Thanks, I've been trying to build a digital garden (or a cemetery) for some time, but with interconnected sites/articles/toys on different domains rather than a single Obsidian Publish style site.
Tangent: I recently found a beautiful and extremely well structured digital garden made by Maggie Appleton (https://maggieappleton.com). So, now I'm just jumping between either being inspired by the amount of research she's shared or analysis paralysis since there are so many interesting approaches to the subject matter.
LLMs, I have an `editorial-team.ts` file containing their personas which I feed into the system alongside WSJ news headlines from an RSS feed.
Obviously with this kind of work, the good stuff requires luck (== quantity) or a manual curation process. I just wanted to run this on autopilot.
I might add a feedback loop at some point, e.g. poets with better engagement become more motivated and those who perform poorly start getting jealous... a little bit of drama here and there.
It sounds like you're against this. I'm not sure why.
SEO is a scam to convince search engines to show something other than most useful content. Content farms are a drain on human attention. Human intelligence had it's chance and we squandered it. Bring on the AIs, they're not going to be worse than the mess we've already made.
Sure, but you would as a generality have gotten BETTER information from the real sources from whom the SEO-oriented farms took the info and optimized for the search engines. They're repurposing someone else's original content.
No, the way it works is having people write the content. Now are there crappy ones that just copy content, write bad stuff, etc.? Sure. But there are also those with helpful content. Here’s a content farm I only recently found that has a lot of helpful original content: https://bootspy.com/
Prompt trainers and tweakers and optimizers will probably replace the SEO types.
I'm terrified of a world where I ask, what beverage will be served on Mars, and the answer will be engineered to be given as Coca-Cola is a popular drink possibly available on Mars, or right now. Would you like it delivered?
Why? The only difference is that everyone can afford it. It is probably better in the end than only having paid chills doing it, since people will realize they can't trust "internet consensus" as being a actual consensus.
The real problem for some sites, is the amount of believable spam on mindless rant feeds, like Twitter and Reddit etc.
Fire one of the many offline LLMs up on a university network or somewhere else that a single IP connecting many times won't be too suspicious and let it go to town.
> Hot take: SEO is dead, content farms are done, almost no one will leave Google/Bing to read more than what it generates.
I disagree. What incentive does a website have to produce content if it receives no traffic? Website owners want control over their traffic and the data too. They will wall off any search engine that doesn't give them anything in return (basically they're scrapers at that point). The search engines that do this will starve themselves of information they need to stay relevant and the first search engine to play fair continuing to share traffic will get an advantage.
More likely, Google and Bing will continue to play fair and send traffic. Perhaps AI features will become browser features instead, complementing websites, not replacing them.
I actually think this is what prevented Google from deploying generative AI before. If the search engine, which existed to direct searchers to websites, becomes an answer engine, which does not direct people to websites, it will take some time, but large quantities of the sites Google consumes will cut them off.
The trade is info to Google for visitors. It's not hard to guess how sites will react when that trade stops.
It’s a pain to having to prompt everything. People still want to see certain identity when browsing, for example browsing CNN or wired. Prompting “show me some interesting tech articles”, and you know a lot of that is Ai generated, it feels stale
Wrong. The low-quality content farm will be out and the high-quality site will be fully paywalled (no more data to AI).
For instance, when searching for information on setting up RDS, like high availability MySQL on self-hosted servers on-premises, neither ChatGPT nor Brad provided the necessary details. I would not make a publicly searchable blog or Github repository if I were well-versed in setting such RDS on-premises. Instead, I would make it available only behind a paywall. Why should Google and MS/Bing benefit from my hard work if they do not direct traffic to my site? Previously, low- or high-quality pages benefited from SEO, but that is no longer true. There is a wealth of knowledge that has not yet been documented. Unless Google or Bing starts directing many traffic, experts, and websites will not share updated and other valuable information. I anticipate more paywalls for high-quality content, similar to good news sites.
Besides that, be careful about wishing for one or two centralized sites controlled by big tech giants with AIs such as Google and Microsoft. The web developed because of many 3rd party websites.
I don't have answers on how good 3rd party sites will survive with Google/Bing sending traffic and Ad clicks, but the equation is about SEO changing. Either you create non-profit Wikipedia-style content or high-quality content paywalled. That is my best guess.
> I would not make a publicly searchable blog or Github repository if I were well-versed in setting such RDS on-premises
You won’t. But I will and I think others will as well. My goal is to help people set up RDS and I don’t care about commercialization. So happy if AI reuses all the material.
There are many technical blogs that are just hobbies, or fun, or brand PR, or book tie ins or whatever.
You aren't helping people, though, you're helping a for-profit company earn billions of dollars off your, and other's good will and knowledge. The for-profit company is helping people, in exchange for direct and/or indirect monetization.
Your blog post's knowledge-dump ends up never being seen.
This is why StackOverflow reacted so poorly to Stack Exchange's announcement they would be using all of your hard work to train a for-profit model.
It might not be illegal - but it sure does feel weird, at a minimum.
> You aren't helping people, though, you're helping a for-profit company earn billions of dollars off your, and other's good will and knowledge.
This has all been played out before. I’m cool helping companies along with people.
Imagine you discover free energy. Would you not give it away because you don’t want billion dollar companies to benefit?
I have a choice to give away info or keep it. Id rather give it away than not. I’m not going to sell info. It’s not worth the time for whatever negligible gains it would make.
Even if there was a magic way to only allow “good people” and not companies to use my info, I’d still allow companies because I think information should be freely given and exchanged and hope that others feel the same.
Imagine where we would be if Linux wasn’t used by billion dollar companies. The world would be way worse. Amazon would be poorer but the world would be much poorer.
If you discovered free energy then you and your family are probably getting whacked rather than disrupt the billionaire-class who depend on scarcity, artificial or otherwise.
Governments have basically subsidized energy so that it is as close as possible to free for generations now. Tons of industrial processes rely on super cheap energy, one reason China has such a powerful steel industry is because of how cheap energy is over there.
Energy is one of many inputs into industrial systems, and it is a fairly commoditized one at that.
Free energy doesn't mean you don't need tons of infrastructure still in place, tons of parts and labor to install that infrastructure, factories to make the parts of that infrastructure. And then when it comes to using that energy, large capital expenditures are still needed to get up and running, which means the rich will keep getting richer.
Or to put it another way, electric cars + solar panels are totally a thing you can do right now, and at no point was anyone's life put at risk to bring these about.
Odds are the first country to get free energy would see obscene economic growth, all sorts of absurd things become possible. For start, salt water + energy => fresh water, solving the droughts that our farmlands are facing.
All metal processing uses tons of energy.
Meanwhile, my local electric co, Puget Sound Energy doesn't even make a billion a year in profits. The nation's largest energy company, Exelon, barely clears 2 billion in profits per year.
Microsoft makes more profit in a week than the nation's largest energy company does in a year.
Whilst I don't disagree with a lot of the points you're making (they're great):
ExxonMobil's operating revenue is $413.7bn USD. I'll be surprised if someone isn't getting whacked if they let the free energy genie out of the bottle.
My family lived in South Africa post-WWII because my gruncle's skin grafts wouldn't take in the UK climate. The Kariba dam gave free electricity to the surrounding area, the idea that this was something people paid for elsewhere just blew the minds of everybody there. Free energy is not a new thing.
However, politics and socioeconomics play a big part in whether or not a country can make successful use of energy, but the possibility of something being possible doesn't mean it'll happen. Furthermore, today, water reserves are a problem for the dam, and power generation was being suspended late last year due to it.
> ExxonMobil's operating revenue is $413.7bn USD. I'll be surprised if someone isn't getting whacked if they let the free energy genie out of the bottle.
Also isn't ExxonMobil one of those strange vertically integrated situations where most of their revenue comes from themselves? They drill the oil, then process it through their own plants which results in them paying themselves lots of money, but I may be mis-remembering that.
Anyway, solar is coming, wind is coming, and electric cars are coming, and no one is getting gunned down in the streets.
Heck China would love infinite free energy! So would any other country that wants completely dominate heavy industry overnight.
> Energy isn't cheap in the UK.
It has been a long time since the UK highly subsidized heavy manufacturing.
Energy prices have of course been going up everywhere, as, most people, realize cheap energy that results in dead kids and cancer for everyone was, in retrospect, really stupid.
> Furthermore, today, water reserves are a problem for the dam, and power generation was being suspended late last year due to it.
Infinite free energy would solve all water reserve problems, although it might end up being an environmental disaster near ocean shorelines...
I feel similarly to prepend: I often write things up because I want to help people by sharing knowledge. I don't care whether people get that knowledge via directly seeing it on my site vs hearing it second hand from a friend vs reading it in LLM output.
It's not important that my contribution go directly from me to the other person; what matters is that they get the information they're looking for.
I don't have a strong feedback loop here, but I generally figure that if I make it public then search engines (or now LLMs) will give it to people who want it.
With a blog post - you get feedback via comments. With SO, you get feedback via votes and comments. With HN, you get feedback the same way.
We have feedback on all of these systems so that humans can more readily discern correctness. An AI model is not going to be able to readily understand what solution is correct, lest it wouldn't need to crawl the page in the first place.
Almost all of my feedback today is via comments immediately after I post something, but I suspect more of the readers are people who come in via search. That's not that different from a future in which the searchers are intermediated by an LLM.
> Your blog post's knowledge-dump ends up never being seen.
I don't think this is true - it ends up being added to a soup of knowledge that is ladled out as people ask about it. It might not directly be seen, but it may contribute more to the overall knowledge about the space since OP's knowledge is now able to be sliced, diced, and recombined.
It sucks for the individual who wants to be credited, and it is annoying that megacorps will benefit directly. But for someone who wants to increase the knowledge in the world, it's not so bad...
> But for someone who wants to increase the knowledge in the world, it's not so bad...
You may actually be decreasing the knowledge of the world.
It's not difficult to imagine a future where people do not know how to effectively communicate, and instead rely on ChatGPT (or whatever) to communicate for them. Or a future where nobody knows anything, and instead blindly trusts the output of AI models.
There's already dating services that let your ChatGPT bot woo someone else's ChatGPT bot...
How does your example (bots chatting with bots on dating sites) decrease knowledge? I can see that it dilutes knowledge, but overall isn't the size of the pie decreased?
Isn't it possible for knowledge to be effectively different based on how much incorrect stuff there is?
For example if one person knows two correct facts about a specific sport, and another person knows those same 2 correct facts as well as 2 false facts, and doesn't know which 2 are true or false, isn't the second person less knowledgeable about that sport than the first person, despite technically having the same amount of true facts on the subject?
Equally, even if the amount of known knowledge in the world remains the same, isn't a world in which every human while studying spends every minute learning true stuff vs. spending half their time reading made up stuff, won't people on average be less knowledgeable despite the fact that no global knowledge got destroyed in the process? (Ofc there's never been a time when it's possible to spend 100% of the time learning completely accurate stuff, hypothetical exaggeration there.)
I think you are just hating on LLMs because its a new thing. You can similarly argue that internet will ruin our social life because we no longer have to go to the library and meet with strangers researching up similar topics. But I don’t see anyone arguing against internet?
Progress is here, old man. Thinking that people will deliberately go out of their way to grok through pages of PDF documentations hoping to find that one line of relevant information instead of just asking is stupid and misguided.
> think you are just hating on LLMs because its a new thing.
Along with your "old man" dig, the fact that you have to attribute hidden motives to someone who's got specific concerns elaborated in their comment doesn't do you any favors.
> You can similarly argue that internet will ruin our social life because we no longer have to go to the library and meet with strangers researching up similar topics. But I don’t see anyone arguing against internet?
I know smart people who argue that paper maps reduce social ties because they remove the necessity to ask for directions. They're not wrong. It doesn't mean maps aren't really useful, or that they even want maps gone. It means they're paying attention to dynamics and maybe even better prepared to fine-tune them by introducing something else to the system.
People do argue against "the internet", btw -- the problem of determining authority/reliability of an internet source, hidden incentives of search or feed algorithms, sand castles, and yes the capacity for isolation or echo chambers from virtual interaction. They're not wrong either.
> Progress is here
Change is here. Thoughtful people can recognize that comes with potential advantages and look with concern on hazards and disadvantages.
Sure you're helping people. The ai gets trained and thens tells people the stuff you learned
The billion dollar company was already profiting off that goodwill by putting ads beside people looking for it
As far as the blog is self advertising for your resume or company, it's just as good since you're linking it directly. Maybe even better since the ai will have opinions about you
They were upset when StackOverFlow, a for profit company announced using their answers to train a model. But they added content to the same for profit site for free?
Especially when they knew it was allowed by the CCL?
> My goal is to help people set up RDS and I don’t care about commercialization.
This feels like the same philosophical difference that leads to debates about GPL vs. Apache licenses. The "how dare someone else make money using my work" camp vs. the "if someone else is able to make money using my work, more power to them" camp.
Monetization is not what GPL vs. Apache license is about, even if that's often how the Apache proponents want to paint things.
The GPL doesn't prevent you from making money; it only requires you to contribute your changes back. That way others can also make money based on your work, like... you just did!
I agree and have been having this discussion for decades of people who don’t care and just want their work to help others (Apache/bsd/mit/etc) vs those that want to have a specific ideology furthered (gpl) that all software should be free.
It’s not exactly the same, but I’ve frequently heard “I don’t want someone to take my code and just sell it.” So want to use gpl or some other license that opens but prohibits selling. I don’t think the latter really works out that well, but people seem to ask for it quite a bit.
Ha, jokes on you, I’ll just be using LLM’s to churn out obscene amounts of plausible-sounding-but-actually-incorrect amounts of content on the same topics, hosted across a variety of domains.
Almost anything shortcut LLM’s provide can be a countered and aggressively wrapped in return.
N.B. I’m not actually going to do this, but it’s still a straightforward attack.
Yup. Commercializing things is hard. If I want to share info, I'll make a Reddit post or maybe a blog post if it's something lengthy.
If I want to paywall it, I don't know where to start. I imagine there's keys-included solutions, but I doubt they can just send me e-transfers for each payment. Maybe they can send money to my PayPal? I've never used that for receiving money before. Do I need a business bank account? Will transparency rules require me to share my address publicly? Maybe I need a PO box. I just wanted to share something helpful.
It seems to me like the options will be 1) publish free content on your website and make zero money because it will get crawled and displayed to readers elsewhere or 2) publish content on your website behind a paywall and make zero money because no one will pay for it (even if they could somehow find it, which they couldn’t).
> may work for some bloggers and news and news-adjacent publications
Yes, for creators who have managed to establish an audience that had high intent to consume that creator’s content. But good luck to people who are trying to make money just by delivering useful niche content where the consumers don’t even know of the creator.
Why wouldn't Google [replace with whoever becomes owner of leading AI platform] just hire experts themselves to generate for LLMs?
Seems like the obvious next step. For clarity, I'm not saying I particularly like that future, but I have a hard time grasping why you think a paywall would be an obstacle here. Especially not for the wealthiest corporations (ever). Additionally because most paywalls to information have very hard time keeping information from leaking. Otherwise news orgs would have figured that out by now!
I'd guess that google is currently the single largest funder of "content" in the world, between adsense on websites and payouts to YouTubers.
They're certainly not getting the content for free. They're running ads against it, and making money on it, but they are also paying for it. It's a relatively small shift in their funding model to pay out to creators for their contributions to an AI model instead of paying out per pageview.
> I'd guess that google is currently the single largest funder of "content" in the world, between adsense on websites and payouts to YouTubers.
Those are advertisers funding the content, not google. google is just a middleman. They generate no content and pay none of they money, they just facilitate the transaction and take a cut.
While I upvoted you, I think there’s still a lot of room in this world for human created content. In fact, I wager it’ll be more important than ever. People will be actively seeking out human-attributable information so there’s someone to hold the buck on where information originated from.
I’m generally pretty pessimistic about the effects LLMs are going to have on the world, but I tentatively agree with you on this point. In fact, a silver lining might be that SEO content marketing becomes worthless, so we’ll have fewer product review listicles that didn’t actually review products, but just did a roundup of other articles in hopes of getting some affiliate link clicks. Genuine writing is usually less directly profit driven, so maybe there will be more room for that in traditional search results hereafter. Still a raw deal for anyone that blogs or writes tutorials and now OpenAI makes money off of them.
is this a hot take? it seems obvious that 95% of searches for answers will end at chatgpt/llm (even if no good answer returns) which yes will kill SEO and traffic to content websites to begin with.
I work for a company who's main traffic comes from questions that google doesn't spit out the entire answer to except below the first few results.
I asked chatgpt and of course it gives the answer right away. We also have searches that land on pages with fancy ui's where user has to enter info to get answers. Took me about 1 minute to get chatgpt to spit out the answers and once I knew how to prompt it I could shorthand the input and get answers much faster.
I tend to agree, because if Google doesn't, OpenAI et al will. The real question is how does Google balance this against the loss in advertising revenue?
Promoted links or native ad formats in AI search results would be an almost too obvious guess.
Then putting advertising in whatever format LLM outputs are dressed as.
My biggest fear is, abuse eg how LLMs for search can work with targeted ads, eg making you slightly prefer Coke vs. Pepsi, or One Political Brain Parasite(tm) over another.
For the past 10 years I've been using google as a search engine and nothing else.
I type for the page or content I already know in advance I'm looking for and that's it. I never browsed or clicked on promotions. I found out about new sites and products, always through social media, or news pages. I will continue using it with the same purpose, I can't imagine people spending 15 minutes on a search engine trying to discover something new.
Why do people post worthless anecdotes like this when we know from trivially available data that Google makes over a hundred billion dollars per year from search.
With enough anecdotes, that 100 billion dollars starts to smell like click fraud. Google owns both sides of the ad market and is less than transparent with how their ads perform or how bids are calculated.
I will be very curious how the promoted stuff works with LLMs. When you ask a LLM what the best brand of shoes are, can folks pay to influence the result?
I personally know people spending 6 figures at the minimum on SEO, because they see huge conversion rates for their own businesses (which are not web-based stuff by the way, more of a niche in person technical services).
I don't know if I'm against this. If it means that websites will return to having less noise on their pages so that I get to the information I want faster, I don't care.
The way Google shaped SEO meant that many websites have tons of text just to prove that they are the authority.
Googling for like a Jerusalem Bug bite risk or Black Widow bite risk makes you end up some local pest control website telling you will get a fever (former) or die (latter) from the bite. Of course, they want to sell you services, so they build their SEO stating that they are the authority. They are not. And this is the problem with the web. There is no authority of information.
The issue is getting people to click on your website, why would any one do that if the entire content is already extracted by the ai, which directly gave it to the user?
Are you saying that the motive for posting a bread recipe that starts with 5000 words about the history of bread will evaporate, so we'll be left with websites from enthusiasts who have something interesting to say?
I've been using ChatGPT to generate recipes both for things I already cook, and for things I'm new to cooking and testing the result against what I find online.
So far it's a good cook! There are times when an ingredient appears in different amounts than I'd expect (like 1c of oil for a 4c/flour taralli recipe) but overall it's comparable to the quality of human written recipes, and better than many.
You think AI will stop and pause as it comes across your "interesting things"? Hey look, it's enthusiast content, let's send our users directly to their website?
I don't think so. It's going to be vacuumed into the big machine and nobody will visit those websites. In fairness, pretty much nobody does today.
So what? As an enthusiast am I supposed to be motivated by the page counter on my site?
Besides, good writers are good writers. Would you rather read Matt Levine or some AI summary of his latest piece?
I'm just not seeing the problem. IMO the whole obsession with driving clicks was silly from the get-go and destructive now. If AI does away with that, great. And if people whose sole motivation for writing was to get clicks decide to stop writing... well, OK.
“As an enthusiast am I supposed to be motivated by the page counter on my site?”
If you bothered to put a counter on your website, wanted to attract like minded individuals, or get enough people to sponsor you to continue work you otherwise couldn’t do, yeah probably. Or we can go with the unrealistic idea that enthusiasts as a whole don’t have egos or motives beyond shouting into the void to express their pure love of <insert thing>.
If that were true there would be no new writers, because nobody paid them to write their first book. In fact, most first books don't sell at all. And yet... people write.
Not everyone is 100% motivated by money. And those that are do not all need full time employment doing that work. And those that need money and employment can often generate revenue with complementary goods. And those that can't can source subscription and other revenue sources.
The idea that the current model of commercialization of writing is the only one that has ever or could ever work is really narrow thinking. Writing has two main values: 1) the ideas, and 2) the expression. Both of those have put food on the table for good writers forever, and will continue to do so. The AI panic is just from people who can't imagine the world being any different than it is at this very instant.
Those positions become gated for the already rich. Only those who can afford to publish do. It's been this way throughout history. The internet changed this briefly but that may change. People are worried it will go back to what it was or worse.
Well there were eras before mass publication when some people still wrote, about science or history or whatever, either because they were funded by their religion or by personal money or by a rich benefactor. Of course it was a tiny % of people doing that, but then again it was only a tiny % who could learn to read and write or afford to spend time on hobbies.
Traditional search engines aren’t going away for a long time, even if they are hybridized with LLM quick answers. My favorite websites about bike touring or someone’s tech blog will still be findable, and perhaps less buried under junk once content marketing is worthless.
People who just want a basic factual answer to a question won't go to your site, they'll use Google's snippet as they already do now in many cases.
But people who want to read your whole article will continue to go to your site.
This seems entirely reasonable to me. I shouldn't have to visit a webpage to discover when Abraham Lincoln was born, but I should if I want to read a short bio of him.
Well, finally people will just make things for the pleasure of adding to the knowledge in the world rather than trying to "build an audience" or "monetize my content" or whatever. No one is going to click through to your blog, so you have no incentive to shittify it.
We're going back to the original days of the Internet that HN users often beg for. Now only the true creators will create for the sake of creation: ars artia gratis.
Maybe we'll end up in a place where most people ask an LLM and take the first opaque answer they're given and be done with it. But others with more curiosity and skepticism will continue to go to real sources, evaluate their trustworthiness, weigh a few against each other, bypass intentional or unintentional bias/censorship in some tech giant's algorithm.
Somewhat, it's only not really an issue currently because most of the top answers aren't great and you want to look for a better overview. You can't currently get the overview from Bing or Google, only whatever sentence they've decided to highlight.
Exactly, just like info gets ripped off websites onto Wikipedia, with very few references, it’s hell getting them cuz they claim you want the link back, cahtgpt references hardly anything
Is your website more pleasant to use than ChatGPT/Bard/Bing Chat? Some actually are. Websites can load fast, be responsive, beautiful and well thought out. Those websites are a treat to visit.
However, if you need to first dismiss a GDPR waiver, a request to know your location, a request to show notifications, a chatbot that is available right now for a free sales consultation, and a request to subscribe to a newsletter; and once you do that, the page jumps around for 30 seconds as the ad auctions finish and obtrusive video ads flood in, and when you try to exit the page your back-button is hijacked; then the answer is probably "no".
All this will do is amplify the rise of paid spam for product promotions.
What is the best network monitoring tool? Oh wow, Bard says it is, “NetShark”.
I will formulate my own thoughts on this in the next 6 months. If serious damage is about to happen (to SEOs) then I fully expect huge swings in traffic for a lot of sites, which is easy to monitor.
Google also said they are rolling out another helpful content update soon. I wonder how much they have integrated LLMs into the search updates for processing text for sentiment and maybe even accuracy.
I'm pretty happy with Kagi's results since they down-rank sites with loads of ads and tracking scripts. It feels like the era for ad-funded information is ending and only paid services will be able to provide a useful noosphere.
(this isn't a sponsored comment. I'm just a machinist who likes good search results)
Pretty soon when the novelty wears off they will realize they still have to gimp their generated responses if they want to have things to scrape in future. A world where you want websites to exist to direct users to clashes with building perfect chatbots.
Kagi have every incentive to engage in sandbagging their upcoming chatbot just like google, they just prefer you knew it as "your safety" rather than "their sinking ship".
> "The two areas where we see automated writing tools for SEO purposes having an advantage will be ... 2) generating content that is not watermarked by Google as synthetic content."
Wow. They're basically saying that AI tools will lets SEOers generate content that isn't detected as "synthetic content" by Google, even though it clearly is synthetic. It's surprising to see the SEO industry acknowledge this so directly. Whether the generated content is useful or not, I'm now even more ready for the world where 90% of my queries can be answered on search engines directly since it's just cutting out the middleman.
This basically came down to being “allowed” after Google announced that they would not penalize content simply because it was fully or partially synthetic. What they say matters is how helpful that content is. Whether or not synthetic = spam is probably a longer discussion.
I see mention in the article of content creation. But are search engines working on task-related personal assistants?
For one example, If I want to take a holiday, could an assistant work out the best dates (based upon preferences of availability, cost etc), and research the best airfares (excluding that particular airline I hate) and find a hotel room with the features I want, and throw in a few sightseeing activities which appeal to my personal tastes, then summarise it up into a travel itinerary for me to approve. Then, upon approval it proceeds to book (and pay for?) all the things.
While it could automate it I don't think it would be better.
In fact it would be worse. Websites would try and game the system to be the one that ChatGPT chooses for you. And now you are relying on a system that has no incentive of telling you the truth. At least if I check to go kayaking on day 2 of my vacation, I can compare the top 3 websites, cross reference with Yelp to see which one has the best value for the $.
Plus there still is the part where the data being sourced isn't formatted the same, so mistakes will be made. It even happens with manual research. You miss the part where one offers a pickup and the other one doesn't. ChatGPT will suffer from that too.
It isn't just websites trying to game it. It's brands wanting to pay for placement in the results, aka search ads. And Google wanting to maximize their metrics.
In the short term this may bias towards giving me the best organic results, but will it shift to pushing me ever more aggressively to what advertisers are bidding on?
We are working on this as a part of Kagi Search Labs, but it is worth noting that this steps outside the domain of search engines. By the time this technology matures, we will be talking about digital assistants.
Keywords (tokens) are the very basis for LLM but they no longer need to be spoonfed or gamed, they are extracted from the text, so in an objective and naive sense the content becomes ever more of a king.
Ofcourse what the search decides to surface to the user and eventually link to is another story altogether. "Learning" from one site and promoting another more lucrative one is entirely possible, if somewhat evil.
Google results quality should be community tested to deface the monster hidden there. Nowadays most search results in Google are easily identified as a failure.
I wonder which results we will obtain when we look for specific recipes with these changes. Or, comparison of hardware.
It's not hard to embed links in the generated answer as demonstrated by Bing Chat. Under the hood, it still uses Bing Search as a first-step filter. So you still want to very much rank high on search results. SEO will not change much in that sense.
I think we should call it GEO - GPT Engine Optimization. :)
Furthermore, the article lack of how to tackle those shifts with depth analysis.
For example: How can one put their info to be presented by a GPT/GPT-plugins.
So if this is coming to proper google.com and the search, what is Google Bard then? I guess it is something like a disguised alpha release in order to gather data?
Oh great, yet another way for Google to return junk pages I didn't ask for because "I think you meant xyz." No I did not. I meant exactly the keywords I asked for you stupid bozo bot.
It's already impossible to search for web pages that contain the actual keywords I asked for; it used to be that you could surround your keywords with double-quote marks but that stopped working some time ago.
There's a market for a dumb search engine that just finds literal keywords and doesn't use AI. Of course it won't be very useful for selling ads.
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