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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
NPR is funded by private donations too and doesn't do enough on-the-ground reporting. It would need significantly more funding to achieve this level of functionality.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
The source is not what’s convincing you, it’s the way the ai is presenting you the information. The source just confirms what you’re already thinking at that point (what the ai has just presented to you). You’re still trusting the ai.
That may be true of the average user, but you have no way of knowing it's true of the person you replied to. It's 100% possible to check the sources properly, and form your beliefs accordingly, if you want to.
Yes, the AI is trained on a vast quantity of data therefore it is less likely to be manipulated vs a single editor that may have ulterior motives. Therefore it's much harder to manipulate. A corporation which represents many shareholders' interest has its own reputation on the line, which would be seriously damaged if they were caught doing anything like you suggest.
But this can only be understood within the context of the white genocide currently happening in South Africa. Some are saying it's not real, but there have been documented attacks on farms and chants of "kill the boer".
I've been taking a look at my own news consumption patterns and how they've changed. One thing I noticed is previously, news was going to a paper / news site and seeing what's "new". Lately I more and more find myself first getting a glimpse of the topic from other sources (e.g. Tiktok) first, and then going to a new site to either get more details or confirm (since it's hard to tell now if a piece of content is reliable or not).
So basically news sites for me is now less about finding out new information, but rather as a secondary source to get more details or a more "professional" account of something.
I “search” (using this word liberally here) by using a newsreader and adding sources to it over time that I find to have a high signal (whether I agree with them or not). This way new things come to me without having to explicitly look for them, often before others have heard about it, usually from several different angles. If I have to explicitly go search for something the results are usually low signal chum :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/googl... and a collection even posted here on HN 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-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.
For anything important I always ask LLMs for links and follow them. I think this will probably just create a strong incentive to cover important things and move away from clickbait.
It's probably a win for everyone in the long run although it means news sites will have to change. That's going to be painful for them but it's not like they're angels either.
With the huge usage that LLM APIs are getting in all sorts of industries, they cannot be going away, and they're cheap.
If consumer AI chatbots get enshittified, you can just grab some open source bring-your-api-keys front-end, and chat away for peanuts without ads or anything anti-user.
I'm surprised the links work for you at all. 90+% of citations for non trivial information (i.e. not in a text book but definitely in the literature) I've gotten from LLMs have been very convincing hallucinations. The year and journal volume will match, the author will be someone who plausibly would have written on the topic, but the articles don't exist and never did. It's a tremendous waste of time and energy compared to old fashioned library search tools.
One thing I did once with great success was asking chatgpt something like "I'm trying to find information about X, but when I Google it I just get results about the app named after X. Can you suggest a better query?"
X was some tehnical thing I didn't know a lot about so it gave me some more words to narrow down the query that I would not have known about myself. And that really helped me find the information I needed.
Spare us the "woe is me" for they literally invented replacing the publishers. Yesterday its infoboxes, today its shitty AI summaries. Which is still the case, so good riddance.
Seems to my untrained eyes like Google's AI search is actually the best on the market, no? Seems like a lot of HN users have trained themselves not to type queries into the search prompt anymore and then complain about the quality of a product they don't use.
Against the biggest corporations? Sure, I'd much rather fulfill the role of overly critical teenager then defensive protective parent when it comes to rapacious companies who deserve none of our support.
Possibly their AI search - I don't know, I switched to Kagi to get a search engine that actually did what I asked instead of just trying to put as many ads in front of me as it could.
The paywall. I'm not against paying, but their free tier limitations are way too low.
The UI is just horrible and a huge waste of space. I had to use a user style to make it a non-headache to use.
Kagi routinely lacks results that every other search engine I use get no problem. I can't give any examples but I found myself going to page 5+ more often on Kagi than any other service.
If the paywall bothers you, then Kagi just isn't for you, the whole point of it is to have a business model where the users are customers, not the product.
I have no problem with the UI. It's snappy, clean, doesn't have a bunch of cruft, it's easy to find results, etc. It feels like Google of yore.
Same thing with the search results, I find them really excellent. In my experience, there's much less SEO spam. If you search for a programming language function, you get links to the proper documentation, not some trash "geeksforgeeks" site or whatever. I can't remember if I've ever had to go past page one.
Obviously YMMV on that, it's entirely possible it's different depending on what you're searching for. But I'm very happy paying for Kagi, and will continue to do so.
Every once in a while I bother not ignoring a Google AI overview, then I waste some time fact-checking it and find out it's wrong. Most recently about a python library (where it hallucinated a function that doesn't exist, complete with documentation and usage examples) and breaking news (where it authoritatively said [non-culture war, non-controversial, local] thing doesn't happen, above a dog-bites-man story from a conventional news source about how thing happened again)
Pretty much what I said, no? You don't use the product and when you do, do it through a filter[1] where you only remember the bugs. Do you use other AI search products and find that they don't show this behavior?
[1] I mean, come on: framing it as "bother not ignoring" is just a dead giveaway that you aren't doing a product evaluation in good faith!
I am doing the review in good faith though--by default, I scroll past to the first result, then if it seems unsuitable and I'm desperate enough I check the LLM thingy. If it were providing any value it would sometimes be both novel and correct.
Usually it's non-novel (correctly-harmelessly but unhelpfully, restating the web search results). When it's novel it's because it's wrong.
I would remember the situation where reading the LLM thingy added any value if it ever happened. The weird little UI thing they do where they only show the LLM result if you wait for it to render makes this very easy, I have to scroll up to even consider it.
People are now changing how they search and gather information to use AI. You're automatically discounting that person's experience because they avoid using AI for valid reasons. A lot of times Google AI is outright wrong, not even close to correct. It makes sense to not rely on it and only going back to see if it's improved.
I don't "ignore AI". I just haven't changed how I search and gather information because it's clearly not accurate yet. I still have to fact check it which negates the benefits(time saving). Occasionally I go back to see if it's improved and usually it hasn't. That's not bias.
My experience with Gemini in AI studio mirrors what the AI overview shows. An hallucinated libraries and their internal reasoning dialogue reinforcing the hallucination and saying "the user don't know how to search on pipy".
The model that's doing AI Summary for search results - that presumably needs to be fast and cheap because of the scale - is still sufficiently bad as to give people a bad taste. Presumably they're frantically working to scale their better models for this use case. If you could get Gemini Pro on every search result the experience would be effectively perfect (in the sense of better error rates than what a non-specialist educated human reading the top results and summarizing them would achieve). That's years away from a scaling/cost/speed perspective.
In the US (to start) there's now a flavor of Gemini 2.5 to power Search experiences like AI Mode and AI Overviews. Should be sufficiently good at this point.
One funny thing about Google summaries is “copy text” merges all of the links into a giant blob which gets interpreted as a single extremely long broken link. Not a great sign for attention to detail if they don’t even copy their own pasta (it’s been like this for months)
Having reluctantly used both, Bing's Copilot seems a lot more grounded on current search results below it versus Google's Gemini seems a lot more likely to conduct its own searches from a different query than what was asked, so also a lot more likely to hallucinate things or to provide answers that seem way different from the rest of the search page.
In terms of "best on the market" for AI search, I know that I am much more likely to trust the one that seems more like a direct summary of the stuff the search engine is traditionally responding with (and presumably has been well tuned in the last several decades) versus the one more likely to make stuff up or to leave the realm of what you are actually asking for some other search it thinks is better for you.
Though admittedly that's a very personal judgment call; some people want the assistant to search for "what they really mean" rather than "what they asked for". It's also a lot of gut vibes from how these AIs write about their research and some of that can be hallucinations and lies and "prompt optimization" as much or more than any sort of "best on the market" criteria.
It's funny most people are saying Google will win the AI wars, though that is precisely what will cannibalize their current business model, which had a much bigger moat than frontier LLMs, apparently.
You think we wont start seeing ads or paid for refs/links in those AI responses? Not defending Google here, when they turned that feature on I posted to some friends "another nail in the coffin for the web as we know it" or something to that effect.
Eventually open models will be able to do the same, so why would anyone use ad-ridden service? The first LLM provider who turns on ads on their responses will disappear in a brink.
It will take a long time until an average person has the resources to run models of similar quality (and speed) as Google and OpenAI can provide today.
They could simply restore the search quality they had in 2010. No one wants these "AI" summaries except for people looking to get promoted for "having an impact" inside Google.
What Google is doing right now is sabotage the search moat they do have. They are throwing it all away because of some "AI" rainmakers inside the company.
That's impossible unless the web reverted back to 2010, when walled gardens weren't prevalent, making your own blog was common, doable and often done by those without programming experience, forums were alive and well, and people wanted to share things on the web rather than group chats.
There are plenty of blogs, plenty of obvious low quality spam to block, plenty of features to enable allowlist and blocklists. To think for a second that the Google search experience couldn't be made significantly better at the snap of a finger by Google is to live in a fantasy world.
Sure, sure, except for this minor issue that the argument I was responding to didn't mention revenue, they talked about the state of the internet. So why again are you responding to my counter with a straw man?
they are losing more and more search to “AI.” my 12-year old never uses Google and couple of times I asked her to “Google it” she literally rolled on the floor laughing and called me a “boomer” :)
Is this really that bad for Google? Do Perplexity and OpenAI use paid SERP API under the hood? Google doesn't have to make money from ads on search, if its paid search.
I never really bought the idea of any AI company killing Google. They have too much momentum to really be seriously impacted, too many people who only use them exclusively and will continue to do so their whole lives on the name brand alone. They might risk a lack of "growth" but that only really matters to shareholders, not to end users.
Yahoo had 90%+ of the search market and they lost it in a few years to google because they were unable to innovate. I don't think anyone saw that coming. Everyone was building "portals" (remember those? AOL.com? I think verizon.com was one at some point with news and weather) to try and compete with Yahoo's dominance in search. It can happen again. LLM Chat is certainly an existential threat to the googs. Part of the OpenAI lore is that google originally viewed it as a threat to their search/advertising revenue model and defunded it on that basis.
The fact that people are willing to pay for LLM and use it over search seems to indicate that Google's free product isn't as good, and llm chat is better "Enough" that people are willing to pay for it.
The major flaw in your argument is that Yahoo is still around. They still have tons of traffic, some of the most in the world, just behind Reddit. They are not constantly growing, yes, but that is exactly my point. They have a satisfied userbase who will use them for life as does Google. Neither is going anywhere any time soon. Both make billions of dollars annually.
Yahoo's peak (inflation adjusted value was ~$325 billion and the last sale of their assets was $4.5 billion in 2017 which is about 1% of it's peak value. I can't imagine google investors wanting to risk 99% of their investment.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Almost all news has very little material impact on one's life which is why it is treated as entertainment when targeting consumers. The Snowden leaks was an entertaining story that would be easily monetizable.
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.
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.
I was thinking about this today. $40/month for home delivery of the NYT. Add in maybe $5/month for postage to pay my bills and other correspondence. That's still less than half what I pay per month for internet. It's tempting to just drop the home internet service and go back to the 1990s way of doing things.
1. Create an elite only product that’s way too expensive for the general public.
2. Subsidize the costs of the newsroom with some form of advertising. There’s several of different forms that can take.
That’s the trade off. You can make it but there really is a need for ad supported reporting.
For what it’s worth I’ve been in this business 15 years and can’t name a single incident of your influence scenario. I can’t speak to every outlet in the world but this is not a thing that happens.
Its mostly a business with very little profit, why all these wealthy men buy more and more newspapers ? Media is the third power after politician and justice, it’s a well known fact.
And they don’t need to intervene directly, the lead editor in these companies just know that there are some subject he shouldn’t speak about or speak in a specific way if he wants to keep his job, get bonus, etc.
Believing it doesn’t interfere with the editorial line is naive, they wouldn’t build empire of news media if they couldn’t benefit from it.
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.
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.
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.
This and many other applications of this sort will depend on AIs becoming ubiquitous, cheap and not metered. Metered access (like most current SAS AIs) will deter these sorts of heavy use cases. Running locally will be best, both for pricing and so you can have it build up context over time.
As an experiment, because p47's social media posts move the markets $60 in a day, and the last thing on Earth I want to be doing is reading them so the system makes an API request for any new ones, then checks for links, video, and images. It uses OpenAI whisper running with transformers.js on the local machine using webgpu for the inference to transcribe the video and audio and image to text for ocr. I tried to do the text generation locally but any decent model although will run caused my Macbook M3 to get so hot I could cook a steak on it while freezing the rendering for the whole computer.
image-to-text and video, audio-to-text works fine, there are lot of uses for text generation that work but to get high quality analysis to see if a social media post might cause the stock market to crash requires sending the data out to an api. If the side panel requires searching for links to navigate to it requires a third party api.
Working with it, I think the next hardware race will be getting these models to run on personal computers in next 2 - 5 years and I have a suspicion Microsoft is ahead of Apple.
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.
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?!?
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.
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!
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
They have a few interfaces that you can trigger an AI answer through
The first, and most useful to me, is when you just append a ? to your query. This pops up the answer in an info box at the top of a search, and then shows related results below
The second is the assistant mode, which pops up either when you use the continuing link at the bottom of an info box, or trigger it directly via the assistant URL. This is the standard conversational interface
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
I would love it if it were true, but sadly, the data doesn't support this. A lot of local newspapers did real journalism relevant to their communities. However, the local newspapers were the hardest hit by the social media wave and few remain today. Fast forward to now, you cannot get any real local news easily.
The avg person never really valued real journalism to begin with and the hyper targeting/polarization of social media and closed echo chambers has made it worse.
I don't think it is social media though. It started to go downhill for newspapers when they put their news on the internet for free subsidized by their papers.
People get sick of it. Most people don't like living in a constant state of anger, ready to get into an argument all the time. We would rather have a shared notion of truth and a common bond. You can't predict the next 'thing' but you can usually count on it not being more of the same. Something new is going to take hold, and I would like it to involve substance and critique of narratives.
> Most people don't like living in a constant state of anger, ready to get into an argument all the time
They may not like it, but that does not mean they are motivated to break away from it. I do not think they are aware why they feel like that - they are more likely to blame the other people than the platform.
There generally hasn't been a way to buy just the local news, so who knows. I emphasize "news", rather than "newspaper", here.
I gave up on the local papers because they contained more Reuters and New York Times wire stories than any actual local content. That was two decades back. I don't think they were willing to give up on the business model of being an aggregator.
This seems a common enough complaint that there is a Texas news company that simply called itself Local News Only, and there are a few other similar names: https://localnewsonly.com/
Potentially, yes. However, the same problem I have with current subscription models also exists with Substack. I added up all the subscriptions necessary to bypass paywalls I encountered every month, and it came to roughly $3,000 a year. I'll have to do the same thing with Substack subscriptions. I expect they'll be like $50 a year for the basic subscription, so it would probably only be a few hundred to a thousand per year.
> ... 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.
Don't know how useful these are, but here are some links pages on a couple of websites I put together a while ago:
Nah, Webrings were an extension of the link page ... but not the same thing.
The Link page was curated by the site operator and usually a linear list. IT's main goal was to say "Hey, this is cool, too".
A webring was more like a collective, whereas individual webring members did not necessarily know or agree with every other site in the ring. And it usually was not a list either, but more of a mini topical directory, often with a token-ring-style "Visit the next / random / prev site" navigation you could add to your own page. Webrings were already geared to increasing visitor numbers to your own page ("Others will link to me").
What was the organisation of a webbing like? Did you have to email two people to arrange to insert yourself as a node at the same time to avoid breaking the ring? Or iframe'd in from a central point?
Webrings were usually a centralized and automated entity. You'd add your site to the index (either through a webform or by emailing the maintainer), then link to http:// web-ring.tld /cgi-bin/ring?site=currentsitename&action=next or something similar, which would then redirect to the actual next site in the ring.
In their heyday, there'd also be "start your own webring" sites, so you didn't need cgi-bin access on your GeoShitties or AngelFucker or TriPoop or xoom [1] site in order to start up a webring.
[1] The dry and square history books will claim that the most exciting thing about xoom was its large storage allocation (10mb at launch! 25 soon after! You could upload an entire three minute mp3 at 128CBR "CD-Quality" bitrate and still have tons of space left over for two-frame .gifs!) or its simple members.xoom. com/username URL, but the true soldiers of those bygone battledays will know it was xoom's resiliency to childish renaming-mockery.
The ”not perfect” part really kind of ruins it for me. I can’t trust the LLM search’s answers and have to go find the source anyway, so what’s the point?
I’m seeing people in chats post stuff like “hey I didn’t know this word also means this!” when it really doesn’t, and invariably they have just asked an LLM and believed it.
You can't blindly trust sources, either. Or, sometimes, you ability to understand the sources correctly.
I think of LLMs as bookworm friends who know a little bit about everything and are a little too overconfident about the depth of their understanding. They tend to repeat what they have heard uncritically, just like so many other people do.
If you don't expect them to be the ultimate arbitrer of truth, they can be pretty useful.
Dictionary.com isn’t likely to just outright make up word meanings. There is such a thing as a trustworthy source, even if you can’t “blindly” trust it. You can still trust it and quote it and cite it. You can’t do any of those things so far with an LLM.
The publishers were just chasing traffic just like everyone else. Link pages were replaced by inline links which were preferred by both search engines and users. The goal was to provide relevant resources on relevant context rather in one big bucket dump no one's going to dig through anyway.
Early Google PageRank was notorious for how much additional trust a given page had based on many links back to it existed. It was why certain bloggers had massive ranks early on, because they would be in big webs of conversations with lots of high quality links out and back in.
Early SEO did weaponize that and broke it for everyone.
You're gloating about the hardship which editors, journalists, writers, our informational institutions are facing because... sites stopped having a Links page in 1998? What the fuck, man.
A recent article on HN was about small sites being destroyed in traffic, not large sites. And not just small, but small with essential human-written info.
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.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadWe can always ask ourselves: What is more important for our society: independent media or our search overlords?
Is that really surprising? Good journalists consider it their job to hold politicians accountable.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like all the new I ever see is calling out Trump. I don't think it's doing anything though.
Well it's a good thing for politicians they haven't had to deal with that for a long, long time.
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?
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?"
But this can only be understood within the context of the white genocide currently happening in South Africa. Some are saying it's not real, but there have been documented attacks on farms and chants of "kill the boer".
Gemini was caught stuffing prompts with "custom" keywords on certain requests, so there is still an editor between you and the AI.
So basically news sites for me is now less about finding out new information, but rather as a secondary source to get more details or a more "professional" account of something.
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.
- 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.
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.
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/googl... and a collection even posted here on HN 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-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.
It's probably a win for everyone in the long run although it means news sites will have to change. That's going to be painful for them but it's not like they're angels either.
But clickbait is how they make money...
That's like saying, "Oh, Apple will just have to move away from selling the iPhone and start selling hamburgers instead."
I mean, sure, but they're not going to like it, and it's going to come with a lot of lost revenue and profits.
I find myself regularly copying URLs, sending it to Gemini, and asking it to answer what I want to get out of the article.
I'm not wasting my time scrolling through a mile of website and 88,000 ads to find the answer to the headline.
If consumer AI chatbots get enshittified, you can just grab some open source bring-your-api-keys front-end, and chat away for peanuts without ads or anything anti-user.
I use https://github.com/sigoden/aichat , but there are GUIs too.
Plus, anyone enterprising can just write a web front-end and sell it as "the ad-free AI chatbot, only $10/mo, usage limits apply".
In my experience, the answers tend to be sourced from fringe little blogs that I would never trust in a Google search.
Google at least attempts to rank them by quality, while LLM web search seems to click on the closest match regardless of the (lack of) quality.
X was some tehnical thing I didn't know a lot about so it gave me some more words to narrow down the query that I would not have known about myself. And that really helped me find the information I needed.
It also threw in some book tips for good measure.
So yeah I can highly recommend this workflow.
The UI is just horrible and a huge waste of space. I had to use a user style to make it a non-headache to use.
Kagi routinely lacks results that every other search engine I use get no problem. I can't give any examples but I found myself going to page 5+ more often on Kagi than any other service.
I have no problem with the UI. It's snappy, clean, doesn't have a bunch of cruft, it's easy to find results, etc. It feels like Google of yore.
Same thing with the search results, I find them really excellent. In my experience, there's much less SEO spam. If you search for a programming language function, you get links to the proper documentation, not some trash "geeksforgeeks" site or whatever. I can't remember if I've ever had to go past page one.
Obviously YMMV on that, it's entirely possible it's different depending on what you're searching for. But I'm very happy paying for Kagi, and will continue to do so.
Pretty much what I said, no? You don't use the product and when you do, do it through a filter[1] where you only remember the bugs. Do you use other AI search products and find that they don't show this behavior?
[1] I mean, come on: framing it as "bother not ignoring" is just a dead giveaway that you aren't doing a product evaluation in good faith!
Usually it's non-novel (correctly-harmelessly but unhelpfully, restating the web search results). When it's novel it's because it's wrong.
I would remember the situation where reading the LLM thingy added any value if it ever happened. The weird little UI thing they do where they only show the LLM result if you wait for it to render makes this very easy, I have to scroll up to even consider it.
People are now changing how they search and gather information to use AI. You're automatically discounting that person's experience because they avoid using AI for valid reasons. A lot of times Google AI is outright wrong, not even close to correct. It makes sense to not rely on it and only going back to see if it's improved.
I don't "ignore AI". I just haven't changed how I search and gather information because it's clearly not accurate yet. I still have to fact check it which negates the benefits(time saving). Occasionally I go back to see if it's improved and usually it hasn't. That's not bias.
source: https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-ai-mode-up...
In terms of "best on the market" for AI search, I know that I am much more likely to trust the one that seems more like a direct summary of the stuff the search engine is traditionally responding with (and presumably has been well tuned in the last several decades) versus the one more likely to make stuff up or to leave the realm of what you are actually asking for some other search it thinks is better for you.
Though admittedly that's a very personal judgment call; some people want the assistant to search for "what they really mean" rather than "what they asked for". It's also a lot of gut vibes from how these AIs write about their research and some of that can be hallucinations and lies and "prompt optimization" as much or more than any sort of "best on the market" criteria.
So nope, open models won't be a threat in the future.
What Google is doing right now is sabotage the search moat they do have. They are throwing it all away because of some "AI" rainmakers inside the company.
But an ad company will never do that.
Google does need to adapt or die
Not true, I use them all the time. They have links available for when I want further information, which is not very often.
The fact that people are willing to pay for LLM and use it over search seems to indicate that Google's free product isn't as good, and llm chat is better "Enough" that people are willing to pay for it.
Yeah I have 0 trust in the responses I am getting so instead of verifying random claims I'm taking my own turns
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.
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?
I'd argue that this reporting was still needed, despite it having very little material impact on one's life.
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.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-00...
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.
It’s as much about paying for news than it is about supporting people doing a great job that is extremely valuable for democracy.
1. Create an elite only product that’s way too expensive for the general public.
2. Subsidize the costs of the newsroom with some form of advertising. There’s several of different forms that can take.
That’s the trade off. You can make it but there really is a need for ad supported reporting.
For what it’s worth I’ve been in this business 15 years and can’t name a single incident of your influence scenario. I can’t speak to every outlet in the world but this is not a thing that happens.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_proprietor
Its mostly a business with very little profit, why all these wealthy men buy more and more newspapers ? Media is the third power after politician and justice, it’s a well known fact.
And they don’t need to intervene directly, the lead editor in these companies just know that there are some subject he shouldn’t speak about or speak in a specific way if he wants to keep his job, get bonus, etc.
Believing it doesn’t interfere with the editorial line is naive, they wouldn’t build empire of news media if they couldn’t benefit from it.
Pay for your news.
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.
What is an article worth to read?
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
image-to-text and video, audio-to-text works fine, there are lot of uses for text generation that work but to get high quality analysis to see if a social media post might cause the stock market to crash requires sending the data out to an api. If the side panel requires searching for links to navigate to it requires a third party api.
Working with it, I think the next hardware race will be getting these models to run on personal computers in next 2 - 5 years and I have a suspicion Microsoft is ahead of Apple.
The Browser Company’s new browser, Dia[1], is supposedly another similar product
[0] = https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/?hl=en
[1] = https://www.diabrowser.com/
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.
It seems like the market thinks Google will be just fine.
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.
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!
The first, and most useful to me, is when you just append a ? to your query. This pops up the answer in an info box at the top of a search, and then shows related results below
The second is the assistant mode, which pops up either when you use the continuing link at the bottom of an info box, or trigger it directly via the assistant URL. This is the standard conversational interface
Hard to say exactly how bad it’s getting right now. Lots of horror stories out there.
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.
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!
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.
> 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
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...
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.
I would love it if it were true, but sadly, the data doesn't support this. A lot of local newspapers did real journalism relevant to their communities. However, the local newspapers were the hardest hit by the social media wave and few remain today. Fast forward to now, you cannot get any real local news easily.
The avg person never really valued real journalism to begin with and the hyper targeting/polarization of social media and closed echo chambers has made it worse.
To bolster this argument, the local papers that hard paywalled seem to have done just fine.
They may not like it, but that does not mean they are motivated to break away from it. I do not think they are aware why they feel like that - they are more likely to blame the other people than the platform.
There is also an addictive element to it.
I gave up on the local papers because they contained more Reuters and New York Times wire stories than any actual local content. That was two decades back. I don't think they were willing to give up on the business model of being an aggregator.
This seems a common enough complaint that there is a Texas news company that simply called itself Local News Only, and there are a few other similar names: https://localnewsonly.com/
I'm willing to pay, but not by individual subscriptions per news organization. I'm more interested in following journalists than news organizations.
Don't know how useful these are, but here are some links pages on a couple of websites I put together a while ago:
https://b79.net/fields/about
https://earthdirections.org/links/
Just personal non-commercial handcrafted sites. One day I'd like to figure out some tooling to manage / prune / update links, etc.
The Link page was curated by the site operator and usually a linear list. IT's main goal was to say "Hey, this is cool, too".
A webring was more like a collective, whereas individual webring members did not necessarily know or agree with every other site in the ring. And it usually was not a list either, but more of a mini topical directory, often with a token-ring-style "Visit the next / random / prev site" navigation you could add to your own page. Webrings were already geared to increasing visitor numbers to your own page ("Others will link to me").
Oh, those were easier times.
In their heyday, there'd also be "start your own webring" sites, so you didn't need cgi-bin access on your GeoShitties or AngelFucker or TriPoop or xoom [1] site in order to start up a webring.
[1] The dry and square history books will claim that the most exciting thing about xoom was its large storage allocation (10mb at launch! 25 soon after! You could upload an entire three minute mp3 at 128CBR "CD-Quality" bitrate and still have tons of space left over for two-frame .gifs!) or its simple members.xoom. com/username URL, but the true soldiers of those bygone battledays will know it was xoom's resiliency to childish renaming-mockery.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Webring
I’m seeing people in chats post stuff like “hey I didn’t know this word also means this!” when it really doesn’t, and invariably they have just asked an LLM and believed it.
I think of LLMs as bookworm friends who know a little bit about everything and are a little too overconfident about the depth of their understanding. They tend to repeat what they have heard uncritically, just like so many other people do.
If you don't expect them to be the ultimate arbitrer of truth, they can be pretty useful.
Early SEO did weaponize that and broke it for everyone.