Here's what happened in a nutshell: During the spring of this year Google rolled out an automatic AI search feature. So now, when you have a question, Google's AI looks at websites across the web and writes up a nice, specific answer to your question. Good for you, but disastrous for those who built blogs and websites on the assumption that Google searches would be sending a lot of people to our sites. Why go to the sites if the nice AI has already given you the answer? Many of us have seen precipitous drops in the numbers of visitors. I have noticed an especially large drop in the number of comments on my blog posts. And I have noticed that many of the other blogs listed on my blog site are no longer posting regularly.
This is not imaginary.
Here is a BBC article on what has happened: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250611-ai-mode-is-google-about-to-change-the-internet-forever
Here is TWiT TV talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDdLw1ubLaY&t=86s
Andreas Speiss (White gloves, Swiss accent, motorcycle hat) talks about the YouTube trends that are causing him to stop regular video production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTerwIniB24
Leo Sampson talks about the pressure to get high hit numbers on YouTube (scroll forward to the 3 minute 20 second mark): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4tSOQO3kxY
Fraser Cain of Universe Today talks about the Google ""AI apocalypse" (scroll ahead to the 18 minute mark): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/
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I'm afraid even DuckDuckGo offers AI (they apparently use Microsoft Bing to do their searches) but you have to click to generate an AI answer.
ReplyDeleteBest Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
I didn’t expect to become a Luddite at 35 but here we are.
ReplyDeleteAnd I mean Luddite in the sense of the organization of English textile workers in the 1800s.
The worst part is that those AIs that are stealing your content don't always summarize it correctly or completely. I turn them off wherever possible.
ReplyDeleteI recall reading an expose of Google about 10 years ago which described them as the worst disaster to hit mankind in the internet age. I thought it a bit harsh at the time but it was convincing enough never to use a Google search again. I use Duckduckgo now as apparently every search anyone makes, use of Google maps etc, and gmail is saved forever, packaged and sold so you can be targeted.
ReplyDeleteI deliberately don't save to the cloud, save phone numbers or other info, yet three weeks after purchasing a new tablet I turn it on one day to find somehow it has been automatically configured to mirror my previous setup on another tablet including browsing history, address details and lists favourite web sites I had viewed on another machine.
This is just another example.