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Comment by drubio | Hacker News Reader

"Search will keep evolving to answer any question in any format"

I can't help but think who/what is going to pay/feed the training data for all this innovation.

As a content creator, this feels like the bottom in the race to the bottom. Google was already keeping users on their site as long as possible (e.g. snippets), this will only worsen the bounce ratio from content creators like local news sites & niche blogs (worse ad performance, less sign-ups) who fuel traffic. It also feels like an extinction event for sites like StackOverlflow and Quora, gamification to get users to write 'free' content will die-off if Google keeps front-running sites like this.

I feel Google will eventually need to go into the content creation/syndication business to keep all this going (and pay up vs. Google News), because the incentives for everyone else are just not there, if they want to keep everyone on Google.

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Webrings, we need webrings back.

Search is fine for people searching for something, but when just "surfing" or browsing for interesting stuff, we end up on this site, or some other centralised site that will constantly try and pull value from the creator back to the owned site (like Reddit, Facebook etc).

A creator owned way to surf and discover (like the old webrings) would be great.

Hacker News itself is kind of a webring, isn't it? The variety of stuff that gets shared here makes it the perfect discovery for tech oriented people.

Kinda, but it's not creator owned, which I think is the key thing here.

Is there still webrings like there used to be?

There are not many webfingers left to put webrings on any more, I'm afraid.

I used to love stumbleupon, which kind of is a webring? (I had to look up the definition). I think the business model is just not as profitable in these days of engagement metrics

Google needs to keep up, the people have spoken and this is exactly the main selling point for ChatGPT. Most users love how they don't ever have to leave the screen compared to Google that just sends you to a bunch of sites of unknown trustworthiness

> that just sends you to a bunch of sites of unknown trustworthiness

Couldn't agree more. These days i rarely search outside of a few sites because it's a chore to determine if a blog/site is meaningfully real, or if it's just SEO spam copied from something else. If i'm searching for a product i rarely leave `site:reddit.com` for this exact reason.

It would definitely be nice to "go to sites" again but these days i just don't.

Ironically, If AI mitigates me having to filter out SEO spam myself i could actually see myself going to more random sites than i do currently. Ie if, like in Phind, a search result was deemed by "the AI" to be useful, and assuming i trust "the AI", i'm more likely to go to it rather than talk to the bot about it.

I'm not saying that AI can or should solve this problem. I'm just saying the web as it stands now is garbage to me personally and filtering out the garbage represents a significant hurdle i deal with at the moment. Anything that solves that is of interest to me.

Right, the people have spoken, but not with their money, just yet.

Last I looked ChatGPT is a loss leader, so users might love it, but the judge is still out if people are willing to pay what it actually costs to produce the experience. It seems Google is betting on an ad-supported ChatGPT experience, which seems like the natural step to keep up.

But then there's the data side to all of this. Case in point, this Google search, https://www.google.com/search?q=chatgpt+losses, awesome I got a snippet and didn't have to sift through a bunch of sites to get the $540 million figure. Great, but who fed this data to Google ? Many sites of course, and what's their incentive ? To make money through ad clicks & sign-ups or some other form, so what's their incentive going to be now if Google keeps users to themselves like ChatGPT ?

There's going to be little to no incentive for news orgs, consultants, developers, cooks, trainers, you name it, to publish the most recent story/analysis/algorithm/recipes. If the data is going be commoditized by Google/ChatGPT or whoever, they will need to feed/pay for the most recent data themselves.

Well if you think through what world this will create - it will create one where all information is available up to around 2023, then once creators and writers have gone bankrupt or just noindexed everything, less and less new data will be available to feed the LLM.

Because there's no way to get any value (money) out of creating quality content, this will either cease to exist, or it will move behind paywalls. For example, I just don't see reddit being indexable by google for long, or quora. They won't get anything out of that deal.

Funnily enough it might be too late already, since all of Reddit's content has probably been eaten by google's LLM. So again - it will only be fresh content that will be excluded from google.

But yeah, 100% agree, this is a new race to the bottom.

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