6 ms·

Google is burying the web alive

225 points by doener 1y ago

ncr100 1y ago
My summary - G is 'burying' web search results underneath AI results on its search page.
- jfengel 1y ago
  Haven't they been doing that for at least a year? And before that they were burying it under paid results and an info box?
- ajross 1y ago
  Pretty much. This is getting toward a "derangement syndrome" kind of behavior, IMHO. When Microsoft and subsidiaries deploy AI-enhanced search results, it's a "Google Killer" and rockets to the top of the front page of HN to great fanfare. When it turns out that the best and most-used AI-enhanced search results are served at the Google search prompt, Google is "burying the web alive" and the outrage rockets to the front page of HN. Which is it, folks? Like, was OpenAI killing the web too? Or is it good when OpenAI kills the web but bad when Google does? (And yes, Google pays my salary, but to work on firmware and not think about search or AI)
  - ndiddy 1y ago
    You fell for the Goomba Fallacy https://i.redd.it/33w3fqrnx8pd1.jpeg https://i.redd.it/33w3fqrnx8pd1.jpeg
    - ajross 1y ago
      Yeah yeah. But nonetheless group think and echo chambers are real things. Not all opinions are uncorrelated data points, probably most of them aren't. And real people (you too) do indeed hold contradictory opinions all the time. In point of fact insisting that "My Opinion Is Pure And Special and Uncorrelated To Anyone Else's" is probably the single best way to find yourself parroting echo chamber delusions. It's a license to ignore everyone who disagrees with you, because you can always construct things such that they're really arguing with someone else. I think it's very appropriate to point out when "General consensus on HN as measured by article upvotes" happens to include two grossly contradictory opinions.
      - surgical_fire 1y ago
        > Yeah yeah. But nonetheless group think That's only your perception of groupthink. You read those threats looking for anti-Google bias, and you find it, because of course. AI is a very divisive subject nowadays. There are people that are all in on the hype, there are skeptics, there are desperate people thinking that they will lose their jobs, there are those that think is is destructive and unethical. The only caveat that I might make is that at the time of the Microsoft announcement, it was during the honeymoon phase of OpenAI (when GPT 3 was fairly new and an impressive leap from what came before), and Google's current advancements, while impressive, come at a time when a lot more people are negative towards it. Also, every sufficiently large company will have people that dislike it as a baseline. Be it Google, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Tesla, Toyota or any other. Read any thread on those companies and you will find negative comments based on that alone.
        ajross 1y ago
        > That's only your perception of groupthink. You read those threats looking for anti-Google bias, and you find it, because of course. Or... maybe it's only your perception. You're engaged in groupthink and read headlines looking for Google crimes[1], and you find them, because of course. I mean, I'm the one citing evidence (literally the headline we're discussing). Your theory that we're actually seeing a general change in attitudes toward AI in the HN commenter community seems interesting! But... unsupported. Occam says you're just engaged in apologia for the echo chamber, sorry. [1] I mean, come on. "Burying the web alive" really seems like reasoned discourse to you? A real rationalist would enter this discussion with a prior that the ridiculous hyperbole is probably wrong, not "let's find ways to make the ridiculous hyperbole more reasonable".
        surgical_fire 1y ago
        > I mean, come on. "Burying the web alive" really seems like reasoned discourse to you? No, I actually disagree with the rationale. If anything, AI makes it easier to find some quick answers, since Google's top results tend to be shit. I am very ambivalent towards the current AI hype. I think that the capabilities of LLMs are vastly overrated, even if they are useful to an extent. That said, this it not to say that I don't think Google was very damaging to the web in many ways, mainly with how it made search so much worse over the years. > A real rationalist would enter this discussion with a prior that the ridiculous hyperbole is probably wrong Eh, I can understand that with the more pronounced negativity towards AI nowadays, this sort of rant will become more common. Every thread on AI nowadays has this overall vibe (not without reason). > Occam says you're just engaged in apologia for the echo chamber, sorry. Eh, I actually don't think very highly of HN. Plenty of terrible takes on every thread. This is just a glorified Reddit full of people who really like the smell of their own farts. Why would I defend it?
- TremendousJudge 1y ago
  Incomplete. The article also discusses the new AI search feature (not the AI box), which eschews links to the web completely
romaaeterna 1y ago
As someone who remembers what the web was like 25 years ago, I have a feeling that they're burying a corpse.
- pphysch 1y ago
  Yes, a corpse killed by Facebook, Reddit, Discord and other closed platforms.
  - energy123 1y ago
    All the negativity is public and algorithmically boosted, all the positivity is in private chats. And this is increasingly the case over time. I sincerely hope for maximum enshittification in the form of AI slop rendering these misery machines discredited in the public's mind so the spell is broken.
  - Spivak 1y ago
    Does it actually matter that Discord is closed or would the problem still exist if Matrix won and the content contained within was nonetheless still not indexable by search engines and communities were invite only? Because the fact that Discord is flourishing is I think a direct result of it not being a part of the giant amalgamated omniplatform indexed by search engines. Being shielded from the masses is the point. There aren't megaphones in small private communities where the social dynamics of repeat interactions are in play. People aren't competing to say the most outrageous rage-bait for engagement.
    - TremendousJudge 1y ago
      >People aren't competing to say the most outrageous rage-bait for engagement. This was never true in the age of web forums, which was the equivalent to Discord in many cases, and still isn't true in niche subreddits, which are public and indexed by search engines.
    - oceansky 1y ago
      But the counterpoint is that it's much harder to find any information, including personal anecdotes from people, without being part of the particular community.
NewsaHackO 1y ago
This is actually a good thing, now we don’t have to sift though a dozen semiautomatically created SEO gaming website that try and make the same point 5-6 said in slightly different ways.
- righthand 1y ago
  What is better? A single source or a variety of sources to determine bias? If I do publish on the web? What is my incentive to keep doing so if my site never gets seen in search results? What will fuel the LLM then?
- Rastonbury 1y ago
  I haven't used AI Mode but AI Overview often reads exactly like those 300 word bullet point listicles if you try searching for anything competitive like "best X for Y"
- danpalmer 1y ago
  I’m in two minds. On the one hand I want to consume quality original content. On the other hand when I ask a question, the top hit being the literal answer is such a convincing UX. But then again, I have always found the quality content through social media, links to blog posts, YouTube channels, etc. I’m not putting “quality politics blogs” into a search engine and never have done.
- nickfromseattle 1y ago
  Search is one of the best ways for startups to compete against incumbents. AI will prioritize known / most popular brands. Want to start an alternative to QuickBooks? Using search you could get hundreds of thousands of people on your website. In the future? AI will recommend QuickBooks.
  - move-on-by 1y ago
    > AI will prioritize known / most popular brands. This is the fiction that the AI creators want you to believe. The truth is that AI will recommend whatever its creators have trained it to recommend.
AriedK 1y ago
So how long do we have until companies can pay to be in the system prompt to be recommended for certain queries?
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  My speculation: It's almost certainly already happening.
  - LunaSea 1y ago
    Yes, it's called "tool partnerships" and Microsoft has been doing it heavily for Copilot.
- righthand 1y ago
  Can’t you just game the SEO and Google will eat your result thus pointing you to whichever service/product? It’d be spam generated answers from seo spam. Which is definitely already happening.
- nicbou 1y ago
  Those AIs are operating at a loss. Sooner or later they will seize enough market share for investors to demand returns.
almusdives 1y ago
I get why this is problematic for industries that depend on high traffic for ad revenue etc, but is bad for websites who are actually trying to market services that provide tangible value? Like if I’m searching for a dry cleaner in Glasgow, if I end up with the same provider, I don't care (and neither does the dry cleaner) whether I find them through traditional links or an AI-mediated search?
- gspencley 1y ago
  Feels like more curation than we had before. My wife and I recently bought a commercial space and have been trying to find contractors for renovation projects. It has kind of blown us away at how unresponsive most have been. Like, we'll reach out them ... wait DAYS, sometimes they get back to us ... maybe a week later they'll come for a site visit to give us a quote and then we need to keep following up with them ... just to get a quote. We were complaining about this and a friend of ours said something very insightful: "There's a lot of good contractors out there who suck at SEO." So we reached out in some local Facebook groups and had people out THAT DAY and the work was starting the very next day. Point is, the companies we were reaching out to were the absolute busiest of the busiest because they were showing up at the top of search results. As soon as we stopped using web searches, we actually started getting results. Now, this problem exists in spite of AI but I'm worried that it's going to make it even harder for smaller, less busy companies to show up AT ALL. AI is taking the system that already existed and is curating it further with "summaries" ... so what can we expect? Only the first "top 3" businesses in your area? Google and other search engines were already starting to kill off the "long tail" ... but with AI I think its going to be the final nail in the coffin. If you want to search for the less popular options, if you want to try and find the niche stuff ... I don't know how well it's going to work. I suppose if you can prompt it: "All the 'top' options are ghosting me, give me some alternates" then maybe people will find ways around that with these tools. Or trying to find businesses with web search was already not going to give good results anyway in current year (return to classifieds and job boards was our recent experience).
  - AStonesThrow 1y ago
    Hey, you should meet the folks in the other thread: "oh why did Google add my phone number to my business profile on Maps?" "It should be illegal for Google to publish listings for businesses without consent!" "It's crazy that just anyone can submit contact information for a business on Google Maps!" If you're using Search or an LLM for a business recommendation, you're already using the wrong tool for the job. Even before Google Maps ramped up, there was Yelp, craigslist, Tripadvisor...
scotty79 1y ago
Maybe Google should use AI to de-rank ad filled seo spam.
DataDaemon 1y ago
Goodbye small blogs and medium publishers, it was nice to read you. Now Google take your unique content, rewrite and present on their website. There will be no incentive anymore to write a new content. You will get NOTHING for your hard work. Bye.
- bitpush 1y ago
  You can't simultaneously rail against ads, which is our best model for scaled monetization, or complain against paywall and then say it is killing the business model. Stuff costs money but unfortunately we as a society have come to expect free stuff, and businesses are just catering to it. If not for Google, ChatGPT or someone else will do it.
mac-mc 1y ago
Correction: burying our business model alive
panarchy 1y ago
The web has been a walking corpse for about a decade now.
ghyxjsnjg 1y ago
[flagged]
rambambram 1y ago
I only do physical offline marketing for some time now. Works well enough and one stands out among all the clickbait and other foolery. Some index disappearing is not a problem. The moment organizations or institutions start burning the libraries down, then we have a bigger problem. Don't get fooled by people who claim the open web is dead. The moment you start believing that, then you are exactly where they want you to be.
sakopov 1y ago
Google is damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don’t. One side screams that Google Search is dead because Google doesn't innovate. The other - Google AI innovation is killing the web.
- spwa4 1y ago
  I find it very hard to believe that any of the major platforms is going to defend against AI slop. They're looking to monopolize it, which will reduce but not stop it in the short term, then maximize it later on for maximum dollars.
ninth_ant 1y ago
Implicit in this article is the idea that you have to use Google, and that Google Search equals “the web”. I’ll be the boring nerd, I guess, who has to be the one to say there are many other search engines out there. If you don’t like Google (I don’t), or don’t like where they are moving their products (I don’t) — please use a competing search engine. I’ve used DuckDuckGo for years and I don’t miss anything about Google. There are plenty of other good search engines out there too. It’s not particularly difficult to switch away and get an experience more to your liking, so it’s a bit baffling when Google Search product decisions are equated with burying the web alive. Just don’t use it!
- TonyTrapp 1y ago
  When "to google" has literally become a verb in several languages, you know it's not going to be that easy to convince literally hundreds of millions of people to use something different. For many unsavvy people, Google is and continues to be their window into the web, and they wouldn't even know they can have it another way.
  - NikolaNovak 1y ago
    It's a seemingly patronizing joke meme, but I've repeatedly seen many of my relatives type in e.g. "Facebook.com" into Google search box, and then blindly click the first entry (which is completely at the mercy of being hijacked/prioritized based on either who's paying more money to Google, or latest fun extension / glitchy website they've installed). I have not yet found a working approach to alter that behaviour - obligatory XKCD reference [0] 0: https://xkcd.com/763/ https://xkcd.com/763/
    - mediumsmart 1y ago
      So true and the holy grail of being the first entry fuels the industry of reviews and stars which fuels the industry of bad review removal services etc and so on. This is such a vast ecosystem and so humiliating for the participants that it is only logical to let AI write, read and handle it. This is our chance to get a life. Lets not squander it.
mitchbob 1y ago
https://archive.ph/2025.05.26-092025/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/google-ai-mode-search-results-bury-the-web.html https://archive.ph/2025.05.26-092025/https://nymag.com/intel...
jameslk 1y ago
Business idea: build a firewall for AI crawlers that variably gives them access to customer’s sites based on traffic they send. The more traffic they send, the more they are allowed to crawl.
- mattferderer 1y ago
  Cloudflare has been talking about this for a while albeit slightly different than your take - https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/
  - jameslk 1y ago
    Yeah that was actually what I was thinking of for the idea, but the problem with their firewall is that it doesn’t penalize the big crawlers, like Google’s bot, because Google still sends traffic. Even if Google is sending less and less traffic over time. That just gives the biggest companies the prize of being able to crawl all the web for free, while they offer less over time in exchange.
kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
I have to resort to using ChatGPT to find any historical information because of the recency bias in all conventional search engines. Never mind their penchant for stuffing results with e-commerce sites no matter how irrelevant they are to the query.
jrm4 1y ago
The hardest issue in "fixing" this is "reminding people that the web is open and you can kind of do whatever you want here."
bilater 1y ago
So if Google innovates with AI, it's a problem because they're hiding their "ten blue links." But if they don't, they're suffering from the innovator's dilemma and are going to die with their ten blue links. The fact is, Google is so big that they're always going to upset some people. Embracing AI and moving forward is the only thing they can do.
- kevingadd 1y ago
  Why is it a foregone conclusion that embracing AI is the only way to move forward, and that embracing AI is necessary to succeed? I'm certainly curious to see how it works out - it's a possible source of growth etc - but it's weird to me seeing people just assume that AI is not only The Future but is The Only Future.
  - Nasrudith 1y ago
    It is because it is easier to imagine the current trend taking off and staying than imaging the alternative tech line that will beat both AI and the ten blue links.
  - dnissley 1y ago
    Because AI/LLMs are clearly a 10x+ improvement over a significant number of use cases for search. And LLMs will be the thing performing the searches and filtering results in the remaining use cases.
  - sushid 1y ago
    If Google doesn't do this, people will slowly (or even quickly, who knows?) move to Perplexity, ChatGPT, etc. I know I personally would abandon Google entirely if it didn't summarize results and help me avoid the SEO slopfest.
Rastonbury 1y ago
What I want from Google is showing me results (not summaries) from sources that I tell it from natural language. If I know I am going to search for a topic I know is going to be filled with a ton of SEO garbage, I default to chatgpt to get sources for me, unfortunately I still do not trust chatgpt to have done a thorough job but sometimes I can't be bother to trawl through blogspam. The reason why chatgpt and perplextty are stealing queries from them is because Search has become so bad.
nicbou 1y ago
I can weigh in on this. I run a small information website (https://allaboutberlin.com https://allaboutberlin.com). My traffic has been growing steadily for 7 years, but now its down 30-ish percent year on year. From what I'm hearing, my competitors (and friends) are having it worse. My main mission is to put new information on the internet. It's harder to do this if AI destroys the economics of it. It's also harder without an audience who provides feedback and encouragement. Having all information mediated by two companies isn't just digging into my revenue, it's killing the fun. The unfortunate side effect is that it made me focus more on business and less on serving my readers. I'm working on health insurance stuff when I would rather work on a citizenship guide. It's also sad to see all the nuance stripped from my carefully chosen words. It sucks, honestly. I am being replaced by AI, but I am still supposed to go experience the real world and translate it into LLM training material. In the end, there still is a thinking, feeling human being doing the essential work. He's just not getting paid anymore.
- boplicity 1y ago
  > My main mission is to put new information on the internet. It's harder to do this if AI destroys the economics of it. It's also harder without an audience who provides feedback and encouragement. I also run an online website that provides valuable information. However, we have a very different philosophy. The mission is very not not to "put new information on the internet." Rather, it is to provide a valuable and much needed service for people in our niche. While we do greatly benefit from SEO, we also work very hard to cultivate our audience, both in terms of finding new people, and nurturing our relationship with the existing ones. "Information on the internet" has zero inherent value without an audience. If you're not working to build that audience (outside of third party platforms), then it's going to be very tough in the long run, and you'll run into situations exactly like this. FWIW, our SEO traffic has remained shockingly steady, though the search console has reported a dramatic increase in "impressions," likely due to featuring our website in AI generated summaries. We'll see if things change over the long-term, but for now, we're not changing any strategies based on this.
  - nicbou 1y ago
    The problem is that there is no audience without a third-party platform nowadays. At least not at a scale. Google was the lesser evil, but I still fully expected to get killed by an algorithm update some day. I vowed to ride this website into the ground if I have to. I believe in its value, even if I need a side job to support it.
mattferderer 1y ago
Google has been getting this push back for the last 15 years. (That makes me feel old to remember it) Google Knowledge Graph (that sidebar they show) was hated by publishers, especially Wiki for stealing their content. Google adding direct answers to questions. Lots of fights over social media & recipe results. I'm not arguing who is right or wrong,* just saying this has been a thing for a long time. * Exception most recipe websites & those infinite looping Pinterest blog links. Those websites are all awful & wrong.
DataDaemon 1y ago
Soon, quick and dirty solution: User-Agent: * Disallow: /
- cr125rider 1y ago
  So then the internet police know to zoom up the fiber line and arrest the user-agent for not following robots.txt!
Magi604 1y ago
I used to hate the AI overview, but I've slowly been getting used to it and now I will often settle for what the AI gives. It's better than scrolling through loads of links and trying to weed out garbage SEO optimized sites.
- DataDaemon 1y ago
  Results are OK, until you have this "garbage".
- somat 1y ago
  How hard is it to get the infernal engine to work for you? "Belphegor-2 go wade through the search results and discard the low quality machine slop, I only want results linking to curated human generated pages."
- nicce 1y ago
  At least in scientific writing, AI summaries have been proved to change the meaning of the results. So, use with caution.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
kazinator 1y ago
Story forget to mention that you can add "fucking ..." to your queries to eliminate the obnoxious and more often incorrect than not AI summaries.
carlosjobim 1y ago
Lazy publishers could have solved this years ago, by making massive syndicates, paid by a single subscription. YouTube did it, and has become a modern wonder of the world. But no, of course they can't syndicate together with other newspapers or magazines who aren't 100% psychotically equally aligned with them politically. So they get what's coming to them. They shouldn't have been megalomaniacs, but that's all they are now.
shmerl 1y ago
I noticed that Google image reverse search turned into completely unusable garbage that can only produce AI lookalikes but completely fails at finding original images. Literally every time, exact match - zero results. I guess that's their current trend. Forget about quality search, inject AI everywhere.
- bookofjoe 1y ago
  I use Google image reverse search on a daily basis for my blog. I rarely get AI look-alikes but rather almost always real things. One caveat: I never reverse search for people, only things.
  - shmerl 1y ago
    I mostly tried it for art to look for original authors. I'll check again.
guluarte 1y ago
the only thing google will win doing this in the long term is new laws that you'll need to opt in for training AI models
baq 1y ago
I'm finding that google's own gemini flash is cannibalizing google search in my own usage, but there's no other way for them to survive being eaten alive by the competition. The sad realization is you probably shouldn't expect humans to read your content anymore - it'll be quoted verbatim (best case) by the all-consuming LLMs, just without your ads, your layout or anything yours at all that isn't your written or spoken words. (Sad part is that's often an improvement until chat interfaces start putting product placement in their responses. We can truly bury the web then.)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
amadeuspagel 1y ago
Yeah when I'm scrolling past the AI overview to click on the links it feels like I'm digging out someone buried alive with my bare hands to breathe new life into him.
DisjointedHunt 1y ago
In my humble opinion, Google is the reason the web withstood as long as it did. At least the open part of the web did. Yes, sure, they monetized, but also they gave back as much as, and if not more than they took. We have so many machine learning frameworks, tensorflow, research, payouts to creators, advertising opportunities, careers, products, a lot of things built and taken down but most importantly built. They were probably the most positive force for the internet age in the past 20 years and more than anyone will ever give them credit for. Only in retrospect will we realize how lucky we were to be alive in the Google age. Full stop. What really killed the web was the rise of closed wall gardens platforms such as Apple, Facebook, Instagram and others. Putting up walls around content that didn't need to necessarily exist or not honoring open frameworks to exchange information and making things more widely indexable. But even here there have been significant benefits. The present AI boom would arguably not have been as large as it is right now without Mark Zuckerberg choosing to put an unconventional amount of investment behind AR ambitions to take on Apple, an investment the size of which many conventionally run publicly listed or private enterprises could hardly imagine to take up, leading to the concentration of capital, talent, technology and hardware in a place that gave birth to open source Llama and others. Google as well was very well poised because of their investments in compute fueled by their business model which kept the web alive and also returned capital into places where computer scientists would be paid significant amounts of money and have job security and freedom of will. to do as they pleased as opposed to chasing a paycheck, working as a physicist at CERN or something. All I'm saying is this article does not fully capture how significant the positive outcomes from Google have been.
- p3rls 1y ago
  it's so funny listening to people who are clearly not publishers give their takes on these things
  - bookofjoe 1y ago
    99+% of people are not publishers
mortsnort 1y ago
Perhaps we need legislation requiring LLMs to compensate the sources they steal from? If the LLMs kill the hand that feeds them, it's bad for everyone.
intended 1y ago
Forgive this weirdly philosophical comment: In a year of dark thoughts I found yet another horror to contemplate, after reading a legal paper on the idea of the marketplace of ideas. A core concept underpinning our shared market place, is that its not about facts, its about ideas being exchanged. Critically, that exchange creates friction, debate and downstream of all that - society. I've commented elsewhere how the marketplace is broken today, and why. But with GenAI, theres a new, twist, that I can barely contemplate. See, our conception of this liberal democracy based society, exists in that exchange between people. Even a crappy exchange, is part of the process of learning and building our ideas. My half formed ideas, your half formed ideas, everyones ideas. We have considered what happens when your ideas don't get heard. But in no place, did we consider what happens when we bounce our ideas into a machine, and that machine talks back. And if that machine talks back in a manner thats can be as good as what a person might write or text. Your half baked idea goes into the machine, you get text back that helps you get to a fully baked idea. But the counter party is the machine. Not a person. The way those ideas have been bouncing around, has changed.
j_timberlake 1y ago
This is like the frog in the boiling water story, except Frog is worried about being boiled alive after the temperature has only risen .001 degrees, so he writes articles saying "Google is burying the web alive" begging for someone to save him.
johneth 1y ago
Surely as the traffic Google sends to websites falls and falls, there'll come a tipping point where the websites themselves will feel there's no benefit to allowing Google to index them. If this happens, Google's generative AI slop will have less and less scaped and regurgitated content to surface to Google users.
tmnvix 1y ago
I've said this before, but I sincerely believe that a human-curated internet directory would be a great resource. Maybe something along the lines of Yahoo Directory revived? Organised using the dewey system could be useful. A library for the internet. I'd love to be able to look up something like say 'shoe repair' and find a host of high quality resources such as videos, tutorials, suppliers, etc, all vetted by real people somehow.
- notnullorvoid 1y ago
  I think the answer lies in a network of curated directories, and search within a localised range of the network. Many people already have a decent list of curated sites in the form of bookmarks, but bookmark software is horribly dated. Even if I limited my search to sites gathered from my own bookmarks, I'd find 95% of everything I'm ever searching for.
- coffeecat 1y ago
  Surely, someone must have already thought of this. Perhaps what we really need is a curated index of curated indices.
notnullorvoid 1y ago
AI summaries aren't the problem, they are a poor solution to a overwhelming amount of slop content. Search engine results have been getting worse and worse for over a decade, and with a rapidly increasing collection of content the web is getting too big to search. AI will be necessary, but it's not going to change the course, it will be deployed on both the solution and the problem front. If I had to pick the biggest contributor to the problem it would be advertising. Which mainly means Google, and governments for allowing an ad and search monopoly under the same roof. People can make all the justifications they want about how ad revenue allowed businesses and individuals to prosper, and "free" access to content, but it was always borrowing against the future.
anal_reactor 1y ago
literal mind control
oliwarner 1y ago
Which is a problem for websites that only provide facts. If your whole business model is getting organic search engine traffic to answer a user's question (a time, a result, something they just want to know) then Google is going to eat your dinner and I'm completely ambivalent because so many of the websites that have been so expertly sculpted to dominate SERPs, are what's wrong with the web. It's why it deserves to be buried. Before posting this, I'd just seen this post about asking Forbes whether or not the latest Mission Impossible has a post-credit scene: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisplummer.bsky.social/post/3lpvxayws6s2w https://bsky.app/profile/chrisplummer.bsky.social/post/3lpvx... > If you load this page it contacts 82 IP addresses executing 256 separate HTTP transactions to download 18MB of data writing 64 cookies to your device to tell you “no” The web has been on life-support for a while. Ad-blockers just make it bearable, but its existence as an information lookup system is nearly over. It's a way to interact with online systems and —occasionally— for reading some long-form content (which is increasingly written by LLMs anyway). Isn't the future confusing.
- winterbloom 1y ago
  Bsky just as bad as twitter/x now, they require login to see certain posts
  - Shorn 1y ago
    Isn't that a setting the individual publishing user controls? I don't use BlueSky so I'm not sure - just interested. Especially if it's already going the route of Twitter/Facebook, etc. - which I expect it to long-term.
    - oliwarner 1y ago
      Yeah there's a "learn more" link. > This user has requested that their content only be shown to signed-in users.
h4kunamata 1y ago
SEO as we knew it gone forever, Google push with its AI drove everything to shit. I used to use Germini and it was pretty good, then it went downhill with wrong answers and I just couldn't trust it anymore. That is where I crossed Perplexity ( https://www.perplexity.ai/ https://www.perplexity.ai/ ), it is surprisingly solid and the best part of it: the sources. It even helped to learn Python. It does mention all the sources it used for that answer, so in doubt, you can cross check which is something Gemini failed miserably to do so. There is very minimal "wrong answers" and in doubt, cross check it. I went De-Google years ago with GrapheneOS and everything, I still use Google dot com to check stores reviews because unfortunately, no other search engine provides that info. There are websites only for that but it is not remotely close to Google reviews left by folks.
- h4kunamata 1y ago
  I forgot to mention that ChatGPT is the worst of them all, it never really provided with the right information, and there is no 2FA so its accounts on the dark web is worth a lot, because developers are pasting company code in there so having access to such accounts means granting you access to companies code.
threesmegiste 1y ago
It may reduce the tendency to visit websites. But I do the same with YouTube videos. I share the link with Gemini and summarize it. I think Google will not allow this after a while.
MichaelMoser123 1y ago
I think publishers will not be pleased about a steep fall in click rates, now publishers still have considerable political influence. What will Google do in the event of serious legal pushback or a renewed drive for antitrust action? The introduction of AI overviews into Google search will cost quite a lot in compute/other resources, despite heavy caching, therefore this might be a significant bet in terms of costs vs profit for Google. What does Google expect from this feature in terms of business results? This seems to be quite a big bet, but what is actually at stake - in real terms? Come to think of it: is there now a showdown between Google and Microsoft/OpenAI, where collateral costs are no longer taken into account?
bfrog 1y ago
There’s no web. There’s big ad companies striving to keep eyeballs. There’s a few lone bastions of what was. Mostly it’s ads.
lzy 1y ago
This feels like the culmination of a long trend. Google shifting from indexing the web to replacing it. The idea of an “AI answer mode” burying actual sources is worrying, especially for niche or emerging topics where LLMs hallucinate confidently. I’d love to see metrics on how often users click through to original sources under the new interface. At some point, if Google becomes too self-referential, it risks losing the very web it was built on. Curious whether this opens the door for competitors that prioritise raw links and transparency over synthesised summaries.
- csa 1y ago
  > if Google becomes too self-referential, it risks losing the very web it was built on This ship has sailed. Paywalls and wall-gardens are the mid-term future, imho. Most of the useful internet spaces I interact with fall under these categories. It feels like a Balkanized version of the AOL/Compuserve days.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
Computer owners finance www through Internet Service Provider subscriptions fees. Users of www upload content at their own expense. Google produces zero content at zero expense, stores content of www users, monitors their www use. Google profits, becomes trillion dollar company. What happens next.
gloosx 1y ago
How to fix Google: 1. Install User-Agent Switcher for Chrome plugin. 2. Choose older browser, like IE 10 or Iphone 6, refresh the page. 3. You're now getting "old google" results. Seeing first 5 links without scrolling. Accurate and concise. The contrast is STARK. There is no "AI overview". There is no "From sources across the web". There is no "People also ask". No "People also search for". No "At a glance" section. No "Images" section, nor "youtube" section taking 50% of the page. No "Short videos" tab. Just. Search. Results.
miguel-muniz 1y ago
when you could just type a question into a chatbox and receive a well thought out, nuanced response instead of having to click into multiple ad-ridden, seo ""optimized"" websites just to find an answer isn't it obvious why one is winning over the other? for many people, they just want an answer to their question. whatever means they get that answer doesn't really matter. the new trend of locking your website content behind a sign in wall or app download is only going push more people to chatbots.
joshdappier 1y ago
For all struggling web publishers: Your brand won't survive as a reference in someone else's AI snippet. We've (https://dappier.com https://dappier.com) been working on offerings to solve this for publishers, and help them thrive in an AI-first world. We enable: - AI data syndication, by converting your content into AI-ready formats like RAG API & MCP and enabling devs to connect in real-time at a per-query basis - deploying your own AI experiences. Our AskAI answer engine is totally customizable and has pre-set deployments based on best practices from leading social networks and news sites already deploying AI - agentic ads - the ability to advertise within conversations, taking advantage of an opt-in network of agents to surface products and offerings wherever the relevant user is. Please give us a try (https://dappier.com/demo https://dappier.com/demo to schedule a demo) and let us know what you think!
lakomen 1y ago
[dead]
bookofjoe 1y ago
https://archive.ph/9OMHF https://archive.ph/9OMHF
neochief 1y ago
Sadly, in the same boat for the time being (https://refactoring.guru https://refactoring.guru). My strategy was to deliver ad-free open valuable content for the devs, focus more on the content than marketing, but it all seems pointless now. Traffic is steadily declining, despite site is being first in search results.

225 points by doener 1y ago

ncr100 1y ago

My summary - G is 'burying' web search results underneath AI results on its search page.

jfengel 1y ago
Haven't they been doing that for at least a year? And before that they were burying it under paid results and an info box?
ajross 1y ago
Pretty much. This is getting toward a "derangement syndrome" kind of behavior, IMHO. When Microsoft and subsidiaries deploy AI-enhanced search results, it's a "Google Killer" and rockets to the top of the front page of HN to great fanfare. When it turns out that the best and most-used AI-enhanced search results are served at the Google search prompt, Google is "burying the web alive" and the outrage rockets to the front page of HN. Which is it, folks? Like, was OpenAI killing the web too? Or is it good when OpenAI kills the web but bad when Google does? (And yes, Google pays my salary, but to work on firmware and not think about search or AI)
- ndiddy 1y ago
  You fell for the Goomba Fallacy https://i.redd.it/33w3fqrnx8pd1.jpeg https://i.redd.it/33w3fqrnx8pd1.jpeg
  - ajross 1y ago
    Yeah yeah. But nonetheless group think and echo chambers are real things. Not all opinions are uncorrelated data points, probably most of them aren't. And real people (you too) do indeed hold contradictory opinions all the time. In point of fact insisting that "My Opinion Is Pure And Special and Uncorrelated To Anyone Else's" is probably the single best way to find yourself parroting echo chamber delusions. It's a license to ignore everyone who disagrees with you, because you can always construct things such that they're really arguing with someone else. I think it's very appropriate to point out when "General consensus on HN as measured by article upvotes" happens to include two grossly contradictory opinions.
    - surgical_fire 1y ago
      > Yeah yeah. But nonetheless group think That's only your perception of groupthink. You read those threats looking for anti-Google bias, and you find it, because of course. AI is a very divisive subject nowadays. There are people that are all in on the hype, there are skeptics, there are desperate people thinking that they will lose their jobs, there are those that think is is destructive and unethical. The only caveat that I might make is that at the time of the Microsoft announcement, it was during the honeymoon phase of OpenAI (when GPT 3 was fairly new and an impressive leap from what came before), and Google's current advancements, while impressive, come at a time when a lot more people are negative towards it. Also, every sufficiently large company will have people that dislike it as a baseline. Be it Google, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Tesla, Toyota or any other. Read any thread on those companies and you will find negative comments based on that alone.
      - ajross 1y ago
        > That's only your perception of groupthink. You read those threats looking for anti-Google bias, and you find it, because of course. Or... maybe it's only your perception. You're engaged in groupthink and read headlines looking for Google crimes[1], and you find them, because of course. I mean, I'm the one citing evidence (literally the headline we're discussing). Your theory that we're actually seeing a general change in attitudes toward AI in the HN commenter community seems interesting! But... unsupported. Occam says you're just engaged in apologia for the echo chamber, sorry. [1] I mean, come on. "Burying the web alive" really seems like reasoned discourse to you? A real rationalist would enter this discussion with a prior that the ridiculous hyperbole is probably wrong, not "let's find ways to make the ridiculous hyperbole more reasonable".
        surgical_fire 1y ago
        > I mean, come on. "Burying the web alive" really seems like reasoned discourse to you? No, I actually disagree with the rationale. If anything, AI makes it easier to find some quick answers, since Google's top results tend to be shit. I am very ambivalent towards the current AI hype. I think that the capabilities of LLMs are vastly overrated, even if they are useful to an extent. That said, this it not to say that I don't think Google was very damaging to the web in many ways, mainly with how it made search so much worse over the years. > A real rationalist would enter this discussion with a prior that the ridiculous hyperbole is probably wrong Eh, I can understand that with the more pronounced negativity towards AI nowadays, this sort of rant will become more common. Every thread on AI nowadays has this overall vibe (not without reason). > Occam says you're just engaged in apologia for the echo chamber, sorry. Eh, I actually don't think very highly of HN. Plenty of terrible takes on every thread. This is just a glorified Reddit full of people who really like the smell of their own farts. Why would I defend it?
TremendousJudge 1y ago
Incomplete. The article also discusses the new AI search feature (not the AI box), which eschews links to the web completely

romaaeterna 1y ago

As someone who remembers what the web was like 25 years ago, I have a feeling that they're burying a corpse.

pphysch 1y ago
Yes, a corpse killed by Facebook, Reddit, Discord and other closed platforms.
- energy123 1y ago
  All the negativity is public and algorithmically boosted, all the positivity is in private chats. And this is increasingly the case over time. I sincerely hope for maximum enshittification in the form of AI slop rendering these misery machines discredited in the public's mind so the spell is broken.
- Spivak 1y ago
  Does it actually matter that Discord is closed or would the problem still exist if Matrix won and the content contained within was nonetheless still not indexable by search engines and communities were invite only? Because the fact that Discord is flourishing is I think a direct result of it not being a part of the giant amalgamated omniplatform indexed by search engines. Being shielded from the masses is the point. There aren't megaphones in small private communities where the social dynamics of repeat interactions are in play. People aren't competing to say the most outrageous rage-bait for engagement.
  - TremendousJudge 1y ago
    >People aren't competing to say the most outrageous rage-bait for engagement. This was never true in the age of web forums, which was the equivalent to Discord in many cases, and still isn't true in niche subreddits, which are public and indexed by search engines.
  - oceansky 1y ago
    But the counterpoint is that it's much harder to find any information, including personal anecdotes from people, without being part of the particular community.

NewsaHackO 1y ago

This is actually a good thing, now we don’t have to sift though a dozen semiautomatically created SEO gaming website that try and make the same point 5-6 said in slightly different ways.

righthand 1y ago
What is better? A single source or a variety of sources to determine bias? If I do publish on the web? What is my incentive to keep doing so if my site never gets seen in search results? What will fuel the LLM then?
Rastonbury 1y ago
I haven't used AI Mode but AI Overview often reads exactly like those 300 word bullet point listicles if you try searching for anything competitive like "best X for Y"
danpalmer 1y ago
I’m in two minds. On the one hand I want to consume quality original content. On the other hand when I ask a question, the top hit being the literal answer is such a convincing UX. But then again, I have always found the quality content through social media, links to blog posts, YouTube channels, etc. I’m not putting “quality politics blogs” into a search engine and never have done.
nickfromseattle 1y ago
Search is one of the best ways for startups to compete against incumbents. AI will prioritize known / most popular brands. Want to start an alternative to QuickBooks? Using search you could get hundreds of thousands of people on your website. In the future? AI will recommend QuickBooks.
- move-on-by 1y ago
  > AI will prioritize known / most popular brands. This is the fiction that the AI creators want you to believe. The truth is that AI will recommend whatever its creators have trained it to recommend.

AriedK 1y ago

So how long do we have until companies can pay to be in the system prompt to be recommended for certain queries?

SoftTalker 1y ago
My speculation: It's almost certainly already happening.
- LunaSea 1y ago
  Yes, it's called "tool partnerships" and Microsoft has been doing it heavily for Copilot.
righthand 1y ago
Can’t you just game the SEO and Google will eat your result thus pointing you to whichever service/product? It’d be spam generated answers from seo spam. Which is definitely already happening.
nicbou 1y ago
Those AIs are operating at a loss. Sooner or later they will seize enough market share for investors to demand returns.

almusdives 1y ago

I get why this is problematic for industries that depend on high traffic for ad revenue etc, but is bad for websites who are actually trying to market services that provide tangible value? Like if I’m searching for a dry cleaner in Glasgow, if I end up with the same provider, I don't care (and neither does the dry cleaner) whether I find them through traditional links or an AI-mediated search?

gspencley 1y ago
Feels like more curation than we had before. My wife and I recently bought a commercial space and have been trying to find contractors for renovation projects. It has kind of blown us away at how unresponsive most have been. Like, we'll reach out them ... wait DAYS, sometimes they get back to us ... maybe a week later they'll come for a site visit to give us a quote and then we need to keep following up with them ... just to get a quote. We were complaining about this and a friend of ours said something very insightful: "There's a lot of good contractors out there who suck at SEO." So we reached out in some local Facebook groups and had people out THAT DAY and the work was starting the very next day. Point is, the companies we were reaching out to were the absolute busiest of the busiest because they were showing up at the top of search results. As soon as we stopped using web searches, we actually started getting results. Now, this problem exists in spite of AI but I'm worried that it's going to make it even harder for smaller, less busy companies to show up AT ALL. AI is taking the system that already existed and is curating it further with "summaries" ... so what can we expect? Only the first "top 3" businesses in your area? Google and other search engines were already starting to kill off the "long tail" ... but with AI I think its going to be the final nail in the coffin. If you want to search for the less popular options, if you want to try and find the niche stuff ... I don't know how well it's going to work. I suppose if you can prompt it: "All the 'top' options are ghosting me, give me some alternates" then maybe people will find ways around that with these tools. Or trying to find businesses with web search was already not going to give good results anyway in current year (return to classifieds and job boards was our recent experience).
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  Hey, you should meet the folks in the other thread: "oh why did Google add my phone number to my business profile on Maps?" "It should be illegal for Google to publish listings for businesses without consent!" "It's crazy that just anyone can submit contact information for a business on Google Maps!" If you're using Search or an LLM for a business recommendation, you're already using the wrong tool for the job. Even before Google Maps ramped up, there was Yelp, craigslist, Tripadvisor...

scotty79 1y ago

Maybe Google should use AI to de-rank ad filled seo spam.

DataDaemon 1y ago

Goodbye small blogs and medium publishers, it was nice to read you. Now Google take your unique content, rewrite and present on their website. There will be no incentive anymore to write a new content. You will get NOTHING for your hard work. Bye.

bitpush 1y ago
You can't simultaneously rail against ads, which is our best model for scaled monetization, or complain against paywall and then say it is killing the business model. Stuff costs money but unfortunately we as a society have come to expect free stuff, and businesses are just catering to it. If not for Google, ChatGPT or someone else will do it.

mac-mc 1y ago

Correction: burying our business model alive

panarchy 1y ago

The web has been a walking corpse for about a decade now.

ghyxjsnjg 1y ago

[flagged]

rambambram 1y ago

I only do physical offline marketing for some time now. Works well enough and one stands out among all the clickbait and other foolery. Some index disappearing is not a problem. The moment organizations or institutions start burning the libraries down, then we have a bigger problem. Don't get fooled by people who claim the open web is dead. The moment you start believing that, then you are exactly where they want you to be.

sakopov 1y ago

Google is damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don’t. One side screams that Google Search is dead because Google doesn't innovate. The other - Google AI innovation is killing the web.

spwa4 1y ago
I find it very hard to believe that any of the major platforms is going to defend against AI slop. They're looking to monopolize it, which will reduce but not stop it in the short term, then maximize it later on for maximum dollars.

ninth_ant 1y ago

Implicit in this article is the idea that you have to use Google, and that Google Search equals “the web”. I’ll be the boring nerd, I guess, who has to be the one to say there are many other search engines out there. If you don’t like Google (I don’t), or don’t like where they are moving their products (I don’t) — please use a competing search engine. I’ve used DuckDuckGo for years and I don’t miss anything about Google. There are plenty of other good search engines out there too. It’s not particularly difficult to switch away and get an experience more to your liking, so it’s a bit baffling when Google Search product decisions are equated with burying the web alive. Just don’t use it!

TonyTrapp 1y ago
When "to google" has literally become a verb in several languages, you know it's not going to be that easy to convince literally hundreds of millions of people to use something different. For many unsavvy people, Google is and continues to be their window into the web, and they wouldn't even know they can have it another way.
- NikolaNovak 1y ago
  It's a seemingly patronizing joke meme, but I've repeatedly seen many of my relatives type in e.g. "Facebook.com" into Google search box, and then blindly click the first entry (which is completely at the mercy of being hijacked/prioritized based on either who's paying more money to Google, or latest fun extension / glitchy website they've installed). I have not yet found a working approach to alter that behaviour - obligatory XKCD reference [0] 0: https://xkcd.com/763/ https://xkcd.com/763/
  - mediumsmart 1y ago
    So true and the holy grail of being the first entry fuels the industry of reviews and stars which fuels the industry of bad review removal services etc and so on. This is such a vast ecosystem and so humiliating for the participants that it is only logical to let AI write, read and handle it. This is our chance to get a life. Lets not squander it.

mitchbob 1y ago

https://archive.ph/2025.05.26-092025/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/google-ai-mode-search-results-bury-the-web.html https://archive.ph/2025.05.26-092025/https://nymag.com/intel...

jameslk 1y ago

Business idea: build a firewall for AI crawlers that variably gives them access to customer’s sites based on traffic they send. The more traffic they send, the more they are allowed to crawl.

mattferderer 1y ago
Cloudflare has been talking about this for a while albeit slightly different than your take - https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/
- jameslk 1y ago
  Yeah that was actually what I was thinking of for the idea, but the problem with their firewall is that it doesn’t penalize the big crawlers, like Google’s bot, because Google still sends traffic. Even if Google is sending less and less traffic over time. That just gives the biggest companies the prize of being able to crawl all the web for free, while they offer less over time in exchange.

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago

I have to resort to using ChatGPT to find any historical information because of the recency bias in all conventional search engines. Never mind their penchant for stuffing results with e-commerce sites no matter how irrelevant they are to the query.

jrm4 1y ago

The hardest issue in "fixing" this is "reminding people that the web is open and you can kind of do whatever you want here."

bilater 1y ago

So if Google innovates with AI, it's a problem because they're hiding their "ten blue links." But if they don't, they're suffering from the innovator's dilemma and are going to die with their ten blue links. The fact is, Google is so big that they're always going to upset some people. Embracing AI and moving forward is the only thing they can do.

kevingadd 1y ago
Why is it a foregone conclusion that embracing AI is the only way to move forward, and that embracing AI is necessary to succeed? I'm certainly curious to see how it works out - it's a possible source of growth etc - but it's weird to me seeing people just assume that AI is not only The Future but is The Only Future.
- Nasrudith 1y ago
  It is because it is easier to imagine the current trend taking off and staying than imaging the alternative tech line that will beat both AI and the ten blue links.
- dnissley 1y ago
  Because AI/LLMs are clearly a 10x+ improvement over a significant number of use cases for search. And LLMs will be the thing performing the searches and filtering results in the remaining use cases.
- sushid 1y ago
  If Google doesn't do this, people will slowly (or even quickly, who knows?) move to Perplexity, ChatGPT, etc. I know I personally would abandon Google entirely if it didn't summarize results and help me avoid the SEO slopfest.

Rastonbury 1y ago

What I want from Google is showing me results (not summaries) from sources that I tell it from natural language. If I know I am going to search for a topic I know is going to be filled with a ton of SEO garbage, I default to chatgpt to get sources for me, unfortunately I still do not trust chatgpt to have done a thorough job but sometimes I can't be bother to trawl through blogspam. The reason why chatgpt and perplextty are stealing queries from them is because Search has become so bad.

nicbou 1y ago

I can weigh in on this. I run a small information website (https://allaboutberlin.com https://allaboutberlin.com). My traffic has been growing steadily for 7 years, but now its down 30-ish percent year on year. From what I'm hearing, my competitors (and friends) are having it worse. My main mission is to put new information on the internet. It's harder to do this if AI destroys the economics of it. It's also harder without an audience who provides feedback and encouragement. Having all information mediated by two companies isn't just digging into my revenue, it's killing the fun. The unfortunate side effect is that it made me focus more on business and less on serving my readers. I'm working on health insurance stuff when I would rather work on a citizenship guide. It's also sad to see all the nuance stripped from my carefully chosen words. It sucks, honestly. I am being replaced by AI, but I am still supposed to go experience the real world and translate it into LLM training material. In the end, there still is a thinking, feeling human being doing the essential work. He's just not getting paid anymore.

boplicity 1y ago
> My main mission is to put new information on the internet. It's harder to do this if AI destroys the economics of it. It's also harder without an audience who provides feedback and encouragement. I also run an online website that provides valuable information. However, we have a very different philosophy. The mission is very not not to "put new information on the internet." Rather, it is to provide a valuable and much needed service for people in our niche. While we do greatly benefit from SEO, we also work very hard to cultivate our audience, both in terms of finding new people, and nurturing our relationship with the existing ones. "Information on the internet" has zero inherent value without an audience. If you're not working to build that audience (outside of third party platforms), then it's going to be very tough in the long run, and you'll run into situations exactly like this. FWIW, our SEO traffic has remained shockingly steady, though the search console has reported a dramatic increase in "impressions," likely due to featuring our website in AI generated summaries. We'll see if things change over the long-term, but for now, we're not changing any strategies based on this.
- nicbou 1y ago
  The problem is that there is no audience without a third-party platform nowadays. At least not at a scale. Google was the lesser evil, but I still fully expected to get killed by an algorithm update some day. I vowed to ride this website into the ground if I have to. I believe in its value, even if I need a side job to support it.

mattferderer 1y ago

Google has been getting this push back for the last 15 years. (That makes me feel old to remember it) Google Knowledge Graph (that sidebar they show) was hated by publishers, especially Wiki for stealing their content. Google adding direct answers to questions. Lots of fights over social media & recipe results. I'm not arguing who is right or wrong,* just saying this has been a thing for a long time. * Exception most recipe websites & those infinite looping Pinterest blog links. Those websites are all awful & wrong.

DataDaemon 1y ago

Soon, quick and dirty solution: User-Agent: * Disallow: /

cr125rider 1y ago
So then the internet police know to zoom up the fiber line and arrest the user-agent for not following robots.txt!

Magi604 1y ago

I used to hate the AI overview, but I've slowly been getting used to it and now I will often settle for what the AI gives. It's better than scrolling through loads of links and trying to weed out garbage SEO optimized sites.

DataDaemon 1y ago
Results are OK, until you have this "garbage".
somat 1y ago
How hard is it to get the infernal engine to work for you? "Belphegor-2 go wade through the search results and discard the low quality machine slop, I only want results linking to curated human generated pages."
nicce 1y ago
At least in scientific writing, AI summaries have been proved to change the meaning of the results. So, use with caution.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

kazinator 1y ago

Story forget to mention that you can add "fucking ..." to your queries to eliminate the obnoxious and more often incorrect than not AI summaries.

carlosjobim 1y ago

Lazy publishers could have solved this years ago, by making massive syndicates, paid by a single subscription. YouTube did it, and has become a modern wonder of the world. But no, of course they can't syndicate together with other newspapers or magazines who aren't 100% psychotically equally aligned with them politically. So they get what's coming to them. They shouldn't have been megalomaniacs, but that's all they are now.

shmerl 1y ago

I noticed that Google image reverse search turned into completely unusable garbage that can only produce AI lookalikes but completely fails at finding original images. Literally every time, exact match - zero results. I guess that's their current trend. Forget about quality search, inject AI everywhere.

bookofjoe 1y ago
I use Google image reverse search on a daily basis for my blog. I rarely get AI look-alikes but rather almost always real things. One caveat: I never reverse search for people, only things.
- shmerl 1y ago
  I mostly tried it for art to look for original authors. I'll check again.

guluarte 1y ago

the only thing google will win doing this in the long term is new laws that you'll need to opt in for training AI models

baq 1y ago

I'm finding that google's own gemini flash is cannibalizing google search in my own usage, but there's no other way for them to survive being eaten alive by the competition. The sad realization is you probably shouldn't expect humans to read your content anymore - it'll be quoted verbatim (best case) by the all-consuming LLMs, just without your ads, your layout or anything yours at all that isn't your written or spoken words. (Sad part is that's often an improvement until chat interfaces start putting product placement in their responses. We can truly bury the web then.)

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

amadeuspagel 1y ago

Yeah when I'm scrolling past the AI overview to click on the links it feels like I'm digging out someone buried alive with my bare hands to breathe new life into him.

DisjointedHunt 1y ago

In my humble opinion, Google is the reason the web withstood as long as it did. At least the open part of the web did. Yes, sure, they monetized, but also they gave back as much as, and if not more than they took. We have so many machine learning frameworks, tensorflow, research, payouts to creators, advertising opportunities, careers, products, a lot of things built and taken down but most importantly built. They were probably the most positive force for the internet age in the past 20 years and more than anyone will ever give them credit for. Only in retrospect will we realize how lucky we were to be alive in the Google age. Full stop. What really killed the web was the rise of closed wall gardens platforms such as Apple, Facebook, Instagram and others. Putting up walls around content that didn't need to necessarily exist or not honoring open frameworks to exchange information and making things more widely indexable. But even here there have been significant benefits. The present AI boom would arguably not have been as large as it is right now without Mark Zuckerberg choosing to put an unconventional amount of investment behind AR ambitions to take on Apple, an investment the size of which many conventionally run publicly listed or private enterprises could hardly imagine to take up, leading to the concentration of capital, talent, technology and hardware in a place that gave birth to open source Llama and others. Google as well was very well poised because of their investments in compute fueled by their business model which kept the web alive and also returned capital into places where computer scientists would be paid significant amounts of money and have job security and freedom of will. to do as they pleased as opposed to chasing a paycheck, working as a physicist at CERN or something. All I'm saying is this article does not fully capture how significant the positive outcomes from Google have been.

p3rls 1y ago
it's so funny listening to people who are clearly not publishers give their takes on these things
- bookofjoe 1y ago
  99+% of people are not publishers

mortsnort 1y ago

Perhaps we need legislation requiring LLMs to compensate the sources they steal from? If the LLMs kill the hand that feeds them, it's bad for everyone.

intended 1y ago

Forgive this weirdly philosophical comment: In a year of dark thoughts I found yet another horror to contemplate, after reading a legal paper on the idea of the marketplace of ideas. A core concept underpinning our shared market place, is that its not about facts, its about ideas being exchanged. Critically, that exchange creates friction, debate and downstream of all that - society. I've commented elsewhere how the marketplace is broken today, and why. But with GenAI, theres a new, twist, that I can barely contemplate. See, our conception of this liberal democracy based society, exists in that exchange between people. Even a crappy exchange, is part of the process of learning and building our ideas. My half formed ideas, your half formed ideas, everyones ideas. We have considered what happens when your ideas don't get heard. But in no place, did we consider what happens when we bounce our ideas into a machine, and that machine talks back. And if that machine talks back in a manner thats can be as good as what a person might write or text. Your half baked idea goes into the machine, you get text back that helps you get to a fully baked idea. But the counter party is the machine. Not a person. The way those ideas have been bouncing around, has changed.

j_timberlake 1y ago

This is like the frog in the boiling water story, except Frog is worried about being boiled alive after the temperature has only risen .001 degrees, so he writes articles saying "Google is burying the web alive" begging for someone to save him.

johneth 1y ago

Surely as the traffic Google sends to websites falls and falls, there'll come a tipping point where the websites themselves will feel there's no benefit to allowing Google to index them. If this happens, Google's generative AI slop will have less and less scaped and regurgitated content to surface to Google users.

tmnvix 1y ago

I've said this before, but I sincerely believe that a human-curated internet directory would be a great resource. Maybe something along the lines of Yahoo Directory revived? Organised using the dewey system could be useful. A library for the internet. I'd love to be able to look up something like say 'shoe repair' and find a host of high quality resources such as videos, tutorials, suppliers, etc, all vetted by real people somehow.

notnullorvoid 1y ago
I think the answer lies in a network of curated directories, and search within a localised range of the network. Many people already have a decent list of curated sites in the form of bookmarks, but bookmark software is horribly dated. Even if I limited my search to sites gathered from my own bookmarks, I'd find 95% of everything I'm ever searching for.
coffeecat 1y ago
Surely, someone must have already thought of this. Perhaps what we really need is a curated index of curated indices.

notnullorvoid 1y ago

AI summaries aren't the problem, they are a poor solution to a overwhelming amount of slop content. Search engine results have been getting worse and worse for over a decade, and with a rapidly increasing collection of content the web is getting too big to search. AI will be necessary, but it's not going to change the course, it will be deployed on both the solution and the problem front. If I had to pick the biggest contributor to the problem it would be advertising. Which mainly means Google, and governments for allowing an ad and search monopoly under the same roof. People can make all the justifications they want about how ad revenue allowed businesses and individuals to prosper, and "free" access to content, but it was always borrowing against the future.

anal_reactor 1y ago

literal mind control

oliwarner 1y ago

Which is a problem for websites that only provide facts. If your whole business model is getting organic search engine traffic to answer a user's question (a time, a result, something they just want to know) then Google is going to eat your dinner and I'm completely ambivalent because so many of the websites that have been so expertly sculpted to dominate SERPs, are what's wrong with the web. It's why it deserves to be buried. Before posting this, I'd just seen this post about asking Forbes whether or not the latest Mission Impossible has a post-credit scene: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisplummer.bsky.social/post/3lpvxayws6s2w https://bsky.app/profile/chrisplummer.bsky.social/post/3lpvx... > If you load this page it contacts 82 IP addresses executing 256 separate HTTP transactions to download 18MB of data writing 64 cookies to your device to tell you “no” The web has been on life-support for a while. Ad-blockers just make it bearable, but its existence as an information lookup system is nearly over. It's a way to interact with online systems and —occasionally— for reading some long-form content (which is increasingly written by LLMs anyway). Isn't the future confusing.

winterbloom 1y ago
Bsky just as bad as twitter/x now, they require login to see certain posts
- Shorn 1y ago
  Isn't that a setting the individual publishing user controls? I don't use BlueSky so I'm not sure - just interested. Especially if it's already going the route of Twitter/Facebook, etc. - which I expect it to long-term.
  - oliwarner 1y ago
    Yeah there's a "learn more" link. > This user has requested that their content only be shown to signed-in users.

h4kunamata 1y ago

SEO as we knew it gone forever, Google push with its AI drove everything to shit. I used to use Germini and it was pretty good, then it went downhill with wrong answers and I just couldn't trust it anymore. That is where I crossed Perplexity ( https://www.perplexity.ai/ https://www.perplexity.ai/ ), it is surprisingly solid and the best part of it: the sources. It even helped to learn Python. It does mention all the sources it used for that answer, so in doubt, you can cross check which is something Gemini failed miserably to do so. There is very minimal "wrong answers" and in doubt, cross check it. I went De-Google years ago with GrapheneOS and everything, I still use Google dot com to check stores reviews because unfortunately, no other search engine provides that info. There are websites only for that but it is not remotely close to Google reviews left by folks.

h4kunamata 1y ago
I forgot to mention that ChatGPT is the worst of them all, it never really provided with the right information, and there is no 2FA so its accounts on the dark web is worth a lot, because developers are pasting company code in there so having access to such accounts means granting you access to companies code.

threesmegiste 1y ago

It may reduce the tendency to visit websites. But I do the same with YouTube videos. I share the link with Gemini and summarize it. I think Google will not allow this after a while.

MichaelMoser123 1y ago

I think publishers will not be pleased about a steep fall in click rates, now publishers still have considerable political influence. What will Google do in the event of serious legal pushback or a renewed drive for antitrust action? The introduction of AI overviews into Google search will cost quite a lot in compute/other resources, despite heavy caching, therefore this might be a significant bet in terms of costs vs profit for Google. What does Google expect from this feature in terms of business results? This seems to be quite a big bet, but what is actually at stake - in real terms? Come to think of it: is there now a showdown between Google and Microsoft/OpenAI, where collateral costs are no longer taken into account?

bfrog 1y ago

There’s no web. There’s big ad companies striving to keep eyeballs. There’s a few lone bastions of what was. Mostly it’s ads.

lzy 1y ago

This feels like the culmination of a long trend. Google shifting from indexing the web to replacing it. The idea of an “AI answer mode” burying actual sources is worrying, especially for niche or emerging topics where LLMs hallucinate confidently. I’d love to see metrics on how often users click through to original sources under the new interface. At some point, if Google becomes too self-referential, it risks losing the very web it was built on. Curious whether this opens the door for competitors that prioritise raw links and transparency over synthesised summaries.

csa 1y ago
> if Google becomes too self-referential, it risks losing the very web it was built on This ship has sailed. Paywalls and wall-gardens are the mid-term future, imho. Most of the useful internet spaces I interact with fall under these categories. It feels like a Balkanized version of the AOL/Compuserve days.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

Computer owners finance www through Internet Service Provider subscriptions fees. Users of www upload content at their own expense. Google produces zero content at zero expense, stores content of www users, monitors their www use. Google profits, becomes trillion dollar company. What happens next.

gloosx 1y ago

How to fix Google: 1. Install User-Agent Switcher for Chrome plugin. 2. Choose older browser, like IE 10 or Iphone 6, refresh the page. 3. You're now getting "old google" results. Seeing first 5 links without scrolling. Accurate and concise. The contrast is STARK. There is no "AI overview". There is no "From sources across the web". There is no "People also ask". No "People also search for". No "At a glance" section. No "Images" section, nor "youtube" section taking 50% of the page. No "Short videos" tab. Just. Search. Results.

miguel-muniz 1y ago

when you could just type a question into a chatbox and receive a well thought out, nuanced response instead of having to click into multiple ad-ridden, seo ""optimized"" websites just to find an answer isn't it obvious why one is winning over the other? for many people, they just want an answer to their question. whatever means they get that answer doesn't really matter. the new trend of locking your website content behind a sign in wall or app download is only going push more people to chatbots.

joshdappier 1y ago

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lakomen 1y ago

[dead]

bookofjoe 1y ago

https://archive.ph/9OMHF https://archive.ph/9OMHF

neochief 1y ago

Sadly, in the same boat for the time being (https://refactoring.guru https://refactoring.guru). My strategy was to deliver ad-free open valuable content for the devs, focus more on the content than marketing, but it all seems pointless now. Traffic is steadily declining, despite site is being first in search results.