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Hot take: SEO is dead, content farms are done, almost no one will leave Google/Bing to read more than what it generates. Thank you content writers for your ser
by candiddevmike 4y ago
Hot take: SEO is dead, content farms are done, almost no one will leave Google/Bing to read more than what it generates.
Thank you content writers for your service training LLMs. Here's 10 amazing ways to find a new career in a LLM world.
- grrdotcloud 4y agoPrompt trainers and tweakers and optimizers will probably replace the SEO types. I'm terrified of a world where I ask, what beverage will be served on Mars, and the answer will be engineered to be given as Coca-Cola is a popular drink possibly available on Mars, or right now. Would you like it delivered?
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y agoI’m more worried about automated astroturfing and propaganda.
- arsome 4y agoWell, it's a little late for that one. Fire one of the many offline LLMs up on a university network or somewhere else that a single IP connecting many times won't be too suspicious and let it go to town.
- rightbyte 4y agoWhy? The only difference is that everyone can afford it. It is probably better in the end than only having paid chills doing it, since people will realize they can't trust "internet consensus" as being a actual consensus. The real problem for some sites, is the amount of believable spam on mindless rant feeds, like Twitter and Reddit etc.
- arsome 4y ago"Prompt trainers" and such will just be replaced by slightly better LLMs that can do that part already or inquire for further details from a user.
- esafak 4y agoNo, because Coca Cola doesn't have what plants crave.
- justinator 4y agoTechnically sodium is an electrolyte, so Coca Cola does have what plants crave.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- penjelly 4y agois this a hot take? it seems obvious that 95% of searches for answers will end at chatgpt/llm (even if no good answer returns) which yes will kill SEO and traffic to content websites to begin with.
- mstachowiak 4y agoI tend to agree, because if Google doesn't, OpenAI et al will. The real question is how does Google balance this against the loss in advertising revenue?
- rpastuszak 4y agoPromoted links or native ad formats in AI search results would be an almost too obvious guess. Then putting advertising in whatever format LLM outputs are dressed as. My biggest fear is, abuse eg how LLMs for search can work with targeted ads, eg making you slightly prefer Coke vs. Pepsi, or One Political Brain Parasite(tm) over another.
- penjelly 4y agocurious what you imagine those targeted ads would look like? i agree its a scary thought, just having trouble imagining it
- jarsin 4y agoI work for a company who's main traffic comes from questions that google doesn't spit out the entire answer to except below the first few results. I asked chatgpt and of course it gives the answer right away. We also have searches that land on pages with fancy ui's where user has to enter info to get answers. Took me about 1 minute to get chatgpt to spit out the answers and once I knew how to prompt it I could shorthand the input and get answers much faster. We are so dead.
- Swizec 4y agoAlready today fewer than 50% off searches result in a click https://thenextweb.com/news/google-search-no-clicks https://thenextweb.com/news/google-search-no-clicks
- MrVandemar 4y agoSometimes because you search for something on Google and whatever you wanted is actually buried. So you go look somewhere else.
- nixcraft 4y agoWrong. The low-quality content farm will be out and the high-quality site will be fully paywalled (no more data to AI). For instance, when searching for information on setting up RDS, like high availability MySQL on self-hosted servers on-premises, neither ChatGPT nor Brad provided the necessary details. I would not make a publicly searchable blog or Github repository if I were well-versed in setting such RDS on-premises. Instead, I would make it available only behind a paywall. Why should Google and MS/Bing benefit from my hard work if they do not direct traffic to my site? Previously, low- or high-quality pages benefited from SEO, but that is no longer true. There is a wealth of knowledge that has not yet been documented. Unless Google or Bing starts directing many traffic, experts, and websites will not share updated and other valuable information. I anticipate more paywalls for high-quality content, similar to good news sites. Besides that, be careful about wishing for one or two centralized sites controlled by big tech giants with AIs such as Google and Microsoft. The web developed because of many 3rd party websites. I don't have answers on how good 3rd party sites will survive with Google/Bing sending traffic and Ad clicks, but the equation is about SEO changing. Either you create non-profit Wikipedia-style content or high-quality content paywalled. That is my best guess.
- prepend 4y ago> I would not make a publicly searchable blog or Github repository if I were well-versed in setting such RDS on-premises You won’t. But I will and I think others will as well. My goal is to help people set up RDS and I don’t care about commercialization. So happy if AI reuses all the material. There are many technical blogs that are just hobbies, or fun, or brand PR, or book tie ins or whatever.
- post-it 4y agoYup. Commercializing things is hard. If I want to share info, I'll make a Reddit post or maybe a blog post if it's something lengthy. If I want to paywall it, I don't know where to start. I imagine there's keys-included solutions, but I doubt they can just send me e-transfers for each payment. Maybe they can send money to my PayPal? I've never used that for receiving money before. Do I need a business bank account? Will transparency rules require me to share my address publicly? Maybe I need a PO box. I just wanted to share something helpful.
- cosmicCactus 4y agoFor the past 10 years I've been using google as a search engine and nothing else. I type for the page or content I already know in advance I'm looking for and that's it. I never browsed or clicked on promotions. I found out about new sites and products, always through social media, or news pages. I will continue using it with the same purpose, I can't imagine people spending 15 minutes on a search engine trying to discover something new.
- lanza 4y agoWhy do people post worthless anecdotes like this when we know from trivially available data that Google makes over a hundred billion dollars per year from search.
- candiddevmike 4y agoWith enough anecdotes, that 100 billion dollars starts to smell like click fraud. Google owns both sides of the ad market and is less than transparent with how their ads perform or how bids are calculated. I will be very curious how the promoted stuff works with LLMs. When you ask a LLM what the best brand of shoes are, can folks pay to influence the result?
- kredd 4y agoI personally know people spending 6 figures at the minimum on SEO, because they see huge conversion rates for their own businesses (which are not web-based stuff by the way, more of a niche in person technical services).
- syntaxing 4y agoI've been using Google for a decade+ too. Phind has replaced about 95% of my Google usage this past month.
- m3kw9 4y agoIt’s a pain to having to prompt everything. People still want to see certain identity when browsing, for example browsing CNN or wired. Prompting “show me some interesting tech articles”, and you know a lot of that is Ai generated, it feels stale
- dclowd9901 4y agoWhile I upvoted you, I think there’s still a lot of room in this world for human created content. In fact, I wager it’ll be more important than ever. People will be actively seeking out human-attributable information so there’s someone to hold the buck on where information originated from.
- eloisius 4y agoI’m generally pretty pessimistic about the effects LLMs are going to have on the world, but I tentatively agree with you on this point. In fact, a silver lining might be that SEO content marketing becomes worthless, so we’ll have fewer product review listicles that didn’t actually review products, but just did a roundup of other articles in hopes of getting some affiliate link clicks. Genuine writing is usually less directly profit driven, so maybe there will be more room for that in traditional search results hereafter. Still a raw deal for anyone that blogs or writes tutorials and now OpenAI makes money off of them.
- rpastuszak 4y agoB…but I’ve just started my (medieval) content farm. https://tidings.potato.horse/about https://tidings.potato.horse/about
- dblooman 4y agogotta love a custom cursor
- rpastuszak 4y agoThanks! I spent way too much time researching manicules in illuminated manuscripts . I wish I could get paid to do it. PS. check out the dog wearing a hat on potato.horse if you haven't
- escapedmoose 4y agoI think I’m in love with you, dear farmer. (Jk, but truly a beautiful site. Every link I clicked was a delight. Your brain seems like a marvelous place.)
- rpastuszak 4y ago> dear farmer. Thanks, I've been trying to build a digital garden (or a cemetery) for some time, but with interconnected sites/articles/toys on different domains rather than a single Obsidian Publish style site. Tangent: I recently found a beautiful and extremely well structured digital garden made by Maggie Appleton (https://maggieappleton.com https://maggieappleton.com). So, now I'm just jumping between either being inspired by the amount of research she's shared or analysis paralysis since there are so many interesting approaches to the subject matter.
- escapedmoose 4y agoWow, that is a very well-considered and interesting site as well. Thanks for the link!
- rgrieselhuber 4y ago
- jameslk 4y ago> Hot take: SEO is dead, content farms are done, almost no one will leave Google/Bing to read more than what it generates. I disagree. What incentive does a website have to produce content if it receives no traffic? Website owners want control over their traffic and the data too. They will wall off any search engine that doesn't give them anything in return (basically they're scrapers at that point). The search engines that do this will starve themselves of information they need to stay relevant and the first search engine to play fair continuing to share traffic will get an advantage. More likely, Google and Bing will continue to play fair and send traffic. Perhaps AI features will become browser features instead, complementing websites, not replacing them.
- sramam 4y ago> Perhaps AI features will become browser features instead, complementing websites, not replacing them. Interesting conclusion. AI features seem to incur more cost than search (don't they?!) Wonder how that'll play out - the user is conditioned not to pay at this point, and the search engine is no longer incentivized to pay for it.
- x0x0 4y agoI actually think this is what prevented Google from deploying generative AI before. If the search engine, which existed to direct searchers to websites, becomes an answer engine, which does not direct people to websites, it will take some time, but large quantities of the sites Google consumes will cut them off. The trade is info to Google for visitors. It's not hard to guess how sites will react when that trade stops.
- webmobdev 4y ago> More likely, Google and Bing will continue to play fair and send traffic. More likely they will need to be sued, like the news / media companies in Europe and Australia have done.
- tomjen3 4y agoNew Bing give you sources you can check and Google has extracted relevant facts for something like a decade at this point.
- notatoad 4y agoIt sounds like you're against this. I'm not sure why. SEO is a scam to convince search engines to show something other than most useful content. Content farms are a drain on human attention. Human intelligence had it's chance and we squandered it. Bring on the AIs, they're not going to be worse than the mess we've already made.
- Semaphor 4y ago> Content farms are a drain on human attention. Maybe it’s a matter of differing definitions, but I’ve got a lot of useful information out of well-written and well-researched "content farms".
- ekanes 4y agoSure, but you would as a generality have gotten BETTER information from the real sources from whom the SEO-oriented farms took the info and optimized for the search engines. They're repurposing someone else's original content.
- Semaphor 4y agoNo, the way it works is having people write the content. Now are there crappy ones that just copy content, write bad stuff, etc.? Sure. But there are also those with helpful content. Here’s a content farm I only recently found that has a lot of helpful original content: https://bootspy.com/ https://bootspy.com/
- jjallen 4y agoWhat about when the content gets stale in a couple of years?
- xkgt 4y agoIt can also go the other way. You may just have to figure out patterns to jailbreak a handful of foundational models and profit forever.