alt Hacker NewsGoogle is dead. Where do we go now?
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Where do you go know - maybe realize that ads make everyone around miserable and with this bitter understanding go through painful but necessary process of finding other means of earning money.
PS. Seriously.
> Right now, though – I’m broke. Anyone need a website or IOT project built? I am AI assisted, very fast!
Oh wow, this author is tone deaf to the entire situation that is occurring in the world right now. I just had a conversation with my 70 year old Aunt (no tech skills) about AI and its impact on the labor market and I used the example of how for the first time ever I actually believe she could build her own iPhone app by just talking to her computer. This is an hypothetical app that would have cost her $10k-100k or more in the very recent past. I really think the market for the very services this author is selling is evaporating or at least on hold while everyone is at least trying to diy it with AI.
It never really worked. Most businesses just paid for customers that were going to or already found them anyways.
Not saying ads don't work at all, they definitely increase awareness.
Maybe someone should tell Google.
It’s not the advertising or eyeballs.
GenAI allows everyone to build their own stuff and find their customers without ads.
The ad business is doomed.
And if you think Gen-Z or Gen-Alpha are a capturable audience, I gotta bridge to sell you.
You have one slim hope. Engage with smart young people that are savvy at today’s comms and can create and edit their own content.
Your campaign on Google is dead.
Contextual ads is the answer. You sell shoes, go and advertise on fashion related sites. I don't want to see a shoe ad while I'm browsing a gaming site just because I did some relative search a week ago. It's so fucking annoying and I never understood why Google never bothered to try some alternative too. I don't mean completely replace behavioral targeting but at the very least try some contextual one too.
is this about the second single from Good Riddance?
my vote is for ATProto
let's take back the interwebs and have a single account where all apps store their data about you, which you can move around and also swap out clients for any data without companies blocking you
the site is loading forever now. hn crashed it hehe
I consider ads to be a cancer I hope it will die in every possible way.
Ironically, Google’s Ads division and CEO have blame for this. The Ads division forced the search division to weaken the quality of search results and Google’s CEO sided with them.
Great, now my server is crashing again. I thought Cloudflare was supposed to take care of this stuff
Google and Google Ads are not one and the same.
The jump from the op's "i screwed up my google ads campaigns" to "Research shows that many young people are getting their information from short video platforms like TikTok"....
i mean, c'mon
Instagram (one of the potential targets of the author to replace Google Ads) became unusable for me with this last update, where they make you wait for ads to finish.
Not that I ever used it much (in fact, after all these years, I still didn't wrap my mind around anything but simple posts), but now, I basically only go there to do a post about a group I have (and that I had to remove from Meetup because Meetup is equal shares of terribly bad and terribly expensive) and answer some messages.
There's a generation (in fact several) of people that still want to meet in person, and the platforms that allowed us to create and join groups for it (Meetup was great for that during a golden period of 3-4 years) are all turning into garbage.
Can we also talk about how dogshit YouTube Search has been the last 2 years? Some videos have turned to shorts, but they're not searchable through their search API, making the feature pretty useless.
Another explanation is that when the cost of living is high, people reduce their spending on entertainment. If that's the case, no amount of advertising will materially shift your bottom line.
Now I wonder how long until AI chat tool are riddled with ads, and with shitty content because of people trying to game them just like they've been gaming search engines.
Can someone explain why GOOG is still sky high despite this?
Well, the cycle is over.
I remember the rise and the fall of AltaVista search engine.
I remember the rise of Google that was able to circumvent all the "old days" SEO efforts by spamming keywords in the HTML headers. Then everyone was trying to guess how to game Google page rank algo.
Finally people learned how to cheat Google, searches on many topics are returning endless pages of spam, marketing content that is supposed to earn AdSenens money (Google's "disruption" of online ads, better than all those cringe banners, that, eventually, destroyed Google search).
Right now Bing is working better for me (Bing! WTF?), for some stuff I use Yandex (shrug), but most of the stuff goes through AI, if you ask them to provide source of the information and you check it, this seems to be working fine...
For the time being, until people learn how to feed AI bots with the manipulated content they want. This will be probably more complicated, but it will happen (gaming page rank was also harder than adding "right" words to HTML keywords), unless AI providers will be careful with what they give as a food for their hungry Nvidia GPUs.
But this will be more expensive than blindly scanning the internet. That's why I see here a proper place where governments should step in, finance curation of the content for AI, as this will benefit society in a big way.
I see here an opportunity for smaller players, like Mistral, who can get some gov/EU funding and provide more quality than others who will devour whatever they find.
I am glad to not be the only one to come to a similar conclusion. But we need to go one step further: I believe that Google has become harmful to the world in its present form. I'll skip listing all reasons, as there are many other websites that detailed this already, as well as (ironically) youtube videos. The problem goes much deeper than "merely" Google's monopoly in regards to all that ad-money. This is indeed probably the biggest reason why Google sucks so much nowadays, but the problem really is much bigger than that; it also taps into politics, what with the orange King meta-protecting these mega-corporations and the tech-bros ruthlessly abusing the rest of the world. We need real change, substantial change. Fixing Google is one important step but not the only one - but let's focus on Google mostly here, to simplify things a little.
The big underlying problem is that Google has no real incentive to change the way how it operates. Its search engine, which they crippled, is not really that important to Google anymore compared to the ad-revenue and other business ventures here. AI is the current insanity rage and Google went for it too. When you cripple the search engine, you can sell more bullshit to people, fake-generate and hallucinate a world wide web that is controlled by these walled garden corporations (Facebook is probably the best example of a walled garden, but there are many similar; twitter run by a crazy oligarch too, "bla bla bla log in to read news bla bla bla" - never going to do that, so they cut off my access to an open world wide web here).
I do not think Google can be fixed with the current setup though. It will just continue to steal money by taking our data and interconnecting this with other greedy private interests, now represented by lobbyists running the USA (and also other places, of course; just the USA being bigger than the other places, economically).
Google has to be split up and removed. There is no other way to fix it anymore. They want down a path from which they can not change anymore, because any change means less revenue, and no corporation wants to do so on its own.
> Research shows that many young people are getting their information from short video platforms like TikTok and Instagram. We are trying ads on there.
Well - circusscientist adds to this problem. They depend on ads, so they contribute to the overall problem. The issue is not just Google here; it is also commercial interests who think they have a right to pester-harass people via irrelevant crap (aka ads). Google killed ublock origin. Google controls the web virtually via chrome. We have a conflict of interests here. Google has no reason to change this, and many companies think they need to use ads. This is a problem. I believe in an ad-free world. I don't want to see any ads. Many years of commercial interests confused people into thinking ads are the way to go. I disagree. I think ads are evil and must die. And companies that have no alternative business model, who rely on ads, also have to go. Google is just sitting on top of it all, acting as a greedy parasite.
> We have an email newsletter
They still think anyone cares about email spam. I never subscribe to any "newsletter". A better model is to read up on things WHEN YOU VISIT THE WEBSITE. This works on many private websites too such as github. I can read when I want to, not when some bot spams me down with this irrelevant stuff (and admittedly I would not read ads anyway, but my point is about DELIVERY versus VISITING something here).
> We also plan to do some actual physical advertising
So he chose confrontation.
> I am AI assisted, very fast!
Why would I want to give my money to anyone using ads or wanting to lower the overall quality via AI? That makes no sense. Some people are beyond hope.
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Google is dead the day they remove their moto: Google is not evil
And by the way announced the world they are the source of evil!!
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Look, the 90's Internet isn't cool anymore. Sorry. Things are cool for a while and then they're not.
Franchises die. It's still cool to say "The originals were really cool", and always will be, but now we're talking about now. Star Wars is uncool. There are people who sort of automatically praise it and subtly put down those who don't like they're aligned with a magnetic field, sure, but they're in their own world. Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters are uncool now. Star Trek is almost there. AI is not cool and never will be. Tiktok is cool, but soon everything that is uncool will descend upon it.
Sorry. Bananas blacken and apples get spots. Time moves on.
Downvoting isn't cool. Reply instead.
I knew about duckduckgo for years and it was always too much friction to switch. I tried like 4 times but always went back to google when I had to research something quickly. Eventually the friction of using google became high enough though that the friction of switching was not that much higher. I’ve been using ddg and occasionally duck ai for over a year now.
Haha no wonder, check out the website its dodgy as f. https://bigtop.co.za/
How long have you lived in Durban? Nice surfing pics.