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Comment by jjtheblunt | Hacker News Reader

in a very real sense, Gemini (etc) _are_ fixed search.

If everyone searches through Gemini, then there are no click conversions. Without click conversions there is no incentive for many websites to make new content. Without content there is nothing new to learn for Gemini. It's an Ouroboros problem.

So you mean only people who want to post something for the fun of posting it will post and we won't get as much corporate crap/SEO? Darn. Of course practically this means people who post will have a reason to post and that reason might be to influence Gemini, so double darn.

I said a majority. Say stack overflow, medium articles, online newspapers, they live off of click conversion. The internet is more than people just posting for fun. Of course everyone only posting for fun would be ideal.

But even if you only post for fun, if most people only find your content by seeing it re-hashed by a LLM that hallucinates some other stuff in the middle, I'd probably also lose the fun in posting for posting sake.

For me, I actually feel much more motivated to write good and accurate documentation knowing there will be at least one reader who is going to look at it very closely and will attempt to synthesize useful information from it.

Same with my old open-source projects, it's kinda cool knowing that all the old stuff that nobody would have ever looked at anymore is now part of a humanity-wide corpus of useful knowledge on how to do X with language Y.

Yeah, a lot of the web is at-risk if searchers just read LLM summaries and don't click through, but we will have Skynet before that becomes a real issue and then this will all be irrelevant.

Fortunately it was trained on reddit comments.

Oh no.

Stack overflow makes a profit off click conversions. It does not exist because of it. People would have built a version regardless of the profit margin involved.

Running the site costs money. So you either run ads or make users pay. Either way, usage of LLMs for searching would decrease the income for these sites.

Kagi is exactly a counterexample to your assertion.

You seem to be assuming that there will be no paid ads in Gemini output. It's hard for me to believe that is going to be true in five years.

Oh, there's definitely going to be ads in there. Probably not even marked or visible as such. I fear that it's going to be weaved into the text somewhere.

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