want the advertising revenue. But do they expect it to come from the page sources, or something else, which adds its own distortion. Another dimension to examine.
threatofrain 4y ago
Am I wrong to say that Google will cite the information so you can go to the original site?
tbran 4y ago
100% agree. I have a content website with some tables that I compiled from carefully scouring forums, taking my own measurements, and from people emailing me new info. Well, Google just displays my tables in the search results, so no one needs to visit my site. This may be great for a user, but it's a real disincentive to create content if Google is just going to scrape it and display it. Last time I looked, my site ranked #1 for the searches above, but a user would have to scroll through 3 screens worth of whatever else is on a search results page now to get to my link.

davidy123 4y ago

I think the proposition for that feature is fair. Some of them are also based on metadata people intentionally add to sites to be used this way. Source content is featured, people can choose to follow it. Everyone wins. In fact you pretty much have to follow the source, because by now we know the answer is not as simple or correct as it seems. Not sure how that translates into a completely synthetic summary that appears to be authorative. Of course, it would be suicidal for Microsoft to just provide answers, they also want the advertising revenue. But do they expect it to come from the page sources, or something else, which adds its own distortion. Another dimension to examine.

threatofrain 4y ago

Am I wrong to say that Google will cite the information so you can go to the original site?

tbran 4y ago

100% agree. I have a content website with some tables that I compiled from carefully scouring forums, taking my own measurements, and from people emailing me new info. Well, Google just displays my tables in the search results, so no one needs to visit my site. This may be great for a user, but it's a real disincentive to create content if Google is just going to scrape it and display it. Last time I looked, my site ranked #1 for the searches above, but a user would have to scroll through 3 screens worth of whatever else is on a search results page now to get to my link.