The Core

maybe related. maybe not.....

On deep searches I've noticed that quotes don't seem to be as powerful as they used to be. 

I’ve noticed the same about quotes as well. It’s becoming an ineffective search refinement.

In terms of traffic collapse… remember when people at Pubcon had sessions on how to get your site’s snippet in the “info box”?   Now being excerpted into one of the many, many expandable snippets seems to be a kiss of death. So many quick, factual questions are answered there. It’s not that big or official websites are winning in that case, it’s that only Google gets traffic for a question like “when was the Wizard of Oz movie released?” or “When did Sinatra die?”

Littleman raised the question recently of why bother to produce content if it’s just going to get used for training and AI that sends you no traffic? Same question with the modern Google - why spend money/time on good content when AI botshit often does better because it can now churn faster than Google can burn.

Lately it has me thinking that the age of the search engine is ending for the search user, but is already over for the niche content producer.

Simply put, if you want to own your content (I.e not have it owned by Meta or X or Alphabet or Bytedance or Reddit) and get eyes on it, you need a strategy that does not prioritize search.

It also makes me wonder if sites will simply start blocking all bots including the Google crawler. It reminds me of the Covid Airbnb crisis. They treated hosts so poorly, hosts started to opt out. It turns out that being overly guest-centric was going to result in them having no stock to offer to guests.

If google and AI chatbots offer less and less to content producers, why let them in?

The paradox of content in 2024 is that the only content that has real value that can’t be stolen is content that is very quirky and hard to summarize, but that is precisely the content that people generally can’t and don’t find via search.

Search is dead and we have killed it
  — Nietzsche

>I’ve noticed the same about quotes as well. It’s becoming an ineffective search refinement.

Debbie says purposely crippled search increases engagement time-on-site and provides more opportunity for marketing.  I can see that small, independent sites might not have the wherewithal to develop a good internal search but there is no such excuse for the big dogs.  If you want to see the ultimate in cripsearch, give FB Marketplace a try.  Amazon is not as bad, but its own serps have never been up to the standard that even secondary search engines have.

Trials moved to the UK:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-68730138

I noticed that the BBC has a list of AI robots banned in robots.txt

>> charge

Cory Doctorow’s most recent post is about switching to Kagi, which is $10/month, $14 for a couple, $20 for a family.

He says it reminds him of when he switched from Alta Vista, which had become utterly spam infested, to Google.

The thing is, Kagi is built using Google data (and Mojeek and Wikipedia and others). The noteworthy thing about this is that it shows that Google’s shitty results are not because of a data problem or an algorithm problem or (as a lot of people who don’t know much about it say) SEO. No, it is because of a CHOICE to offer a shitty product and use Payola to be the default search engine.

It has me thinking a lot about how much free has cost us a society. We accept that streaming costs money and cloud storage costs money and password managers cost money. But we let search and networking platforms be “free” and now it’s a cesspool.

On the other hand, everyone wants $10/month which means I’m going to choose one or two or three of those services, not 20. Which is why there are so many “free with ads” or “cheaper with ads” streaming services.

For what ever reason, I refuse to use ad-supported streaming, but readily use ad-supported search. I don’t understand myself sometimes.

>>Are ANY niche sites from independent publishers gaining ground

Anecdotally I know a number of small publishers (myself included) who's sites have been hammered pretty hard by Google. Some are cooking related, some are product reviews, some are wedding themed, and some other niches as well. As far as I know none of these are AI content and are all written by real people with first hand knowledge of the products they are reviewing and talking about.

Like I should have learned at least a half a dozen times in the past I need to stop getting sucked into the trap of relying on Google for my traffic. Most of the small publishers I see having success at my day job are primarily generating their traffic from social channels now. Facebook, Twitter, IG, Youtube, etc.

>This has echos of the turn of the century cloaking sh## that people like me were producing en-mass.

Have you seen how teachers are putting in "code words" into their instructions for assignments to see if kids are just using ChatGPT to make their essays? Seriously, white on white text

https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/1bitata/adding_a_trojan_horse_to_detect_ai/

And, for resumes, keyword stuffing in white text.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnethicalLifeProTips/comments/cvhjvy/ulpt_trouble_landing_an_interview_many_hr_systems/

Everything old is new again.