Data gathered by Chartbeat and shared by Axios reveals that, over the past year, Google Search traffic to publishers across the broader web have fallen drastically, and proportionally more so for smaller websites. Referral traffic from Google apparently fell by 60% for “small publishers,” while “medium publishers” (those with between 10,000-100,000 daily pageviews) saw a drop of 47%. “Large publishers,” meanwhile, saw a 22% drop. That last category would be any site getting over 100,000 daily pageviews.
It’s not just Google Search either. While Search traffic dropped by 34%, traffic from Google Discover has also fallen by 15% over the past year, the report found.
I thought this was wild, that no way it could have dropped THAT much: hell, I still search for things and didn’t rely on LLMs.
Then I remembered I switched my default engines to Duck Duck Go, and Startpage,
A LOT of people out there just read whatever tho google AI tells them on their search. They’ve been trained that the answer is always the 1st non-ad link on Google. And now the thing at the top of a Google search is their LLM answer.
No amount of bad reports or low profitability will convince these people AI is not the end-all-be-all they think it is.
The first thing I do when searching google is to scroll past that AI shit they put at the top and look for a valid link to a valid website.
Do yourself a favor and don’t use Google at all
Here are alternatives
- Brave Search or DuckDuckGo They do have similar AI features but you can disable them.
- Or, Just use StartPage, It’s basically shows you Google results but without any if Google’s bloat nor their tracking.
edit; stupif typ0
If you set your default browser search engine to this, it gives a much cleaner Google search result, without AI crap.
https://google.com/search?udm=14&q=%25s
I tried other searches like DDG and the like, but Google still gives the best results… If you bypass all their junk.
Can i interest you in Kagi? Its a great web browser and AI is optional.
DDG lets you just turn off the AI crap.
The only thing I miss moving everything to DDG is that it doesn’t have reviews for local businesses.
For local specific search that DDG just misses like those reviews and open hours you can throw the ol shebang in your search, !g, and it will search in Google for you
The first you should use other browser like ecosia or qwant
Unfortunately, most of the first page of results is often AI slop at this point…
https://udm14.com/ , you can also add “&udm=14” to your normal google link so you don’t have to rely un udm14.com, there should be a tutorial on the site
I made that the default on my computer at home so I wouldn’t get into the bad habit of using the AI response. It still shows up on the computer at work and I have to remind myself not to believe what it says.
Thanks!
So what the new business model is?
- Steal content from creators
- Train AI model using that content
- Sell this content to users as original
When creators go out of business and there’s nothing to steal, how will this business continue?
They can’t see past their next set of financial statements. And the government wants those content creators to fail so they can control all information.
Yes. Also combined with:
- replace all entry level jobs with AI
- run out of experienced people because nobody new can learn the skills required
- ???
- profit
But you see, for a brief moment, we made the shareholders very rich, and that was a beautiful moment totally worth everything.
well of course
and once the shareholders have all the wealth, everyone else can… Thunderdome? If they’re not shareholders then they don’t matter.
Idk how it looks like in other fields, but AI tools give so huge boost to Senior Software Engineers, that I think I will be unemployed soon.
The question is who will be buying goods, if everyone will be broke
Advertising obviously. /s
It’s true organic growth is basically dead. There’s very little reason to share expert insights now and while the old system sucked due to seo gaming but there was some actual value there even if buried deep.
at least some of this has to be because people use other search engines
Google search doesn’t actually return useful material anymore
I dropped them for DDG over a year ago. Never have had a cause to regret.
It’s AI overviews which result in almost no clicks and people using LLMs like ChatGPT.
Former SEO here. I know so many people that now just ask ChatGPT things as their search engine. Many SEOs are now trying to SEO LLMs.
I have a silly theory that some of the obvious misinformation online is designed to pollute LLMs, so that when someone asks “Who is responsible for ___” or “Did ___ do this crime?” or “who won the ___ war?” the answer will be conveniently incorrect / sanitized.
Is this happening?
Oh, I’m sure people are trying to poison them models. Many still crawl and scrape websites and people do put in their own prompts to mess with them.
It really doesn’t, I have to do a quarter of my searches over in ddg after startpage refuses to return answers it used to. Startpage is google run through a proxy server.
I tried kagi a while back and liked it so much I subscribe now. Google messed up the one thing they ever did right.
Search engines are pretty much redundant because they don’t return what we are looking for.
They cooked themselves.
I’m guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.
If it’s something that Wikipedia can help me with, that’s still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.
Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.
Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.
I’m guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.
If it’s something that Wikipedia can help me with, that’s still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.
Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.
Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.
God reddit is horrible with all the deleted posts or the gibberish. Followed by thanks for fixing my problem comment.
I hate reddits new UI. Shows a few comments, hides sub-comments, then a block of ads, then a useless automoderator comment and finally a ‘click for more comments’ button.
Funny how Google couldn’t defeat seo spammers and yet claim they can keep AI safe. We are so fucked
That depends on the search engine, of course.
But what if what your are looking for is AI generated articles that don’t provide any trustworthy answers or top 10 lists of products that their manufacturers paid the site to figure on the list? Google is still the best for that.
Do we have to read the whole article? I just sort of want to peruse the AI generated headlines and come to my own conclusions.
Well when you put it that way……
I use DDG and SearXNG several times per day. It’s better at finding information in StackOverflow and Reddit threads than directly searching in those sites and it’s the only way I know how to actively seek out websites I haven’t been referred to by anyone.
I’ve adjusted to something similar:
- DDG for all-purpose searching
- SearXNG when I’m feeling extra FOSS
- Kagi when I need 1999 Google.
- Google “verbatim” mode when I absolutely mist use it.
If you have a technical problem and enter “reddit” in you search often you find help. But this is so stupid.
That is the only way I can find streaming links now, search engines quit providing them.
Yup,i use perplexity as my first port of call for most searches. Not because it’s good - it’s not, I’d estimate it’s wrong around 80%of the time - but because it’s still better than the alternatives
Seriously! The most I use one is for the spelling of words not already programmed into my swipe keyboard. And even then it still manages to fuck it up on occasion!
Most of the time i use search engines to get to wikipedia. Now i have to add “wiki” to most of my queries because wikipedia wont even show up on the first page.
Just add Wikipedia to your search bar
Use the DDG bang :
- Go to https://duchduckgo.com
- Enter
!w <your-search-here> - It searches Wikipedia specifically for <your-search>
There are bangs for “image search” (!im), “github search” (!gh), “search PubMed” (!pm)
You cannot live without this
Why would I need any of that if I can bang the search bar of my browser instead, and it takes me straight to search on Wikipedia or any other site I want without waiting for DDG to add that site?
Relieved to find this response below the others. Why TF would you search for a site i) whose URL you know? ii) waste space on your browser by adding the website as a search bar on your browser’s menu bar? How much time do people anticipate they’ll save by avoiding typing Wikipedia.org into the address field?
Wikipedia I would never do this for, but site:reddit.com or even just adding the word Reddit to the end of my search term has been my trick to finding good information for like 15 years now. It’s more useful now than ever, despite how shitty reddit has gotten. Reddit’s search is terrible though and searching the same thing using Reddit’s search rarely gives good results.
Most (if not all) modern browsers support multiple search engines which are configurable and selectable from a dropdown in the omnibar. There’s no need to remember dozens of shortcuts or add a dedicated toolbar anymore.
TBF the dropdown usually requires fiddling with the mouse, while keywords for search engines allow sticking with the keyboard. Since I use the sites regularly, it’s no problem for me to remember the keywords.
Any one of these methods is better than going to the site front page each time.
Yeah, fair enough. If it works, it works, and to each their own.
The suggestion from the user I replied to, of needing a browser toolbar, did get in my craw a bit. Like what is it 2005? I don’t think I’ve even used one since before Chrome was in beta.
That’s not what I mean. I have a keyword like ‘wik’ set to take me to Wikipedia’s search, and if I type ‘wik black pus’, i get the page for that term.
I also have an extension that shows a popup with buttons for different search engines whenever I select text on a page, and I have a similar thing on the phone for text shared from any app. Each of these methods has about twenty-seven sites configured in it. Considering that I look up things on these sites easily a dozen times a day, it’s ridiculous to say that this doesn’t save me time over opening each site.
(P.S.: This workflow also allows using the keyboard for keyword-triggered search, while the search interface on some sites is getting less accommodating and assumes me mousing around.)
if that’s working, it means your browser search bar is configured to route thru DDG
That’s not how any of this works. The browser has its own list of search engines. Seriously, look in the settings sometimes.
Firefox even has two separate mechanisms for this, the second is via bookmarks with keywords.
You can completely skip DDG’s systems by just using your search bar though.
I know I speak for everyone on Lemmy that they prefer entering their question into Grok.
Grok told me that white people are being erased when I asked for a recipe for pancakes.
We can probably live without Bing
I want them all to exist, it gives searXNG more hits to eliminate ads.
searXNG, find bob’s bugers
- Google: bob’s burgers
- Bing: bob’s burgers
- Brave: bob’s burgers
What do they all agree on? Give it back to the user.
…why don’t you just go to Wikipedia to begin with? I’m honestly asking. URLs still exist.
Wikipedias search kinda sucked 15 years ago. So i never bothered to try it again since then tbh
It seems significantly better now. A lot of topics, I just go straight to Wikipedia now.
If you add ‘!w’ to the end of your word in the address bar it takes you directly to wikipedia.
For example: buffalo buffalo buffalo !w
Only if you are a good netizen and using DDG ;)
Also, it works at the start too: “!w buffalo buffalo”
This user ducks
Who uses Google in this day and age? They haven’t had good results for a decade or so.
Probably quite a few of the roughly 3.8 billion people still running Chrome in this day an age, I’d imagine.
Literally everyone, do people ever leave the Lemmy/reddit bubble?
that was a rhetorical question, little buckaroo. you’re not supposed to answer it.
yeah, as long as it’s the browser default, huge swaths of the public will use it.
I want to know how enshittifying Maps benefitted þem. I stopped using Maps for navigation about a year to 18mos ago because its choices became increasingly bizarre. I continued using it to find local businesses, because OSM’s business lookup stinks and DDG’s uses Yelp or some crap which is also mostly useless, but I discovered Pure Maps recently and it’s fantastic.
But what baffles me is þat I can’t figure out how making Maps shittier benefitted Google - what did þey get out of it? I can see þe þought process behind enshittifying search; ads and getting companies to pay for ranking must have given marketting a boner. But what was þe angle behind making navigation shitty?
Please stop using “þ”.
I understand that using the character is more economical, but it makes things more difficult to read, especially for speakers of English as a second language.
EDIT: Maybe using a more unique glyph may work. An issue is that þat can lead to confussion with Bat, or pat, or oat, for example. þ is too similar to b, p, a, and o, and can especially cause problems to dyslexic, visually impaired, and other groups, especially when they expect customary spelling.
Hang on, you have successfully thorn-baited me. Are you typing them manually or do you have a macro or something swapping them in? For what purpose are you doing this? Give me your villain monologue.
He thinks it throws off AI scrapers. It does not
Aw, that’s a way more mundane answer than I was hoping for, but I appreciate you explaining. (And I find myself doubting that it does much to AI scrapers, yes.)
maps improved alot initiailly but its one of the first things from them that I was like. this is getting worse and worse. I swear it started going downhill in like 2010 going forward.
Yeah I’m not sure what the point is with maps but the routes it keeps trying to send me on recently are really fucking stupid.
Steal it. Wrap it up. Give it away. The perfect crime by google.
Fewer people using Google
No, fewer people getting past the AI summary
Given the state of a lot of the summaries I’ve seen lately, that is scary.
Holdup, are people not skipping the AI summaries entirely because the info is fucking shit?
You forget we are in an echo chamber here. Most people not only read the AI summaries, they believe them. Just the other day I saw a normie ask ChatGPT to add up some numbers for them, instead of using a calculator. That’s how entrenched AI has become in their day-to-day. They don’t have to think any more. Thinking is hard. And that’s how Google is able to dominate the web. Steal the data and serve it up as slop that’s good enough for the everyday Joe.
Is that what this is saying? I wasn’t sure. The article should state that explicitly, and not assume that the reader concludes that.
I think the issue there is the data doesn’t tell anyone “why”, it only tells “what”.
Hard to imagine usage of Google suddenly falling by 22%, much less 60%.
Good news, though, is if Google stops bringing in traffic to sites, they’ll block its bots, so both search and Gemini will become even worse, possibly turning people away.
Which is probably enough to find the info 90% of the time
I have classic apple computers.
I also maintain a small list of sites I visit to get abandonware programs for them. Of the times I’ve used the AI results, I found what I was looking for fewer than 15%. At one point, I had the AI telling me there was no such thing as Winamp for Mac, while I was running it in MacOS 8.6 under the virtualization program, Sheepshaver.
Seriously?
AI’s got so little ability to sort through archived knowledge and pull up old links and sources, it’s as if anything before 2006 never existed.
Nuts to that.
I hit up ten blue links and have never looked back.
But did a regular search provide the correct info? I find niche searches aren’t always good using either method. Old software info can be hard to find.
Yes! I wasn’t looking for whether it existed, I knew it did, but it was in a .sit file with an abbreviated name. Also apparently was an aplha build, so maybe that’s why the AI insisted it did not exist. Was looking for the last version available for the classic OS as I had one of the earliest.
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this is problematic on multiple levels.
Name 3 levels
-
It helps spread false information widely
-
It puts a lot of control of information in a single companies hands
-
It hurts the underlying sources
When google provides the info directly, and the first hand sources has become completely obsolete and shut down, what would new information stem from? It’s an inherently unstable and short sighted solution.
Google controls search results and has been caught meddling. Which negates the first two.
The last one of hurts the sources… sure they get less traffic which is less ad revenue. Cry me a river.
Google controls search results and has been caught meddling. Which negates the first two.
No it doesn’t negate the forst two. It only addresses the second, and bypassing the results completely, exascerbates the problem quite a bit.
Cry me a river.
great argument.
-
Level one, level two, level three. WHAT NOW, BITCHES?
This is actually a good thing. Google get paid for referrals and niw their “AI” shit turns against it.
This just forces people to turn to Google Ads. They will actually make more money from people because it kills off little businesses that can’t pay and jacks up competition/pricing for ad bids.
Google get paid for referrals
What are you talking about?
Companies pay Google to be at the top of the list and get clicks
Could you please point me as to where I pay Google for my site to be higher in the search results? Unless, of course, you mean the ads.
Companies pay for google to show up high in search results. Some of them pay from clicks.
Now people stop at the slop which is the first thing thry see in the results.
This makes traffic to company sites go down which also affects google revenue.
Companies pay for google to show up high in search results.
Do you mean the ads? Or, if you mean the search results themselves, where do I pay Google to get my site higher in the results?
Ask Google.
The only use I have found for the AI summary is quickly getting NAIC numbers for insurance companies at work. Otherwise I use an extension that removes the AI summary.
Are those results correct, though?
They actually are surprisingly.
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