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.
at least some of this has to be because people use other search engines
Google search doesn’t actually return useful material anymore
Steal it. Wrap it up. Give it away. The perfect crime by google.
Who uses Google in this day and age? They haven’t had good results for a decade or so.
I want to know how enshittifying Maps benefitted þem. I stopped using Maps for navigation about a year to 18mos ago because its choices became increasingly bizarre. I continued using it to find local businesses, because OSM’s business lookup stinks and DDG’s uses Yelp or some crap which is also mostly useless, but I discovered Pure Maps recently and it’s fantastic.
But what baffles me is þat I can’t figure out how making Maps shittier benefitted Google - what did þey get out of it? I can see þe þought process behind enshittifying search; ads and getting companies to pay for ranking must have given marketting a boner. But what was þe angle behind making navigation shitty?
Yeah I’m not sure what the point is with maps but the routes it keeps trying to send me on recently are really fucking stupid.
Search engines are pretty much redundant because they don’t return what we are looking for.
They cooked themselves.
If you have a technical problem and enter “reddit” in you search often you find help. But this is so stupid.
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……
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
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.
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!
Most of the time i use search engines to get to wikipedia. Now i have to add “wiki” to most of my queries because wikipedia wont even show up on the first page.
Just add Wikipedia to your search bar
Use the DDG bang :
- Go to https://duchduckgo.com/
- Enter
!w <your-search-here> - It searches Wikipedia specifically for <your-search>
There are bangs for “image search” (!im), “github search” (!gh), “search PubMed” (!pm)
You cannot live without this
Why would I need any of that if I can bang the search bar of my browser instead, and it takes me straight to search on Wikipedia or any other site I want without waiting for DDG to add that site?
Relieved to find this response below the others. Why TF would you search for a site i) whose URL you know? ii) waste space on your browser by adding the website as a search bar on your browser’s menu bar? How much time do people anticipate they’ll save by avoiding typing Wikipedia.org into the address field?
That’s not what I mean. I have a keyword like ‘wik’ set to take me to Wikipedia’s search, and if I type ‘wik black pus’, i get the page for that term.
I also have an extension that shows a popup with buttons for different search engines whenever I select text on a page, and I have a similar thing on the phone for text shared from any app. Each of these methods has about twenty-seven sites configured in it. Considering that I look up things on these sites easily a dozen times a day, it’s ridiculous to say that this doesn’t save me time over opening each site.
if that’s working, it means your browser search bar is configured to route thru DDG
That’s not how any of this works. The browser has its own list of search engines. Seriously, look in the settings sometimes.
Firefox even has two separate mechanisms for this, the second is via bookmarks with keywords.
You can completely skip DDG’s systems by just using your search bar though.
I know I speak for everyone on Lemmy that they prefer entering their question into Grok.
We can probably live without Bing
…why don’t you just go to Wikipedia to begin with? I’m honestly asking. URLs still exist.
Wikipedias search kinda sucked 15 years ago. So i never bothered to try it again since then tbh
It seems significantly better now. A lot of topics, I just go straight to Wikipedia now.
If you add ‘!w’ to the end of your word in the address bar it takes you directly to wikipedia.
For example: buffalo buffalo buffalo !w
Only if you are a good netizen and using DDG ;)
Also, it works at the start too: “!w buffalo buffalo”
This user ducks
Fewer people using Google
No, fewer people getting past the AI summary
Holdup, are people not skipping the AI summaries entirely because the info is fucking shit?
You forget we are in an echo chamber here. Most people not only read the AI summaries, they believe them. Just the other day I saw a normie ask ChatGPT to add up some numbers for them, instead of using a calculator. That’s how entrenched AI has become in their day-to-day. They don’t have to think any more. Thinking is hard. And that’s how Google is able to dominate the web. Steal the data and serve it up as slop that’s good enough for the everyday Joe.
Given the state of a lot of the summaries I’ve seen lately, that is scary.
Is that what this is saying? I wasn’t sure. The article should state that explicitly, and not assume that the reader concludes that.
Hard to imagine usage of Google suddenly falling by 22%, much less 60%.
Good news, though, is if Google stops bringing in traffic to sites, they’ll block its bots, so both search and Gemini will become even worse, possibly turning people away.
I think the issue there is the data doesn’t tell anyone “why”, it only tells “what”.
This is actually a good thing. Google get paid for referrals and niw their “AI” shit turns against it.
Google get paid for referrals
What are you talking about?
The only use I have found for the AI summary is quickly getting NAIC numbers for insurance companies at work. Otherwise I use an extension that removes the AI summary.
Are those results correct, though?
They actually are surprisingly.
Which is probably enough to find the info 90% of the time
I have classic apple computers.
I also maintain a small list of sites I visit to get abandonware programs for them. Of the times I’ve used the AI results, I found what I was looking for fewer than 15%. At one point, I had the AI telling me there was no such thing as Winamp for Mac, while I was running it in MacOS 8.6 under the virtualization program, Sheepshaver.
Seriously?
AI’s got so little ability to sort through archived knowledge and pull up old links and sources, it’s as if anything before 2006 never existed.
Nuts to that.
I hit up ten blue links and have never looked back.
But did a regular search provide the correct info? I find niche searches aren’t always good using either method. Old software info can be hard to find.
Yes! I wasn’t looking for whether it existed, I knew it did, but it was in a .sit file with an abbreviated name. Also apparently was an aplha build, so maybe that’s why the AI insisted it did not exist. Was looking for the last version available for the classic OS as I had one of the earliest.
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this is problematic on multiple levels.
Name 3 levels
-
It helps spread false information widely
-
It puts a lot of control of information in a single companies hands
-
It hurts the underlying sources
When google provides the info directly, and the first hand sources has become completely obsolete and shut down, what would new information stem from? It’s an inherently unstable and short sighted solution.
Google controls search results and has been caught meddling. Which negates the first two.
The last one of hurts the sources… sure they get less traffic which is less ad revenue. Cry me a river.
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Level one, level two, level three. WHAT NOW, BITCHES?
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