Data gathered by Chartbeat and shared by Axios reveals that, over the past year, Google Search traffic to publishers across the broader web have fallen drastically, and proportionally more so for smaller websites. Referral traffic from Google apparently fell by 60% for “small publishers,” while “medium publishers” (those with between 10,000-100,000 daily pageviews) saw a drop of 47%. “Large publishers,” meanwhile, saw a 22% drop. That last category would be any site getting over 100,000 daily pageviews.
It’s not just Google Search either. While Search traffic dropped by 34%, traffic from Google Discover has also fallen by 15% over the past year, the report found.
Search engines are pretty much redundant because they don’t return what we are looking for.
They cooked themselves.
I’m guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.
If it’s something that Wikipedia can help me with, that’s still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.
Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.
Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.
That depends on the search engine, of course.
Funny how Google couldn’t defeat seo spammers and yet claim they can keep AI safe. We are so fucked
But what if what your are looking for is AI generated articles that don’t provide any trustworthy answers or top 10 lists of products that their manufacturers paid the site to figure on the list? Google is still the best for that.
Well when you put it that way……
If you have a technical problem and enter “reddit” in you search often you find help. But this is so stupid.
I use DDG and SearXNG several times per day. It’s better at finding information in StackOverflow and Reddit threads than directly searching in those sites and it’s the only way I know how to actively seek out websites I haven’t been referred to by anyone.
Yup,i use perplexity as my first port of call for most searches. Not because it’s good - it’s not, I’d estimate it’s wrong around 80%of the time - but because it’s still better than the alternatives
Seriously! The most I use one is for the spelling of words not already programmed into my swipe keyboard. And even then it still manages to fuck it up on occasion!