[HN Gopher] Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating ...
___________________________________________________________________
Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for
some publishers
Author : jaredwiener
Score : 62 points
Date : 2025-06-10 21:03 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| https://archive.ph/W9K4V
| mitchbob wrote:
| Previously discussed:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44235951
| Tarsul wrote:
| 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?
| triceratops wrote:
| > politicians worldwide have done basically nothing to help
| media companies
|
| Is that really surprising? Good journalists consider it their
| job to hold politicians accountable.
| Tarsul wrote:
| 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.
| rightbyte wrote:
| 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.
| rmah wrote:
| Why should they help media companies?
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| And doesn't funneling money to over 700 media organizations
| through USAID count as helping?
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/4-things-to-know-
| abo...
| junto wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| fumar wrote:
| Manufacturing consent from the media owners owners.
| skywhopper wrote:
| They have to get the content they repurpose without
| permission from somewhere.
| tehjoker wrote:
| There should be a national media company. Instead we have
| national media companies with no democratic oversight and
| labor abuse.
| holoduke wrote:
| What? Media companies sold their souls to big capital and
| Journalists write to serve engagement.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Media companies are heavily subsidized everywhere in the world
| and that's precisely because of politicians.
| bamboozled wrote:
| 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.
| jaredwiener wrote:
| 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?
| 1bpp wrote:
| Updates on a specific topic, region, company, or ongoing story.
| Celeo wrote:
| 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).
| bigthymer wrote:
| 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.
| dreghgh wrote:
| 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.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| daedrdev wrote:
| what?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| 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.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| crest wrote:
| How ironic that the WSJ decided to make the text unreadable
| themselves just in case anyone cared to read it.
| spankalee wrote:
| 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.
| vgeek wrote:
| 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.
| tehjoker wrote:
| A simple tale of how capitalism leads to unintended anti-social
| consequences through market mechanisms that no one participant
| can control.
| msgodel wrote:
| 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.
| stefan_ wrote:
| 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.
| oytis wrote:
| But... Google's AI summaries are wrong like at least 50% of the
| time.
| blindstitch wrote:
| A lot of the time it's a just a near-verbatim rephrasing of the
| top result, too.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| You can help save the planet by asking AI less questions!
|
| Yeah I have 0 trust in the responses I am getting so instead of
| verifying random claims I'm taking my own turns
| bombcar wrote:
| But 95% of the time it doesn't matter.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| 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.
| jmsdnns wrote:
| Here is Ben Franklin addressing this issue back in 1731 by
| essentially saying, "that's true, but then how would news ever
| get printed?"
|
| https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-00...
| mvdtnz wrote:
| How much do you pay for your news?
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| 8EUR/months.
|
| It's as much about paying for news than it is about
| supporting people doing a great job that is extremely
| valuable for democracy.
| mattl wrote:
| News sites have way too much invasive advertising on them, but AI
| is a scam.
|
| Pay for your news.
| wnevets wrote:
| Google simultaneously making search worse as more people use AI
| chatbots isn't helping their cause.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-06-10 23:00 UTC)