16 ms·

Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

205 points by jaredwiener 1y ago

JKCalhoun 1y ago
https://archive.ph/W9K4V https://archive.ph/W9K4V
- iAMkenough 1y ago
  [dead]
mitchbob 1y ago
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44235951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44235951
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
syndraiofficial 1y ago
[dead]
Tarsul 1y ago
Anyone surprised? I mean that's just what Google does and did from the very early days. I am more ashamed that politicians worldwide have done basically nothing to help media companies in the last 25 years. We can always ask ourselves: What is more important for our society: independent media or our search overlords?
- triceratops 1y ago
  > politicians worldwide have done basically nothing to help media companies Is that really surprising? Good journalists consider it their job to hold politicians accountable.
  - Tarsul 1y ago
    but that cuts both ways. They hold not only your own party accountable but also the other parties. Thus, if you are a politican that has a moral compass and believe you are the one who does the best job, then you would like a well-respected media organisation because you would think that it hits the other guys more often than yourself. But yes.. this only works so long as the amount of politicans with a moral compass are a majority... the moment this changes is the moment that the media is the enemy.
- rightbyte 1y ago
  Google is doing some sort of LLM copyright laundering. The earlier version was bad for the sites but with the new one most likely decreases click throughs even more.
- rmah 1y ago
  Why should they help media companies?
  - teeray 1y ago
    Because an informed public helps the proper functioning of a democracy (I know, I know, it’s a hilarious thing to say in the US)
  - aaronbaugher 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - input_sh 1y ago
      Do you usually get your news from The Christian Post or is this a one off thing?
  - junto 1y ago
    I think that’s a good question. If they did their jobs properly, acting as the 4th estate, then I’d be much more supportive. However the last action I can remember that fulfilled checks and counterbalances was the publication of the Snowden files. After that the press died and it’s never recovered. Journalists are too scared and media companies neutered, and no longer have what it takes to call out the executive.
    - Spivak 1y ago
      I mean Fox News seemed to be pretty darn good at calling out Biden and made it their personal mission to hate everything Obama touched. Why aren't people comfortable calling out Trump? Because he's made it clear he will and has retaliated against anyone who does. We've implicitly relied on the "courtesy" of the executive to just sit there and take it for the good of the country and public discussion. But now that time seems to have passed. No more high road and turning the other cheek.
      - fumar 1y ago
- holoduke 1y ago
  What? Media companies sold their souls to big capital and Journalists write to serve engagement.
- ekianjo 1y ago
  Media companies are heavily subsidized everywhere in the world and that's precisely because of politicians.
- bamboozled 1y ago
  Politicians hate Media companies, sometimes they deserve the hate but there is almost no reality where having accurate, objective news reporting is beneficial for politicians.
  - DaSHacka 1y ago
    > there is almost no reality where having accurate, objective news reporting is beneficial for politicians. Well it's a good thing for politicians they haven't had to deal with that for a long, long time.
- asadotzler 1y ago
  Google used to send traffic to my site. Now it scrapes my site and serves summaries of my site on its site, sending me zero human traffic but a whole lot of expensive bot traffic.
jaredwiener 1y ago
Honest question as I try to wrap my millennial brain around this -- for those of you who search for news -- with or without an AI -- what are you searching for? So much of news is finding out the unknown, it seems unsearchable by nature? Or are you asking for updates to a specific, ongoing story?
- 1bpp 1y ago
  Updates on a specific topic, region, company, or ongoing story.
- Celeo 1y ago
  Generally, if I'm manually searching for news, it's either to get more information about something I heard from someone (searching by the event), or to see if news has been published about something nearby (searching by region).
- bigthymer 1y ago
  Sometimes I look for a specific old article. Search is completely useless for this since it usually ignores what I'm searching for to show me more about whatever is recent.
- dreghgh 1y ago
  I would assume a lot of what is losing views on news sites are the articles designed to capture "what time is the super bowl" type searches. The article features the question in the title or standfirst, the answer comes after 3 paragraphs of low value information about the super bowl.
- Baader-Meinhof 1y ago
  I ask two types of questions: 1. Factual updates to an ongoing or recent story. 2. Analysis, e.g. "What were the economic effects of Brexit." Without AI, I would try to read multiple opinions from different sides. But its hard for me to always know which experts to trust? AI will present both sides, but even when AI is not hallucinating, there is still the issue of "are the experts that the AI is sourcing reliable?"
OutOfHere 1y ago
I think that requiring PoW (proof-of-work) could take over for simple requests, rejecting requests until a sufficient nonce is included in the request. Unfortunately, this collective PoW could burden power grids even more, wasting energy+money+computation for transmission. Such is life. It would be a lot better to just upgrade the servers, but that's never going to be sufficient.
- daedrdev 1y ago
  what?
- GuB-42 1y ago
  Worse than that. Such computations are nothing to a desktop computer, or a server in a datacenter. But they are definitely going to be a problem for cheap smartphones. Ironically, the computers that are the best suited for solving these proof-of-work problem are the same kind of computers that are used to train and run AIs. And for even more irony, chatbots are relatively lightweight on the client side, being just text, while news sites tend to be bloated even without considering PoW. So there is a good chance for PoW not to affect AI scrapers much (they have powerful computers to solve the challenges) while driving away smartphone users towards chatbots and other AI-based summaries.
  - OutOfHere 1y ago
    If the PoW difficulty is IP or subnet specific, then the IP addresses or subnets that hammer the server more can be given increasingly greater PoW requirements. The smartphones, assuming they're not being used as proxies, will have few requests, so the server can go very easy on them with the PoW difficulty.
crest 1y ago
How ironic that the WSJ decided to make the text unreadable themselves just in case anyone cared to read it.
spankalee 1y ago
Google's damned if they do and damned if the don't here: - If they don't make search AI centric, they're going to get lapped by AI-first competitors like Perplexity, OpenAI, etc. We saw many people here predict Google's pending demise from this. - If they do make search centric, they're unfairly consuming they world's content and hoarding the user traffic to themselves. Since no reasonable company is just going to stand by and willing let itself be obsoleted, Google's obviously going to go for option 2. But had they for some reason stood down, then they would have been supplanted by an AI competitor and the headline would read "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Perplexity" - just a few years later.
- vgeek 1y ago
  We are getting to watch The Innovator's Dilemma play out, yet again. The downward trajectory of Google's utility has only been worsening over the past 10 years-- but only in the last 3-4 have mainstream audiences started to notice.
  - bitpush 1y ago
    The first part of that statement is valid but the second one isn't. If anything, most of big tech has shown exceptional humility against new threats Instagram incorporating stories (Snapchat) YouTube incorporating Shorts (tiktok) Google search incorporating AI Mode (perplexity et al) This is in stark contrast to Kodak and the likes who scoffed at digital camera and phone cameras as distraction. They were sure that their ways were superior, ultimately leading to their demise.
    - vgeek 1y ago
      Maybe you misunderstood the scope that Google is a search advertising company first and foremost? Alphabet ignores (yes, they essentially invented transformers, etc.., but actual productive efforts likely correlate to predicted TAM or protecting status quo, answering to shareholders while waiting to acquire threats) a market that will eventually usurp their cash cow of first party search ads, because the new market isn't initially as lucrative due to market size. There is also the consideration of cannibalizing their high margin search ads market with an error prone and resource intensive tech that cannot immediately be monetized in a second price auction (both from inventory and bidder participant perspectives). A $10 billion market for Google would be under 3% of revenue, but if the market grows 10x, it is much more attractive, but now the incumbent may be trailing the nascent companies who refined their offerings (without risk of cannibalizing their own offerings) while said market was growing. We are currently at the stage where Google is incorporating Gemini responses and alienating publishers (by not sending monetizable clicks while using their content) while still focusing on monetization via their traditional ad products elsewhere on the SERPs (text search ads, shopping ads). Keep in mind, they also control 3rd party display ads via DoubleClick and Adsense-- but inventory on 3rd party sites will drop and Google will lose their 30%+ cut if users don't leave the SERPs. Dozens of major news publications have covered the decline of Google's organic search quality decline and emphasis on monetization (ignoring incorrect infoboxes and AI generated answers). See articles such as https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/google-search-size-usefulness-decline/675409/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/googl... and a collection even posted here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348460 . This has played into reasons why people have shifted away from Google. Their results are focused solely on maximizing Google's earnings per mille, as leaked (https://www.wsj.com/tech/u-s-urges-breakup-of-google-ad-businesses-65b07c7b https://www.wsj.com/tech/u-s-urges-breakup-of-google-ad-busi...) where the ads team has guanxi over search quality. Once Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts left their roles, the focus on monetization over useful SERPs becomes much more evident.
oytis 1y ago
But... Google's AI summaries are wrong like at least 50% of the time.
- blindstitch 1y ago
  A lot of the time it's a just a near-verbatim rephrasing of the top result, too.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 1y ago
  You can help save the planet by asking AI less questions! Yeah I have 0 trust in the responses I am getting so instead of verifying random claims I'm taking my own turns
- bombcar 1y ago
  But 95% of the time it doesn’t matter.
- physix 1y ago
  I read them to get an idea of the quality that the AI produces, but mostly ignore the content after reading and click on to find actual sources, since I don't yet trust that content. I was thinking that the drop in traffic to news sites is due to AI summaries, which might have the effect of filtering out people who are happy with a snippet. And was postulating that it would have two effects: improving the relevance of those who go to the news site (good) and feeding people with poor quality AI generated information (bad). But then I tested out various news- ish search terms and never got an AI summary from Google. So I think the primary cause for a drop in traffic to news sites is probably not the AI summary itself.
homeonthemtn 1y ago
[flagged]
- georgemcbay 1y ago
  I agree with your assessment of how terrible online news sites are, but I'm sure the same problem is true for not just news sites but any sort of site where searchable content is shown for ad eyeballs, news sites are just the ones that you're going to hear about it first and most loudly from for pretty obvious reasons. Regardless of which side you take on any of this (anti/pro-SEO clickbait, anti/pro-AI), it is still ultimately a serious ouroboros problem for Google and other "AI" companies because their "AI" relies on these sites for ongoing training. Kill them all off and where does new content for their AIs to slurp come from?
- dineol 1y ago
  until the moment they'll built ads into AI responses
- Infinity315 1y ago
  We still need people on the ground reporting on these things. AI can't (yet) have connections and conversations with relevant parties. Many interviews would not be possible without a reporter developing a rapport with the interviewee beforehand.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    If they are actually needed they shouldn't have any issue finding funding.
    - Infinity315 1y ago
      How do you define what is needed? The vast majority of reporting does not affect one's own behaviour at all. For example, consider the Snowden leaks, I guarantee you the vast majority of people did not even attempt to modify their own behaviour at all in light of this new information--despite having read or heard about it. I'd argue that this reporting was still needed, despite it having very little material impact on one's life.
ValveFan6969 1y ago
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aucisson_masque 1y ago
Well I didn’t expect some good coming from the ai revolution and yet. If it helps to annihilate the « news » sites that depended over advertisement to be profitable, that’s great. Advertisement and journalism should never have been in the same sentence, no one can provide full independent news when you’re at the mercy of advertiser threatening to bail out if you say something bad on them.
- jmsdnns 1y ago
  Here is Ben Franklin addressing this issue back in 1731 by essentially saying, "that's true, but then how would news ever get printed?" https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-0061 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-00...
  - aucisson_masque 1y ago
    Newspaper really took off during Industrial Revolution, I’m not sure that a 1731 text is pertinent. On that matter, people used to print newspaper for a variety of different reasons, some were to rally public to an opinion (political parties for instance), some were printed to exerce control over their reader (a factory owner making a newspaper for his employee) and there have always been people who wanted to report facts and get paid for that. Still today, there are many newspaper and online news that don’t have any advertisement, sponsoring and are in a really good financial situation. In France, I can think of mediapart (fully online), le canard enchaîné (online and paper). People pay for them because their paper is worth more than just lightening up a barbecue.
    - jmsdnns 1y ago
      No. Printing presses were used for news well before then. That's why Franklin wrote what he wrote in 1731.
  - hy4000days 1y ago
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- 1y ago
mattl 1y ago
News sites have way too much invasive advertising on them, but AI is a scam. Pay for your news.
- teeray 1y ago
  But how? I usually have never heard of some publication and literally want to read one article and never visit the site again. I don’t want to whip out my credit card, fill out a form, have a subscription on the books that I have to cancel, just so I can read that one article. I want the web equivalent of an ezPass transponder.
  - mattl 1y ago
    Apple News+ is one way. Another is what 404media does. You pay $10 a month for no ads and extra stuff. But yes, I know what you want and sadly there’s nobody doing it yet.
    - hobs 1y ago
      Oh its been done dozens of times, it just always fails.
      - mattl 1y ago
        Yeah, Ted Nelson even talked about it. It requires a level of cooperation that we may see eventually. What is an article worth to read?
BlazeNova 1y ago
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iambateman 1y ago
If the vast majority of Google revenue comes from search, and search is under siege, why is the stock so unfazed? It seems like the market thinks Google will be just fine.
- tokioyoyo 1y ago
  Ads in AI query results.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
  Windows and Office used to make up >90% of Microsoft's revenue, back when Microsoft was the biggest company in the world around DotCom. Windows especially has been a sinking ship for a decade and yet Microsoft is bigger than ever. Google is well positioned to monetize LLMs. Cloud, Gemini, and Waymo are all growing and could easily be Fortune 50 companies each within a few years. Gsuite continues to do well. Google Search revenue was still growing as of last quarter. It's possible for Search revenue to still grow while Google Search total market share of search (if including LLM "search") goes down drastically (LLM users search more, not less). It's also possible that total traditional Google Search volume could decline substantially without a huge impact to Search revenues. Remember, only about ~15% of searches are Monetized. Google will be focused on keeping THOSE searches going. It's possible Google could lose TONS of marketshare and still keep the frothiest part of the market... OpenAI could take off more than any expects and be the biggest company in the world, and it's possible that only takes a small dent out of Search. It's also possible Google could end up having a significant (if not dominant) part of the LLM search market.
  - TulliusCicero 1y ago
    Waymo is a particularly good one. Yes, it's been harder and taken longer than expected to get cars self driving, but it's starting to show real results now, and the sheer difficulty could act as quite the moat -- right now in the Western world, nobody is even close to Waymo in operational L4 or higher self driving cars, and the incumbent automakers in particular seem to have mostly given up. And it's not just that Waymo will inevitably expand beyond robotaxis into personal cars as well, they could take their expertise in vision and robotics and apply it to adjacent domains. Maybe we'll actually start seeing the humanoid helper robots of the 50's a decade or two from now!
wnevets 1y ago
Google simultaneously making search worse as more people use AI chatbots isn't helping their cause.
dataviz1000 1y ago
Take it to the next level, integrate the chatbot into a browser extension side panel. Let people navigate to websites that contain the information. This will work. It will allow the chatbot to provide up to the minute data and information from the source. It will allow the user to maintain context -- like a popup dialog allows the user to maintain visual context. And, it will incentivize content creators to curate and provide information and data as people will be visiting their websites. If anyone thinks this might be a good idea also, I've already laid down the foundation approaching a browser extension side panel as a framework like Electron or Playwright and did the grunt work. [0] I put the VSCode IPC and other core libraries into this project. The IPC is important because a browser extension with this use case requires looking at a browser as a distributed system of javascript processes that communicate a a dozen different ways > Environments: Node.js main process, Node.js child process, Node.js worker thread, browser main thread (window), iframe, dedicated Web Worker, Shared Worker, Service Worker, AudioWorklet. > Communication: fetch/XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket, RTCDataChannel, EventSource, BroadcastChannel, SharedArrayBuffer + Atomics, localStorage storage events, MessageChannel/MessagePort, postMessage/onmessage, Worker.postMessage/worker.onmessage, parentPort.postMessage/parentPort.on('message'), ChildProcess.send/process.on('message'), stdin/stdout streams. and VSCode provides a protocol interface with only `onMessage` and `send` so I can define my own that are not provided creating a consistent API for communication. Regardless, I have it working but it needs to be completely rewritten. [0]https://github.com/adam-s/doomberg-terminal https://github.com/adam-s/doomberg-terminal
- _thisdot 1y ago
  This is already a thing with Gemini in Chrome[0]. The Browser Company’s new browser, Dia[1], is supposedly another similar product [0] = https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/?hl=en https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/?hl=en [1] = https://www.diabrowser.com/ https://www.diabrowser.com/
  - dataviz1000 1y ago
    I wasn't aware of dia browser, thank you for sharing. I've been doing browser automation for a while and have become convinced the way to accomplish human in the middle is to fork Chromium and create a custom browser. However, there is one problem, there are 3.5B Chrome users. Getting someone to install a browser extension is hard enough, a whole new browser much, much more difficult. I went with experimenting with stock trading as a demo because people need huge incentive and value to make the critical jump to install an app. There is potential for niche curated business intelligence in trading or real estate, for example, where not only providing the chat bot but also time series data embeddings ect. I'm a little sad because I'm late to this party. Nevertheless, there needs to incentive also for people to continue to publish the data, ideas, and information so the chatbots are going to have help the content creators help them curate and provide the data by getting users to navigate to the webpages. I remember reading Google's Search Engine Optimization guide back in 2009 when I built a news publishing website for an industry newpaper. The tone was here is how to optimize your website for google crawlers to help us help you get traffic to your website. Google is nothing without people creating.
rubyfan 1y ago
Who would have thought we’d be looking for a better experience after Google let search turn to a steaming pile of shit filled with spam, popups and clickbait while violating our privacy with every vector possible?!?
paradox460 1y ago
I don't use Google anymore, and haven't in over a year (I use kagi instead) but for finding information that could be buried deep within slow, ad ridden websites, the AI and quick question features are indispensable. Things like "is game XYZ available on gamepass" or "which is state is comparable in area to germany" are good examples of this
- bitpush 1y ago
  Does Kagi have AI Mode?
  - ac29 1y ago
    Kagi assistant is hybrid search / LLM
    - bitpush 1y ago
      What model are they using?
      - jgeurts 1y ago
        They offer most models from the large AI players (anthropic, openai, mistral, meta, grok, google, deepseek)
        bitpush 1y ago
        Why would you use Kagi instead of any of these models directly?
        lostdesign 1y ago
        convenience through a UI?
        paradox460 1y ago
        You get all of them for the price of one kagi sub instead of a half dozen subs
awongh 1y ago
I was considering starting a business where the main traffic source would be SEO based, but based on all the gloom and doom around search I decided to hold off. Hard to say exactly how bad it’s getting right now. Lots of horror stories out there.
- bcoates 1y ago
  Honestly that might be a mistake, when the consensus is greedy get scared and when it's scared get greedy
- mmanfrin 1y ago
  I built a protein comparison site (aggregating nutrition, ingredients, electrolytes, prices) and I expected a little bit of traffic, but I'm getting less than a single visitor every 2 days from google. It's absolutely dead. A year ago I threw together a tiny little site with some datamined assets from a game (deadlock) that randomly got indexed and saw a couple hundred visits a month from google.
amarant 1y ago
Honestly, it's at least partially on the publishers in this case. I've started using AI to summarise articles for me because the endless SEO fluff has gotten to completely unbearable levels. If you publish an article with a sidetrack that's 8 pages long and completely irrelevant, don't get upset when I have some LLM summarize it to 3 bullet points instead. I'm not made of time, nor patience!
Hobadee 1y ago
This one trick will cut down on listicles and click-bait!
Agingcoder 1y ago
I don’t really care about google’s ai features - I’m fine with regular old fashioned search engines. I’ve stopped using google because it doesn’t work anymore - I used to be able to find what I want , and now I can’t. Everything is lost in a mess of ads and what seems to be a collection of random answers. I now instruct chatgpt to search the web for me and I read the result, since it works. I also read the news directly from various newspapers that I subscribe to to make sure they actually get money.
- kwanbix 1y ago
  I use ublock origin and it works just fine for me. AS much as I like to leave the google ecosystem, I tried bing and duckduckgo and they are not as good.
- dieortin 1y ago
  > I’m fine with regular old fashioned search engines > I now instruct chatgpt to search the web for me and I read the result I wouldn’t exactly classify ChatGPT as an old fashioned search engine
deleted 1y ago
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MyPasswordSucks 1y ago
In the old days - back before smartphones, back before widescreen monitors, back before broadband - the "Links" section was always a key part of any site. After spending time on a site, a visitor could find links to other pages - some of them on the same topic, some of them simply enjoyed by the creator of the site they were on. If one were to visualize the concept, they might well say that this formed a "web" of sorts. The big publishers were the first to really reject the "Links" page. If it's not a link to our content, or the content of our sister publications, then why should we include it? Instead, they threw their resources into optimizing their placement on search engines. This took the "web" and turned it closer towards a hub-and-spoke system, as smaller sites withered and died. Now, people have found a way to retrieve various pieces of information they're looking for that doesn't involve a search engine. It may not be perfect (gluey pizza, anyone?) but objectively, it's certainly more efficient than a list of places that have used the same words that a person is searching for, and honestly probably at least "nearly-as" reliable as said list, because the average Joe Sixpack always has, and always will, be a lot better at asking a question and getting an answer than he will be at finding an answer to his question within the confines of a larger story. This devastates the large publishers' traffic. I'd come up with a conclusion here, but I'm too distracted wondering where I placed my violin. It's really small, it could probably be anywhere...
- Eisenstein 1y ago
  I think the conclusion is that changing your business model in a reactive way to internet developments is a bad idea if you want to have a stable business. If you want to run your business that way, you better be on top of everything and you better be lucky. They rode the social media wave and lost, and now they are going to try to ride the AI wave because they don't have anything to fall back on. They are going to lose. Legacy media grew fat off of TV and local news. Captive attention markets did not teach them how to entice people's attention, they took it for granted. They are not equipped to compete with youtube and tiktok and reddit and they will lose. Trending news from the AP wire is not unique or in depth enough for anyone to want to read more than the AI summary of your article. What should they do? What they are good at, and what they were always good at: journalism. Write in-depth articles that take time to research and talent to write. Hire real journalists, pay them to find stories that take time to write, and publish those stories. People will pay for it.
gkanai 1y ago
I do a lot of product searches in Japanese and there is a ton of SEO spam on domains (.br but also many others) that are basically irrelevant to Japan. Google should be blocking all of that SEO spam but they can't seem to walk away from the ad revenue. There's no good domestic Japanese search engine so it's a defacto monopoly of bad search.
- ipsum2 1y ago
  Is Yahoo Japan not good?
deleted 1y ago
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725686 1y ago
"Searching" using AI is much faster and direct that traditional search. And with no ads.
DidYaWipe 1y ago
What chatbots? The article talks about Google's (shitty) "AI"-generated answer summaries, but that's not a chatbot, and as far as I can see the article doesn't say where all these "chatbots" are hosted. How are people finding them? Very disappointing for WSJ.
jgalt212 1y ago
1. This is self-limiting. If they drive the content producing sites out of business, what is Google AI search going to summarize? 2. These chatbots must also be killing ad revenue on SERP pages. It's safe to assume these summaries are also reducing clicks on ad links just as they are reducing clicks on content links.
- bitpush 1y ago
  If Google doesn't do it, perplexity would. Or ChatGPT or Arc (browser) It's one of those game theory situations. Best outcome is of everyone cooperates but if you think another party is going to defect (perplexity doing AI search) then the best move is to also defect (Google doing ai search)
sreekanth850 1y ago
A day will come when auth is an essential part of blogging sites.
deadbabe 1y ago
These days chatbots are good enough that when I do use a search engine, I really just want pure search results, I’m not interested in getting another AI opinion. I am sick and tired of getting AI overviews for a google search. What’s a better search engine? Heck, it doesn’t even have to be “better”, I’m looking for different results, not just perfect matches.
kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
Google destroyed Google's search. You can't surface any factual, non-slop content through them any more.
simonw 1y ago
This story has a few instances of suspicious numbers like these: > When Dotdash merged with Meredith in 2021, Google search accounted for around 60% of the company’s traffic, Vogel said. Today, it is about one-third. Overall traffic is growing, thanks to efforts including newsletters and the MyRecipes recipe locker. If traffic is up but percentage of that traffic from search is down, does that mean search traffic is down overall? Or does it mean that strategies to diversify their traffic sources are working as planned?
Aziell 1y ago
I use AI a lot myself and it definitely makes getting information faster but it feels like something’s missing, like the fun of digging for the truth yourself. These AI tools can just give you the answers, which saves time, but it also takes away a lot of depth and variety. Without realizing it, we might also be losing our ability to think independently. Do you think AI can really replace all the value traditional news brings?
- thrwaway55 1y ago
  Isn't this already the case but you can replace traditional news with personal investigation? What is another layer of indirection? I recall going to a townhall vote on some legislation a company I was employed with at the time wanted vs what the Teamster Union wanted and both sides doing body double line rigging to get their viewpoint in during "open comments" but I couldn't find a single news article about the obvious tactic by both sides. Do you think traditional news can really replace all the value personally verifiable data brings?
jmyeet 1y ago
Previously, if you searched for "mortgage calculator" in Google, you'd get one at the top, embedded in the page. It was fast, simple and did what you wanted. I guess because of "competition" it was removed at some point. Now all the top results are terrible. The sites are slow. They ask too many questsions. They're clearly trying to generate leads and sell ads. Whereas Google's just... worked. There are good calculators out there but they don't rank as highly. How exactly is this good for consumers? My point is that a lot of publishers are what I call "low value". They're rent-seekers. They have easily obtained information, often user-generated, and their role is to gatekeep that and make you click just one more page to get a result because hey that's another slew of ads they can show you. I'm sympathetic to the argument that LLMs steal. At the same time, we have to recognize that a lot of publishers are intentionally useless rent-seekers so it's hard for me to feel sorry for them.
wslh 1y ago
Google devastated search for small and medium sized companies, with AI or without it they have not improved the search engine to get accurate results with very concrete searches that are not prompts.
torqueehmada 1y ago
If nobody writes it, the LLM can't learn it. This is going to be a fascinating shift of resources. I suspect it will have the inverse effect of eroding traditional journalism outlets to retrofit for the new model, while boosting smaller competitors, but with everyone going to subscription based. The content creators could make a significant amount of money. Then again, this would be a great time for state-sponsored media, if we didn't have such an anti-intellectual assclown as president and the lacky congress/scotus.
- timewizard 1y ago
  I'm naturally conspiratorial; but, this is possibly why search results were intentionally degraded over the past 5 years. Which has had an impact on overall site traffic that has not gone unnoticed. Google's been trying their luck with "creator summits" over the past few years but the creators are starting to smell a rat. So you have Google which famously does not want people to actually leave their property. Infoboxes, calculator, extraction of semantic data for direct display in search results. Would a company like that intentionally downgrade search results making quality content harder for users to find, then train their LLMs on this highly valuable content, ultimately creating an unnatural shift away from the previous model to the "weak AI chatbot" model? I know HN hates conspiracies but there's trillions of dollars at stake here. We know companies will poison entire communities and create flammable rivers just to shave a few million off the expenses. Who knows what Google will do to keep it's market position?
  - _factor 1y ago
    110% this. Real web search is disappearing locked behind large datasets unavailable for normal users. The AI screen ensures you’re fed exactly what they intended while siloing off the web more and more to block competition. All the while signing exclusivity deals which should realistically be illegal (try finding current Reddit results anywhere but Google). AI based interaction makes it much easier to manipulate users into buying your items as they add a layer of human-like trust on top of the machine. It won’t be long before prices are hidden behind LLMs generating prices based on who you are. I’m already noticing ChatGPT becoming more and more enthusiastic about any product it thinks I have the potential of buying. Try asking it if something is a good deal, 9 times out of 10 it will say, “Yes, go for it.” We don’t want to live in a proprietary world where LLMs exist. This technology needs to be open. The search data needs to be open and not walled off to only monopolies. This is an inflection point.
bananalychee 1y ago
I don't believe that Google's AI Overviews or even LLMs in general are to blame for the decline in traffic to news websites. ChatGPT launched with the GPT-3.5 model in November 2022 without a web search function, and had a training data cutoff date of September 2021. Google AI Overviews launched in May 2024 to generally poor reception initially, and ChatGPT Search launched in July 2024. The graph presented in the article reveals a trend starting as far back as April 2022, well before mass-market LLM products could extract useful information in real time, and it doesn't look like it's accelerated significantly. In fact, the WSJ series contradicts it. Prior data would likely reveal that the broad decline began much earlier, since it's well-known[1] that younger generations prefer to get their news from social media these days. Paywalls, quality degradation in search results, and mistrust in the objectivity of news coverage are likely contributing factors. I don't doubt that the shift from web searches to automated information extraction will pose new challenges to websites that rely on search engine optimization to drive new user traffic, especially for small/individual operators, and I'll be happy to witness the death of SEO if it comes to that, but blaming a new Google Search feature[2] for a long-running decline in traffic to online newspapers strikes me as a deflection from the slow death of their business model. P.S.: Google's AI Overviews are fairly respectful of content providers and link back to source material from the generated text. [1] https://theconversation.com/young-people-are-abandoning-news-websites-new-research-reveals-scale-of-challenge-to-media-207659 https://theconversation.com/young-people-are-abandoning-news... [2] The current title of the article is "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools"
felipeerias 1y ago
The emergence of AI tools and closed platforms will reduce the importance of advertising on the open Web, and eventually of the open Web itself. One possible way this plays out is that attention and investment move towards proprietary ecosystems, with large AI companies being able to secure exclusive access to closed information sources while everyone else is reduced to getting what they can from a dwindling open Web. Another possibility might be that new standards allow interoperability between AI agents and open content providers, including microtransactions between them, and creating a new marketplace for information. https://stratechery.com/2025/the-agentic-web-and-original-sin/ https://stratechery.com/2025/the-agentic-web-and-original-si...
- potamic 1y ago
  What will happen is that chatbots will start showing ads and publishers will bid over prompt keywords to have their content sponsored and boosted. I don't see the end result being very different from what it is today. Chatbots will eventually get enshittified to the level of google search today. It's inevitable, unless there's some dramatic shift in advertising economics.
- isaacremuant 1y ago
  Ads will come inside the LLM response and all around it. I'm quite positive. You don't know how much these businesses thrive in being the "drivers of customers to other businesses by showing their ads". It's going to be there.
lakomen 1y ago
[dead]
p1dda 1y ago
Great news to see the abominable corporate news media wither and hopefully die.
Mehuleo 1y ago
This is definitely bad. But on a different note, I think this was inevitable, as the new generation's attention span keeps dropping rapidly with all the TikTok and Instagram shorts. I believe publishers will need to figure out shorter written content formats as well. Until then, Google and others that offer alternatives will have an edge. I'm not saying this is the only way forward—just part of the evolution. I believe publishers will evolve to adapt to this too.
niemandhier 1y ago
All I want is to go to the site of my favorite newspapers and see stuff that matters. Instead I get things like this: “Modern fathers have failed” “Man need to ditch the dadbod” “Equality means only man should be drafted” They have tons of great and deeply investigated content, but they throw engagement bait into your face. In the end I use a search engine to extract a relevant subset of articles.
patatero 1y ago
This is Google's fault. They made Search worse so people have to resort to AI chatbots.
ryao 1y ago
This seems appropriate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZXwdRBxZ0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZXwdRBxZ0U It took a little longer than predicted, but “Googlezon” is finally happening, with or without Google and Amazon.
darqis 1y ago
Would you say that Google's search taking results from other sites and compiling them and presenting them as their own is piracy?
oliwarner 1y ago
Google's demise is self-inflicted. They broke search by prioritising ads, then trusting the wrong, big publishers (eg every listacle from a big media network), broke their advanced search controls (domain blacklists, quotes that mean quotes, plus-and-minuses to alter things). Then they added their own LLM's analysis to searches, admitting that that their SERPs are dead. They were in this death-spiral well before LLMs became an alternative. I won't pretend that SEO wasn't making traditional search untenable, but the vector Google chose will make their key product obsolete. The thing I worry about is what they'll do to retain revenue. They have knowledge systems that cater to a lot more than what we normally search on. They have address data, know where people physically are right now, have live communication data on billions of users, know their shopping habits, and a thousand etceteras. Meta too. They have communication data on billions of people. How are these older software companies going to monetise the data they've amassed in an age when they are getting close to being able to replicate personas, model actual human behaviours?
- busterarm 1y ago
  They've shown in their other products that they really don't even care anymore. Roughly 30% of the YouTube ads I get served recently are 10minutes long or more. At least once a day I feel like I'm reporting some 50+ minute long alternative medicine scam ad.
  - dgimla20 1y ago
    I'm surprised Googles ad business stays afloat. It seems every video I watch on YouTube is preceded with a Grammarly advert, a service I have no use for and will not subscribe to/pay for in the future. I feel like Google should be the one company that has enough data and the widespread scope to really excel in advertising, yet on every site I see their ads, its as if they have no idea who I am and what I might want. Feels like a bubble to me..
    - busterarm 1y ago
      As someone who worked in advertising...advertising isn't really about connecting you with things that you want. It's about putting something in your head to make you want it.
incomingpain 1y ago
Practically every news site now needs archive.ph because of paywall. There's also a problem around trust in journalists being tremendously low.
scotty79 1y ago
Last decade or two was gradual exploration of how terrible and ad-infested you can get without people going away to somewhere else entirely. Now that a new elsewhere popped up everybody suddenly found out that instead of being knee deep in sewage, it already reached their mouth and nose.
phantom_wizard 1y ago
They did it to themselves. I'm sure we will read books about their failure and the replacement of Google search with chats and llms. The outcome is quite peculiar, because those chats are a blessing but should we really give them our data away. Scary what they will do with it. It was already scary enough with Google.
AaronAPU 1y ago
The other day I used Google to research something I didn’t know the answer to. It gave back a slightly reformatted piece of text which had been directly stolen from my own blog post. So not only did it steal my traffic, it elevated my random opinion to pseudo “official” truth.
TiredOfLife 1y ago
Same publishers that demanded Google to pay them for the privilege to link to them?
Fairburn 1y ago
Google, Bing etal.. are fast becoming irrelevant. At least as a search engine

205 points by jaredwiener 1y ago

JKCalhoun 1y ago

https://archive.ph/W9K4V https://archive.ph/W9K4V

iAMkenough 1y ago
[dead]

mitchbob 1y ago

Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44235951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44235951

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

syndraiofficial 1y ago

[dead]

Tarsul 1y ago

Anyone surprised? I mean that's just what Google does and did from the very early days. I am more ashamed that politicians worldwide have done basically nothing to help media companies in the last 25 years. We can always ask ourselves: What is more important for our society: independent media or our search overlords?

triceratops 1y ago
> politicians worldwide have done basically nothing to help media companies Is that really surprising? Good journalists consider it their job to hold politicians accountable.
- Tarsul 1y ago
  but that cuts both ways. They hold not only your own party accountable but also the other parties. Thus, if you are a politican that has a moral compass and believe you are the one who does the best job, then you would like a well-respected media organisation because you would think that it hits the other guys more often than yourself. But yes.. this only works so long as the amount of politicans with a moral compass are a majority... the moment this changes is the moment that the media is the enemy.
rightbyte 1y ago
Google is doing some sort of LLM copyright laundering. The earlier version was bad for the sites but with the new one most likely decreases click throughs even more.
rmah 1y ago
Why should they help media companies?
- teeray 1y ago
  Because an informed public helps the proper functioning of a democracy (I know, I know, it’s a hilarious thing to say in the US)
- aaronbaugher 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - input_sh 1y ago
    Do you usually get your news from The Christian Post or is this a one off thing?
- junto 1y ago
  I think that’s a good question. If they did their jobs properly, acting as the 4th estate, then I’d be much more supportive. However the last action I can remember that fulfilled checks and counterbalances was the publication of the Snowden files. After that the press died and it’s never recovered. Journalists are too scared and media companies neutered, and no longer have what it takes to call out the executive.
  - Spivak 1y ago
    I mean Fox News seemed to be pretty darn good at calling out Biden and made it their personal mission to hate everything Obama touched. Why aren't people comfortable calling out Trump? Because he's made it clear he will and has retaliated against anyone who does. We've implicitly relied on the "courtesy" of the executive to just sit there and take it for the good of the country and public discussion. But now that time seems to have passed. No more high road and turning the other cheek.
    - fumar 1y ago
holoduke 1y ago
What? Media companies sold their souls to big capital and Journalists write to serve engagement.
ekianjo 1y ago
Media companies are heavily subsidized everywhere in the world and that's precisely because of politicians.
bamboozled 1y ago
Politicians hate Media companies, sometimes they deserve the hate but there is almost no reality where having accurate, objective news reporting is beneficial for politicians.
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  > there is almost no reality where having accurate, objective news reporting is beneficial for politicians. Well it's a good thing for politicians they haven't had to deal with that for a long, long time.
asadotzler 1y ago
Google used to send traffic to my site. Now it scrapes my site and serves summaries of my site on its site, sending me zero human traffic but a whole lot of expensive bot traffic.

jaredwiener 1y ago

Honest question as I try to wrap my millennial brain around this -- for those of you who search for news -- with or without an AI -- what are you searching for? So much of news is finding out the unknown, it seems unsearchable by nature? Or are you asking for updates to a specific, ongoing story?

1bpp 1y ago
Updates on a specific topic, region, company, or ongoing story.
Celeo 1y ago
Generally, if I'm manually searching for news, it's either to get more information about something I heard from someone (searching by the event), or to see if news has been published about something nearby (searching by region).
bigthymer 1y ago
Sometimes I look for a specific old article. Search is completely useless for this since it usually ignores what I'm searching for to show me more about whatever is recent.
dreghgh 1y ago
I would assume a lot of what is losing views on news sites are the articles designed to capture "what time is the super bowl" type searches. The article features the question in the title or standfirst, the answer comes after 3 paragraphs of low value information about the super bowl.
Baader-Meinhof 1y ago
I ask two types of questions: 1. Factual updates to an ongoing or recent story. 2. Analysis, e.g. "What were the economic effects of Brexit." Without AI, I would try to read multiple opinions from different sides. But its hard for me to always know which experts to trust? AI will present both sides, but even when AI is not hallucinating, there is still the issue of "are the experts that the AI is sourcing reliable?"

OutOfHere 1y ago

I think that requiring PoW (proof-of-work) could take over for simple requests, rejecting requests until a sufficient nonce is included in the request. Unfortunately, this collective PoW could burden power grids even more, wasting energy+money+computation for transmission. Such is life. It would be a lot better to just upgrade the servers, but that's never going to be sufficient.

daedrdev 1y ago
what?
GuB-42 1y ago
Worse than that. Such computations are nothing to a desktop computer, or a server in a datacenter. But they are definitely going to be a problem for cheap smartphones. Ironically, the computers that are the best suited for solving these proof-of-work problem are the same kind of computers that are used to train and run AIs. And for even more irony, chatbots are relatively lightweight on the client side, being just text, while news sites tend to be bloated even without considering PoW. So there is a good chance for PoW not to affect AI scrapers much (they have powerful computers to solve the challenges) while driving away smartphone users towards chatbots and other AI-based summaries.
- OutOfHere 1y ago
  If the PoW difficulty is IP or subnet specific, then the IP addresses or subnets that hammer the server more can be given increasingly greater PoW requirements. The smartphones, assuming they're not being used as proxies, will have few requests, so the server can go very easy on them with the PoW difficulty.

crest 1y ago

How ironic that the WSJ decided to make the text unreadable themselves just in case anyone cared to read it.

spankalee 1y ago

Google's damned if they do and damned if the don't here: - If they don't make search AI centric, they're going to get lapped by AI-first competitors like Perplexity, OpenAI, etc. We saw many people here predict Google's pending demise from this. - If they do make search centric, they're unfairly consuming they world's content and hoarding the user traffic to themselves. Since no reasonable company is just going to stand by and willing let itself be obsoleted, Google's obviously going to go for option 2. But had they for some reason stood down, then they would have been supplanted by an AI competitor and the headline would read "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Perplexity" - just a few years later.

vgeek 1y ago
We are getting to watch The Innovator's Dilemma play out, yet again. The downward trajectory of Google's utility has only been worsening over the past 10 years-- but only in the last 3-4 have mainstream audiences started to notice.
- bitpush 1y ago
  The first part of that statement is valid but the second one isn't. If anything, most of big tech has shown exceptional humility against new threats Instagram incorporating stories (Snapchat) YouTube incorporating Shorts (tiktok) Google search incorporating AI Mode (perplexity et al) This is in stark contrast to Kodak and the likes who scoffed at digital camera and phone cameras as distraction. They were sure that their ways were superior, ultimately leading to their demise.
  - vgeek 1y ago
    Maybe you misunderstood the scope that Google is a search advertising company first and foremost? Alphabet ignores (yes, they essentially invented transformers, etc.., but actual productive efforts likely correlate to predicted TAM or protecting status quo, answering to shareholders while waiting to acquire threats) a market that will eventually usurp their cash cow of first party search ads, because the new market isn't initially as lucrative due to market size. There is also the consideration of cannibalizing their high margin search ads market with an error prone and resource intensive tech that cannot immediately be monetized in a second price auction (both from inventory and bidder participant perspectives). A $10 billion market for Google would be under 3% of revenue, but if the market grows 10x, it is much more attractive, but now the incumbent may be trailing the nascent companies who refined their offerings (without risk of cannibalizing their own offerings) while said market was growing. We are currently at the stage where Google is incorporating Gemini responses and alienating publishers (by not sending monetizable clicks while using their content) while still focusing on monetization via their traditional ad products elsewhere on the SERPs (text search ads, shopping ads). Keep in mind, they also control 3rd party display ads via DoubleClick and Adsense-- but inventory on 3rd party sites will drop and Google will lose their 30%+ cut if users don't leave the SERPs. Dozens of major news publications have covered the decline of Google's organic search quality decline and emphasis on monetization (ignoring incorrect infoboxes and AI generated answers). See articles such as https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/google-search-size-usefulness-decline/675409/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/googl... and a collection even posted here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348460 . This has played into reasons why people have shifted away from Google. Their results are focused solely on maximizing Google's earnings per mille, as leaked (https://www.wsj.com/tech/u-s-urges-breakup-of-google-ad-businesses-65b07c7b https://www.wsj.com/tech/u-s-urges-breakup-of-google-ad-busi...) where the ads team has guanxi over search quality. Once Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts left their roles, the focus on monetization over useful SERPs becomes much more evident.

oytis 1y ago

But... Google's AI summaries are wrong like at least 50% of the time.

blindstitch 1y ago
A lot of the time it's a just a near-verbatim rephrasing of the top result, too.
ThatMedicIsASpy 1y ago
You can help save the planet by asking AI less questions! Yeah I have 0 trust in the responses I am getting so instead of verifying random claims I'm taking my own turns
bombcar 1y ago
But 95% of the time it doesn’t matter.
physix 1y ago
I read them to get an idea of the quality that the AI produces, but mostly ignore the content after reading and click on to find actual sources, since I don't yet trust that content. I was thinking that the drop in traffic to news sites is due to AI summaries, which might have the effect of filtering out people who are happy with a snippet. And was postulating that it would have two effects: improving the relevance of those who go to the news site (good) and feeding people with poor quality AI generated information (bad). But then I tested out various news- ish search terms and never got an AI summary from Google. So I think the primary cause for a drop in traffic to news sites is probably not the AI summary itself.

homeonthemtn 1y ago

[flagged]

georgemcbay 1y ago
I agree with your assessment of how terrible online news sites are, but I'm sure the same problem is true for not just news sites but any sort of site where searchable content is shown for ad eyeballs, news sites are just the ones that you're going to hear about it first and most loudly from for pretty obvious reasons. Regardless of which side you take on any of this (anti/pro-SEO clickbait, anti/pro-AI), it is still ultimately a serious ouroboros problem for Google and other "AI" companies because their "AI" relies on these sites for ongoing training. Kill them all off and where does new content for their AIs to slurp come from?
dineol 1y ago
until the moment they'll built ads into AI responses
Infinity315 1y ago
We still need people on the ground reporting on these things. AI can't (yet) have connections and conversations with relevant parties. Many interviews would not be possible without a reporter developing a rapport with the interviewee beforehand.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  If they are actually needed they shouldn't have any issue finding funding.
  - Infinity315 1y ago
    How do you define what is needed? The vast majority of reporting does not affect one's own behaviour at all. For example, consider the Snowden leaks, I guarantee you the vast majority of people did not even attempt to modify their own behaviour at all in light of this new information--despite having read or heard about it. I'd argue that this reporting was still needed, despite it having very little material impact on one's life.

ValveFan6969 1y ago

[dead]

aucisson_masque 1y ago

Well I didn’t expect some good coming from the ai revolution and yet. If it helps to annihilate the « news » sites that depended over advertisement to be profitable, that’s great. Advertisement and journalism should never have been in the same sentence, no one can provide full independent news when you’re at the mercy of advertiser threatening to bail out if you say something bad on them.

jmsdnns 1y ago
Here is Ben Franklin addressing this issue back in 1731 by essentially saying, "that's true, but then how would news ever get printed?" https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-0061 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-00...
- aucisson_masque 1y ago
  Newspaper really took off during Industrial Revolution, I’m not sure that a 1731 text is pertinent. On that matter, people used to print newspaper for a variety of different reasons, some were to rally public to an opinion (political parties for instance), some were printed to exerce control over their reader (a factory owner making a newspaper for his employee) and there have always been people who wanted to report facts and get paid for that. Still today, there are many newspaper and online news that don’t have any advertisement, sponsoring and are in a really good financial situation. In France, I can think of mediapart (fully online), le canard enchaîné (online and paper). People pay for them because their paper is worth more than just lightening up a barbecue.
  - jmsdnns 1y ago
    No. Printing presses were used for news well before then. That's why Franklin wrote what he wrote in 1731.
- hy4000days 1y ago
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1y ago

mattl 1y ago

News sites have way too much invasive advertising on them, but AI is a scam. Pay for your news.

teeray 1y ago
But how? I usually have never heard of some publication and literally want to read one article and never visit the site again. I don’t want to whip out my credit card, fill out a form, have a subscription on the books that I have to cancel, just so I can read that one article. I want the web equivalent of an ezPass transponder.
- mattl 1y ago
  Apple News+ is one way. Another is what 404media does. You pay $10 a month for no ads and extra stuff. But yes, I know what you want and sadly there’s nobody doing it yet.
  - hobs 1y ago
    Oh its been done dozens of times, it just always fails.
    - mattl 1y ago
      Yeah, Ted Nelson even talked about it. It requires a level of cooperation that we may see eventually. What is an article worth to read?

BlazeNova 1y ago

[dead]

iambateman 1y ago

If the vast majority of Google revenue comes from search, and search is under siege, why is the stock so unfazed? It seems like the market thinks Google will be just fine.

tokioyoyo 1y ago
Ads in AI query results.
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
Windows and Office used to make up >90% of Microsoft's revenue, back when Microsoft was the biggest company in the world around DotCom. Windows especially has been a sinking ship for a decade and yet Microsoft is bigger than ever. Google is well positioned to monetize LLMs. Cloud, Gemini, and Waymo are all growing and could easily be Fortune 50 companies each within a few years. Gsuite continues to do well. Google Search revenue was still growing as of last quarter. It's possible for Search revenue to still grow while Google Search total market share of search (if including LLM "search") goes down drastically (LLM users search more, not less). It's also possible that total traditional Google Search volume could decline substantially without a huge impact to Search revenues. Remember, only about ~15% of searches are Monetized. Google will be focused on keeping THOSE searches going. It's possible Google could lose TONS of marketshare and still keep the frothiest part of the market... OpenAI could take off more than any expects and be the biggest company in the world, and it's possible that only takes a small dent out of Search. It's also possible Google could end up having a significant (if not dominant) part of the LLM search market.
- TulliusCicero 1y ago
  Waymo is a particularly good one. Yes, it's been harder and taken longer than expected to get cars self driving, but it's starting to show real results now, and the sheer difficulty could act as quite the moat -- right now in the Western world, nobody is even close to Waymo in operational L4 or higher self driving cars, and the incumbent automakers in particular seem to have mostly given up. And it's not just that Waymo will inevitably expand beyond robotaxis into personal cars as well, they could take their expertise in vision and robotics and apply it to adjacent domains. Maybe we'll actually start seeing the humanoid helper robots of the 50's a decade or two from now!

wnevets 1y ago

Google simultaneously making search worse as more people use AI chatbots isn't helping their cause.

dataviz1000 1y ago

Take it to the next level, integrate the chatbot into a browser extension side panel. Let people navigate to websites that contain the information. This will work. It will allow the chatbot to provide up to the minute data and information from the source. It will allow the user to maintain context -- like a popup dialog allows the user to maintain visual context. And, it will incentivize content creators to curate and provide information and data as people will be visiting their websites. If anyone thinks this might be a good idea also, I've already laid down the foundation approaching a browser extension side panel as a framework like Electron or Playwright and did the grunt work. [0] I put the VSCode IPC and other core libraries into this project. The IPC is important because a browser extension with this use case requires looking at a browser as a distributed system of javascript processes that communicate a a dozen different ways > Environments: Node.js main process, Node.js child process, Node.js worker thread, browser main thread (window), iframe, dedicated Web Worker, Shared Worker, Service Worker, AudioWorklet. > Communication: fetch/XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket, RTCDataChannel, EventSource, BroadcastChannel, SharedArrayBuffer + Atomics, localStorage storage events, MessageChannel/MessagePort, postMessage/onmessage, Worker.postMessage/worker.onmessage, parentPort.postMessage/parentPort.on('message'), ChildProcess.send/process.on('message'), stdin/stdout streams. and VSCode provides a protocol interface with only `onMessage` and `send` so I can define my own that are not provided creating a consistent API for communication. Regardless, I have it working but it needs to be completely rewritten. [0]https://github.com/adam-s/doomberg-terminal https://github.com/adam-s/doomberg-terminal

_thisdot 1y ago
This is already a thing with Gemini in Chrome[0]. The Browser Company’s new browser, Dia[1], is supposedly another similar product [0] = https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/?hl=en https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/?hl=en [1] = https://www.diabrowser.com/ https://www.diabrowser.com/
- dataviz1000 1y ago
  I wasn't aware of dia browser, thank you for sharing. I've been doing browser automation for a while and have become convinced the way to accomplish human in the middle is to fork Chromium and create a custom browser. However, there is one problem, there are 3.5B Chrome users. Getting someone to install a browser extension is hard enough, a whole new browser much, much more difficult. I went with experimenting with stock trading as a demo because people need huge incentive and value to make the critical jump to install an app. There is potential for niche curated business intelligence in trading or real estate, for example, where not only providing the chat bot but also time series data embeddings ect. I'm a little sad because I'm late to this party. Nevertheless, there needs to incentive also for people to continue to publish the data, ideas, and information so the chatbots are going to have help the content creators help them curate and provide the data by getting users to navigate to the webpages. I remember reading Google's Search Engine Optimization guide back in 2009 when I built a news publishing website for an industry newpaper. The tone was here is how to optimize your website for google crawlers to help us help you get traffic to your website. Google is nothing without people creating.

rubyfan 1y ago

Who would have thought we’d be looking for a better experience after Google let search turn to a steaming pile of shit filled with spam, popups and clickbait while violating our privacy with every vector possible?!?

paradox460 1y ago

I don't use Google anymore, and haven't in over a year (I use kagi instead) but for finding information that could be buried deep within slow, ad ridden websites, the AI and quick question features are indispensable. Things like "is game XYZ available on gamepass" or "which is state is comparable in area to germany" are good examples of this

bitpush 1y ago
Does Kagi have AI Mode?
- ac29 1y ago
  Kagi assistant is hybrid search / LLM
  - bitpush 1y ago
    What model are they using?
    - jgeurts 1y ago
      They offer most models from the large AI players (anthropic, openai, mistral, meta, grok, google, deepseek)
      - bitpush 1y ago
        Why would you use Kagi instead of any of these models directly?
        lostdesign 1y ago
        convenience through a UI?
        paradox460 1y ago
        You get all of them for the price of one kagi sub instead of a half dozen subs

awongh 1y ago

I was considering starting a business where the main traffic source would be SEO based, but based on all the gloom and doom around search I decided to hold off. Hard to say exactly how bad it’s getting right now. Lots of horror stories out there.

bcoates 1y ago
Honestly that might be a mistake, when the consensus is greedy get scared and when it's scared get greedy
mmanfrin 1y ago
I built a protein comparison site (aggregating nutrition, ingredients, electrolytes, prices) and I expected a little bit of traffic, but I'm getting less than a single visitor every 2 days from google. It's absolutely dead. A year ago I threw together a tiny little site with some datamined assets from a game (deadlock) that randomly got indexed and saw a couple hundred visits a month from google.

amarant 1y ago

Honestly, it's at least partially on the publishers in this case. I've started using AI to summarise articles for me because the endless SEO fluff has gotten to completely unbearable levels. If you publish an article with a sidetrack that's 8 pages long and completely irrelevant, don't get upset when I have some LLM summarize it to 3 bullet points instead. I'm not made of time, nor patience!

Hobadee 1y ago

This one trick will cut down on listicles and click-bait!

Agingcoder 1y ago

I don’t really care about google’s ai features - I’m fine with regular old fashioned search engines. I’ve stopped using google because it doesn’t work anymore - I used to be able to find what I want , and now I can’t. Everything is lost in a mess of ads and what seems to be a collection of random answers. I now instruct chatgpt to search the web for me and I read the result, since it works. I also read the news directly from various newspapers that I subscribe to to make sure they actually get money.

kwanbix 1y ago
I use ublock origin and it works just fine for me. AS much as I like to leave the google ecosystem, I tried bing and duckduckgo and they are not as good.
dieortin 1y ago
> I’m fine with regular old fashioned search engines > I now instruct chatgpt to search the web for me and I read the result I wouldn’t exactly classify ChatGPT as an old fashioned search engine

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MyPasswordSucks 1y ago

In the old days - back before smartphones, back before widescreen monitors, back before broadband - the "Links" section was always a key part of any site. After spending time on a site, a visitor could find links to other pages - some of them on the same topic, some of them simply enjoyed by the creator of the site they were on. If one were to visualize the concept, they might well say that this formed a "web" of sorts. The big publishers were the first to really reject the "Links" page. If it's not a link to our content, or the content of our sister publications, then why should we include it? Instead, they threw their resources into optimizing their placement on search engines. This took the "web" and turned it closer towards a hub-and-spoke system, as smaller sites withered and died. Now, people have found a way to retrieve various pieces of information they're looking for that doesn't involve a search engine. It may not be perfect (gluey pizza, anyone?) but objectively, it's certainly more efficient than a list of places that have used the same words that a person is searching for, and honestly probably at least "nearly-as" reliable as said list, because the average Joe Sixpack always has, and always will, be a lot better at asking a question and getting an answer than he will be at finding an answer to his question within the confines of a larger story. This devastates the large publishers' traffic. I'd come up with a conclusion here, but I'm too distracted wondering where I placed my violin. It's really small, it could probably be anywhere...

Eisenstein 1y ago
I think the conclusion is that changing your business model in a reactive way to internet developments is a bad idea if you want to have a stable business. If you want to run your business that way, you better be on top of everything and you better be lucky. They rode the social media wave and lost, and now they are going to try to ride the AI wave because they don't have anything to fall back on. They are going to lose. Legacy media grew fat off of TV and local news. Captive attention markets did not teach them how to entice people's attention, they took it for granted. They are not equipped to compete with youtube and tiktok and reddit and they will lose. Trending news from the AP wire is not unique or in depth enough for anyone to want to read more than the AI summary of your article. What should they do? What they are good at, and what they were always good at: journalism. Write in-depth articles that take time to research and talent to write. Hire real journalists, pay them to find stories that take time to write, and publish those stories. People will pay for it.

gkanai 1y ago

I do a lot of product searches in Japanese and there is a ton of SEO spam on domains (.br but also many others) that are basically irrelevant to Japan. Google should be blocking all of that SEO spam but they can't seem to walk away from the ad revenue. There's no good domestic Japanese search engine so it's a defacto monopoly of bad search.

ipsum2 1y ago
Is Yahoo Japan not good?

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725686 1y ago

"Searching" using AI is much faster and direct that traditional search. And with no ads.

DidYaWipe 1y ago

What chatbots? The article talks about Google's (shitty) "AI"-generated answer summaries, but that's not a chatbot, and as far as I can see the article doesn't say where all these "chatbots" are hosted. How are people finding them? Very disappointing for WSJ.

jgalt212 1y ago

1. This is self-limiting. If they drive the content producing sites out of business, what is Google AI search going to summarize? 2. These chatbots must also be killing ad revenue on SERP pages. It's safe to assume these summaries are also reducing clicks on ad links just as they are reducing clicks on content links.

bitpush 1y ago
If Google doesn't do it, perplexity would. Or ChatGPT or Arc (browser) It's one of those game theory situations. Best outcome is of everyone cooperates but if you think another party is going to defect (perplexity doing AI search) then the best move is to also defect (Google doing ai search)

sreekanth850 1y ago

A day will come when auth is an essential part of blogging sites.

deadbabe 1y ago

These days chatbots are good enough that when I do use a search engine, I really just want pure search results, I’m not interested in getting another AI opinion. I am sick and tired of getting AI overviews for a google search. What’s a better search engine? Heck, it doesn’t even have to be “better”, I’m looking for different results, not just perfect matches.

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago

Google destroyed Google's search. You can't surface any factual, non-slop content through them any more.

simonw 1y ago

This story has a few instances of suspicious numbers like these: > When Dotdash merged with Meredith in 2021, Google search accounted for around 60% of the company’s traffic, Vogel said. Today, it is about one-third. Overall traffic is growing, thanks to efforts including newsletters and the MyRecipes recipe locker. If traffic is up but percentage of that traffic from search is down, does that mean search traffic is down overall? Or does it mean that strategies to diversify their traffic sources are working as planned?

Aziell 1y ago

I use AI a lot myself and it definitely makes getting information faster but it feels like something’s missing, like the fun of digging for the truth yourself. These AI tools can just give you the answers, which saves time, but it also takes away a lot of depth and variety. Without realizing it, we might also be losing our ability to think independently. Do you think AI can really replace all the value traditional news brings?

thrwaway55 1y ago
Isn't this already the case but you can replace traditional news with personal investigation? What is another layer of indirection? I recall going to a townhall vote on some legislation a company I was employed with at the time wanted vs what the Teamster Union wanted and both sides doing body double line rigging to get their viewpoint in during "open comments" but I couldn't find a single news article about the obvious tactic by both sides. Do you think traditional news can really replace all the value personally verifiable data brings?

jmyeet 1y ago

Previously, if you searched for "mortgage calculator" in Google, you'd get one at the top, embedded in the page. It was fast, simple and did what you wanted. I guess because of "competition" it was removed at some point. Now all the top results are terrible. The sites are slow. They ask too many questsions. They're clearly trying to generate leads and sell ads. Whereas Google's just... worked. There are good calculators out there but they don't rank as highly. How exactly is this good for consumers? My point is that a lot of publishers are what I call "low value". They're rent-seekers. They have easily obtained information, often user-generated, and their role is to gatekeep that and make you click just one more page to get a result because hey that's another slew of ads they can show you. I'm sympathetic to the argument that LLMs steal. At the same time, we have to recognize that a lot of publishers are intentionally useless rent-seekers so it's hard for me to feel sorry for them.

wslh 1y ago

Google devastated search for small and medium sized companies, with AI or without it they have not improved the search engine to get accurate results with very concrete searches that are not prompts.

torqueehmada 1y ago

If nobody writes it, the LLM can't learn it. This is going to be a fascinating shift of resources. I suspect it will have the inverse effect of eroding traditional journalism outlets to retrofit for the new model, while boosting smaller competitors, but with everyone going to subscription based. The content creators could make a significant amount of money. Then again, this would be a great time for state-sponsored media, if we didn't have such an anti-intellectual assclown as president and the lacky congress/scotus.

timewizard 1y ago
I'm naturally conspiratorial; but, this is possibly why search results were intentionally degraded over the past 5 years. Which has had an impact on overall site traffic that has not gone unnoticed. Google's been trying their luck with "creator summits" over the past few years but the creators are starting to smell a rat. So you have Google which famously does not want people to actually leave their property. Infoboxes, calculator, extraction of semantic data for direct display in search results. Would a company like that intentionally downgrade search results making quality content harder for users to find, then train their LLMs on this highly valuable content, ultimately creating an unnatural shift away from the previous model to the "weak AI chatbot" model? I know HN hates conspiracies but there's trillions of dollars at stake here. We know companies will poison entire communities and create flammable rivers just to shave a few million off the expenses. Who knows what Google will do to keep it's market position?
- _factor 1y ago
  110% this. Real web search is disappearing locked behind large datasets unavailable for normal users. The AI screen ensures you’re fed exactly what they intended while siloing off the web more and more to block competition. All the while signing exclusivity deals which should realistically be illegal (try finding current Reddit results anywhere but Google). AI based interaction makes it much easier to manipulate users into buying your items as they add a layer of human-like trust on top of the machine. It won’t be long before prices are hidden behind LLMs generating prices based on who you are. I’m already noticing ChatGPT becoming more and more enthusiastic about any product it thinks I have the potential of buying. Try asking it if something is a good deal, 9 times out of 10 it will say, “Yes, go for it.” We don’t want to live in a proprietary world where LLMs exist. This technology needs to be open. The search data needs to be open and not walled off to only monopolies. This is an inflection point.

bananalychee 1y ago

I don't believe that Google's AI Overviews or even LLMs in general are to blame for the decline in traffic to news websites. ChatGPT launched with the GPT-3.5 model in November 2022 without a web search function, and had a training data cutoff date of September 2021. Google AI Overviews launched in May 2024 to generally poor reception initially, and ChatGPT Search launched in July 2024. The graph presented in the article reveals a trend starting as far back as April 2022, well before mass-market LLM products could extract useful information in real time, and it doesn't look like it's accelerated significantly. In fact, the WSJ series contradicts it. Prior data would likely reveal that the broad decline began much earlier, since it's well-known[1] that younger generations prefer to get their news from social media these days. Paywalls, quality degradation in search results, and mistrust in the objectivity of news coverage are likely contributing factors. I don't doubt that the shift from web searches to automated information extraction will pose new challenges to websites that rely on search engine optimization to drive new user traffic, especially for small/individual operators, and I'll be happy to witness the death of SEO if it comes to that, but blaming a new Google Search feature[2] for a long-running decline in traffic to online newspapers strikes me as a deflection from the slow death of their business model. P.S.: Google's AI Overviews are fairly respectful of content providers and link back to source material from the generated text. [1] https://theconversation.com/young-people-are-abandoning-news-websites-new-research-reveals-scale-of-challenge-to-media-207659 https://theconversation.com/young-people-are-abandoning-news... [2] The current title of the article is "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools"

felipeerias 1y ago

The emergence of AI tools and closed platforms will reduce the importance of advertising on the open Web, and eventually of the open Web itself. One possible way this plays out is that attention and investment move towards proprietary ecosystems, with large AI companies being able to secure exclusive access to closed information sources while everyone else is reduced to getting what they can from a dwindling open Web. Another possibility might be that new standards allow interoperability between AI agents and open content providers, including microtransactions between them, and creating a new marketplace for information. https://stratechery.com/2025/the-agentic-web-and-original-sin/ https://stratechery.com/2025/the-agentic-web-and-original-si...

potamic 1y ago
What will happen is that chatbots will start showing ads and publishers will bid over prompt keywords to have their content sponsored and boosted. I don't see the end result being very different from what it is today. Chatbots will eventually get enshittified to the level of google search today. It's inevitable, unless there's some dramatic shift in advertising economics.
isaacremuant 1y ago
Ads will come inside the LLM response and all around it. I'm quite positive. You don't know how much these businesses thrive in being the "drivers of customers to other businesses by showing their ads". It's going to be there.

lakomen 1y ago

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p1dda 1y ago

Great news to see the abominable corporate news media wither and hopefully die.

Mehuleo 1y ago

This is definitely bad. But on a different note, I think this was inevitable, as the new generation's attention span keeps dropping rapidly with all the TikTok and Instagram shorts. I believe publishers will need to figure out shorter written content formats as well. Until then, Google and others that offer alternatives will have an edge. I'm not saying this is the only way forward—just part of the evolution. I believe publishers will evolve to adapt to this too.

niemandhier 1y ago

All I want is to go to the site of my favorite newspapers and see stuff that matters. Instead I get things like this: “Modern fathers have failed” “Man need to ditch the dadbod” “Equality means only man should be drafted” They have tons of great and deeply investigated content, but they throw engagement bait into your face. In the end I use a search engine to extract a relevant subset of articles.

patatero 1y ago

This is Google's fault. They made Search worse so people have to resort to AI chatbots.

ryao 1y ago

This seems appropriate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZXwdRBxZ0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZXwdRBxZ0U It took a little longer than predicted, but “Googlezon” is finally happening, with or without Google and Amazon.

darqis 1y ago

Would you say that Google's search taking results from other sites and compiling them and presenting them as their own is piracy?

oliwarner 1y ago

Google's demise is self-inflicted. They broke search by prioritising ads, then trusting the wrong, big publishers (eg every listacle from a big media network), broke their advanced search controls (domain blacklists, quotes that mean quotes, plus-and-minuses to alter things). Then they added their own LLM's analysis to searches, admitting that that their SERPs are dead. They were in this death-spiral well before LLMs became an alternative. I won't pretend that SEO wasn't making traditional search untenable, but the vector Google chose will make their key product obsolete. The thing I worry about is what they'll do to retain revenue. They have knowledge systems that cater to a lot more than what we normally search on. They have address data, know where people physically are right now, have live communication data on billions of users, know their shopping habits, and a thousand etceteras. Meta too. They have communication data on billions of people. How are these older software companies going to monetise the data they've amassed in an age when they are getting close to being able to replicate personas, model actual human behaviours?

busterarm 1y ago
They've shown in their other products that they really don't even care anymore. Roughly 30% of the YouTube ads I get served recently are 10minutes long or more. At least once a day I feel like I'm reporting some 50+ minute long alternative medicine scam ad.
- dgimla20 1y ago
  I'm surprised Googles ad business stays afloat. It seems every video I watch on YouTube is preceded with a Grammarly advert, a service I have no use for and will not subscribe to/pay for in the future. I feel like Google should be the one company that has enough data and the widespread scope to really excel in advertising, yet on every site I see their ads, its as if they have no idea who I am and what I might want. Feels like a bubble to me..
  - busterarm 1y ago
    As someone who worked in advertising...advertising isn't really about connecting you with things that you want. It's about putting something in your head to make you want it.

incomingpain 1y ago

Practically every news site now needs archive.ph because of paywall. There's also a problem around trust in journalists being tremendously low.

scotty79 1y ago

Last decade or two was gradual exploration of how terrible and ad-infested you can get without people going away to somewhere else entirely. Now that a new elsewhere popped up everybody suddenly found out that instead of being knee deep in sewage, it already reached their mouth and nose.

phantom_wizard 1y ago

They did it to themselves. I'm sure we will read books about their failure and the replacement of Google search with chats and llms. The outcome is quite peculiar, because those chats are a blessing but should we really give them our data away. Scary what they will do with it. It was already scary enough with Google.

AaronAPU 1y ago

The other day I used Google to research something I didn’t know the answer to. It gave back a slightly reformatted piece of text which had been directly stolen from my own blog post. So not only did it steal my traffic, it elevated my random opinion to pseudo “official” truth.

TiredOfLife 1y ago

Same publishers that demanded Google to pay them for the privilege to link to them?

Fairburn 1y ago

Google, Bing etal.. are fast becoming irrelevant. At least as a search engine