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> they are decreasing the probability that this user would come to by content (via Google, for example). Google has been providing summaries of stuff and hijac

> they are decreasing the probability that this user would come to by content (via Google, for example). Google has been providing summaries of stuff and hijacking traffic for ages. I kid you not, in the tourism sector this has been a HUGE issue, we have seen 50%+ decrease in views when they started doing it. We paid gazzilions to write quality content for tourists about the most different places just so Google could put it on their homepage. It's just depressing. I'm more and more convinced that the age of regulations and competition is gone, US does want to have unkillable monopolies in the tech sector and we are all peons.

itsoktocry 2y ago
>We paid gazzilions to write quality content for tourists about the most different places just so Google could put it on their homepage. It's just depressing It's a legitimate complaint, and it sucks for your business. But I think this demonstrates that the sort of quality content you were producing doesn't actually have much value.
- OrigamiPastrami 2y ago
  I'd argue it only demonstrates that it doesn't produce much value for the creator.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    The Google summaries (before whatever LLM stuff they're doing now) are 2-3 sentences tops. The content on most of these websites is much, much longer than that for SEO reasons. It sucks that Google created the problem on both ends, but the content OP is referring to costs way more to produce than it adds value to the world because it has to be padded out to show up in search. Then Google comes along and extracts the actual answer that the page is built around and the user skips both the padding and the site as a whole. Google is terrible, the attention economy that Google created is terrible. This was all true before LLMs and tools like Perplexity are a reaction to the terrible content world that Google created.
    - newaccount74 2y ago
      It would be a lot better if Google just prioritised concise websites. If Google preferred websites that cut the fluff, then website operators would have an incentive to make useful websites, and Google wouldn't have as much of an incentive to provide the answer in a snippet, and everyone wins. I guess it's hard to rank website quality, so Google just prefers verbose websites.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        > Google wouldn't have as much of an incentive to provide the answer in a snippet, and everyone wins. Google has at least two incentives to provide that answer, both of which wouldn't change. The bad one: they want to keep you on their page too, for usual bullshit attention economy reasons. The good one: users prefer the snippets too. The user searching for information usually isn't there to marvel at beauty of random websites hiding that information in piles of noise surrounded by ads. They don't care about websites in the first place. They want an answer to the question, so they can get on with whatever it is they're doing. When Google can give them an answer, and this stops them from going from SERP to any website, then that's just few seconds or minutes of life that user doesn't have to waste. Lifespans are finite.
        newaccount74 2y ago
        I strongly disagree with you. The only reason that users prefer snippets is because websites hide the info you are looking for. The problem is that the top ranked search results are ad-infested SEO crap. If the top ranked website were actually designed with the user in mind, they would not hide the important info. They would present the most important info at the top, and contain additional details below. They would offer the user exactly what they want immediately, and provide further details that the user can read if they want to. Think of a well written wikipedia article. The summary is probably all that you need, but it's good that the rest of the article with all the detail is there as well. I'm pretty sure that most people prefer a well designed user-centric article to the stupid Google snippet that may or may not answer the question you asked. Most people looking for info don't look for just a single answer. Often, the answer leads to the next question, or if the answer is surprising, you might want to check out if the source looks credible, etc. Even ads would be helpful, if they were actually relevant (eg. if I am looking for low profile graphic cards, I'd appreciate an ad for a local retailer that has them in stock). But the problem is that website operators (and Google) just want to distract you, capture your attention, and get you to click on completely irrelevant bullshit, because that is more profitable than actually helping you.
- luaKmua 2y ago
  That line of thinking makes no sense. If the "content" had no value, why would google go through the effort of scraping it and presenting it to the user?
  - itsoktocry 2y ago
    >If the "content" had no value, why would google go through the effort of scraping it and presenting it to the user? They don't present it all, they summarize it. And let's be serious here, I was being polite because I don't know the OPs business. But 99% of this sort of content is SEO trash and contributes to the wasteland that the internet is becoming. Feel free to point me to the good stuff.
    - luaKmua 2y ago
      Pedantry aside, let's restate as "present the core thoughts" to the user, which still implies value. I agree that most of google front page results are SEO garbage these days, but that's a separate issue from claiming that are summary of a piece of information removes the original of its value. I'd even argue that it transfers it from one entity to the other in this case.
    - lyu07282 2y ago
      I would also think that the intrinsic value is different. If there is a hotel on a mountain writing "quality content" about the place, to them it really doesn't matter who "steals" their content, the value is in people going to the hotel on the mountain not in people reading about the hotel on the mountain. Like to society the value is in the hotel, everything else is just fluff around it that never had any real value to begin with. > Feel free to point me to the good stuff. Travel bloggers and vloggers, but that is an entirely different unaffected industry (entertainment/infotainment).
      - itsoktocry 2y ago
        >Travel bloggers and vloggers I've no doubt some good ones exist, but my instinct is to ignore every word this industry says because it's paid placement and our world is run by advertisers.
CobrastanJorji 2y ago
I'm curious about the tourism sector problem. In tourism, I would think the goal would be to promote a location. You want people to be able to easily discover the location, get information about it, and presumably arrange to travel to those locations. If Google gets the information to the users, but doesn't send the tourist to the website, is that harmful? Is it a problem of ads on the tourism website? Or is more of problem of the site creator demonstrating to the site purchaser that the purchase was worthwhile?
- SamBam 2y ago
  Presumably the issue is more the travel guides/Time Out/Tripadvisor type websites. They make money by you reading their stuff, not by you actually spending money in the place.
- epolanski 2y ago
  We would employ local guides all around the world to craft itinerary plans to visit places, give tips, tricks, recommend experiences and places (we made money by selling some of those through our website) and it was a success. Customers liked the in depth value of that content and it converted to buys (we sold experiences and other stuff, sort of like getyourguide). One day all of our content ended up on Google "what time is best to visit the Sagrada Familia" and you would have a copy pasted answer by Google. This killed a lot of traffic. Anyway, I just wanted to point out that the previous user was a bit naive taking his fight to LLMs when search engines and OSs have been leeching and hijacking content for ages.
  - popalchemist 2y ago
    If your content has a yes/no or otherwise simple, factual answer that can be conveyed in a 1-2 sentence summary, then I don't see this as a problem. You need to adapt your content strategy, as we all do from time to time. There was never a guarantee -- for anyone in any industry at all -- that what worked in the past will always continue to work. That is a regressive attitude. However I do have concerns about Google and other monopolies replacing large swaths of people who make their livings doing things that can now be automated. I am not against automation but I don't think the disruption of our entire societal structure and economy should be in the hands of the sociopaths that run these companies. I expect regulation to come into play once the shit hits the fan for more people.
Brybry 2y ago
While I personally believe it should be opt-in, Google does have multiple ways to opt out of snippets while still being indexed. [1] [1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet#nosnippet https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet...
jcynix 2y ago
> Google has been providing summaries of stuff and hijacking traffic for ages. Yes, Google hijacked images for some time. But in general there has "always" been the option to tell Google not to display summaries etc with these meta tags: <meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive"> <meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet">
- bigethan 2y ago
  The problem with opt-out is that if the whole industry doesn't do it, google will show someone's summaries and the traffic still stays with them.
Too 2y ago
Google has been in trouble for doing so several times in the past and removed key features because of it. Examples: Viewing cached pages, linking directly to images, summarized news articles.

itsoktocry 2y ago

>We paid gazzilions to write quality content for tourists about the most different places just so Google could put it on their homepage. It's just depressing It's a legitimate complaint, and it sucks for your business. But I think this demonstrates that the sort of quality content you were producing doesn't actually have much value.

OrigamiPastrami 2y ago
I'd argue it only demonstrates that it doesn't produce much value for the creator.
- lolinder 2y ago
  The Google summaries (before whatever LLM stuff they're doing now) are 2-3 sentences tops. The content on most of these websites is much, much longer than that for SEO reasons. It sucks that Google created the problem on both ends, but the content OP is referring to costs way more to produce than it adds value to the world because it has to be padded out to show up in search. Then Google comes along and extracts the actual answer that the page is built around and the user skips both the padding and the site as a whole. Google is terrible, the attention economy that Google created is terrible. This was all true before LLMs and tools like Perplexity are a reaction to the terrible content world that Google created.
  - newaccount74 2y ago
    It would be a lot better if Google just prioritised concise websites. If Google preferred websites that cut the fluff, then website operators would have an incentive to make useful websites, and Google wouldn't have as much of an incentive to provide the answer in a snippet, and everyone wins. I guess it's hard to rank website quality, so Google just prefers verbose websites.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > Google wouldn't have as much of an incentive to provide the answer in a snippet, and everyone wins. Google has at least two incentives to provide that answer, both of which wouldn't change. The bad one: they want to keep you on their page too, for usual bullshit attention economy reasons. The good one: users prefer the snippets too. The user searching for information usually isn't there to marvel at beauty of random websites hiding that information in piles of noise surrounded by ads. They don't care about websites in the first place. They want an answer to the question, so they can get on with whatever it is they're doing. When Google can give them an answer, and this stops them from going from SERP to any website, then that's just few seconds or minutes of life that user doesn't have to waste. Lifespans are finite.
      - newaccount74 2y ago
        I strongly disagree with you. The only reason that users prefer snippets is because websites hide the info you are looking for. The problem is that the top ranked search results are ad-infested SEO crap. If the top ranked website were actually designed with the user in mind, they would not hide the important info. They would present the most important info at the top, and contain additional details below. They would offer the user exactly what they want immediately, and provide further details that the user can read if they want to. Think of a well written wikipedia article. The summary is probably all that you need, but it's good that the rest of the article with all the detail is there as well. I'm pretty sure that most people prefer a well designed user-centric article to the stupid Google snippet that may or may not answer the question you asked. Most people looking for info don't look for just a single answer. Often, the answer leads to the next question, or if the answer is surprising, you might want to check out if the source looks credible, etc. Even ads would be helpful, if they were actually relevant (eg. if I am looking for low profile graphic cards, I'd appreciate an ad for a local retailer that has them in stock). But the problem is that website operators (and Google) just want to distract you, capture your attention, and get you to click on completely irrelevant bullshit, because that is more profitable than actually helping you.
luaKmua 2y ago
That line of thinking makes no sense. If the "content" had no value, why would google go through the effort of scraping it and presenting it to the user?
- itsoktocry 2y ago
  >If the "content" had no value, why would google go through the effort of scraping it and presenting it to the user? They don't present it all, they summarize it. And let's be serious here, I was being polite because I don't know the OPs business. But 99% of this sort of content is SEO trash and contributes to the wasteland that the internet is becoming. Feel free to point me to the good stuff.
  - luaKmua 2y ago
    Pedantry aside, let's restate as "present the core thoughts" to the user, which still implies value. I agree that most of google front page results are SEO garbage these days, but that's a separate issue from claiming that are summary of a piece of information removes the original of its value. I'd even argue that it transfers it from one entity to the other in this case.
  - lyu07282 2y ago
    I would also think that the intrinsic value is different. If there is a hotel on a mountain writing "quality content" about the place, to them it really doesn't matter who "steals" their content, the value is in people going to the hotel on the mountain not in people reading about the hotel on the mountain. Like to society the value is in the hotel, everything else is just fluff around it that never had any real value to begin with. > Feel free to point me to the good stuff. Travel bloggers and vloggers, but that is an entirely different unaffected industry (entertainment/infotainment).
    - itsoktocry 2y ago
      >Travel bloggers and vloggers I've no doubt some good ones exist, but my instinct is to ignore every word this industry says because it's paid placement and our world is run by advertisers.

CobrastanJorji 2y ago

I'm curious about the tourism sector problem. In tourism, I would think the goal would be to promote a location. You want people to be able to easily discover the location, get information about it, and presumably arrange to travel to those locations. If Google gets the information to the users, but doesn't send the tourist to the website, is that harmful? Is it a problem of ads on the tourism website? Or is more of problem of the site creator demonstrating to the site purchaser that the purchase was worthwhile?

SamBam 2y ago
Presumably the issue is more the travel guides/Time Out/Tripadvisor type websites. They make money by you reading their stuff, not by you actually spending money in the place.
epolanski 2y ago
We would employ local guides all around the world to craft itinerary plans to visit places, give tips, tricks, recommend experiences and places (we made money by selling some of those through our website) and it was a success. Customers liked the in depth value of that content and it converted to buys (we sold experiences and other stuff, sort of like getyourguide). One day all of our content ended up on Google "what time is best to visit the Sagrada Familia" and you would have a copy pasted answer by Google. This killed a lot of traffic. Anyway, I just wanted to point out that the previous user was a bit naive taking his fight to LLMs when search engines and OSs have been leeching and hijacking content for ages.
- popalchemist 2y ago
  If your content has a yes/no or otherwise simple, factual answer that can be conveyed in a 1-2 sentence summary, then I don't see this as a problem. You need to adapt your content strategy, as we all do from time to time. There was never a guarantee -- for anyone in any industry at all -- that what worked in the past will always continue to work. That is a regressive attitude. However I do have concerns about Google and other monopolies replacing large swaths of people who make their livings doing things that can now be automated. I am not against automation but I don't think the disruption of our entire societal structure and economy should be in the hands of the sociopaths that run these companies. I expect regulation to come into play once the shit hits the fan for more people.

Brybry 2y ago

While I personally believe it should be opt-in, Google does have multiple ways to opt out of snippets while still being indexed. [1] [1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet#nosnippet https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet...

jcynix 2y ago

> Google has been providing summaries of stuff and hijacking traffic for ages. Yes, Google hijacked images for some time. But in general there has "always" been the option to tell Google not to display summaries etc with these meta tags: <meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive"> <meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet">

bigethan 2y ago
The problem with opt-out is that if the whole industry doesn't do it, google will show someone's summaries and the traffic still stays with them.

Too 2y ago

Google has been in trouble for doing so several times in the past and removed key features because of it. Examples: Viewing cached pages, linking directly to images, summarized news articles.