Google Is Dead. Where Do We Go Now?
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The provocative question "Google is dead. Where do we go now?" sparked a lively debate about the future of search and online advertising. Many commenters, like agentifysh, welcomed the potential demise of Google Adwords, recalling the era of overpriced, unverifiable clicks. However, others, such as eterm and nacozarina, warned that AI-powered search results will likely be polluted by advertising, just like Google's current model, with some predicting it will be seamlessly integrated into responses. As commenters like hylaride and Banditoz pointed out, we're already seeing this play out on platforms like Amazon, and SEO/ad companies will likely find ways to game large language models to their advantage.
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AI should equal the playing field and promote businesses based on merit and capacity not how much they can spend.
I give it maybe 12-18 months before AI results are polluted by advertising.
the product promotion text will be integrated into the responses
'your prompt is insightful and refreshing. reminds me of the refreshing taste of organic coconut-cinnamon water. here's a QR code coupon for $1 off a 48-ct pack you can use at your local HoleFoods.'
"Fantastic! It's great that you care about what you should feed your children. A bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is a great way to start your kids' day with the energy they need, and it's something they're sure to love! It's also fortified with vitamins to give them the nutrition they need! If you don't have any, I can start a DoorDash order right now."
Or "It's great that you want to find a way to earn some extra money for holiday presents for your family when you don't have anything left over after paying your bills. You're so thoughtful. You're an avid sports fan, so you've got the knowledge to have an edge in sports betting. DraftKings has a $10 credit when you bet $10 on tomorrow's game. You're automatically a winner!"
One mustn't forget that advertisers are frequently just straight malicious.
I'm pretty certain that the ChatAI providers want to show ads, but until they can bill for it, they aren't going to.
At some point the billing will work, and then they will.
Have you been on amazon lately? We're already there. :-/
If you're shopping around, an LLM you control can work for stuff like summarizing customer reviews or compiling a list of products with specific features (if you don't mind them being randomly wrong). But for general shopping advice / "plan my vacation" kind of queries, it's already firmly in the land of garbage-in-garbage-out.
Wasn't that pretty much also the promise of Google as a search engine originally? For the longest time Google actively fought SEO, while running a minimal set of ads, then they bought DoubleClick and everything went to to shit.
AI should equal the playing field, but it won't. The current generation have our bias built in and it's not in a good place financially. It's only a matter of time because it becomes infested with ads. You think OpenAI aren't going to promote shitty products or companies, because the algorithm says they shouldn't? No, they might charge that customer more, but they aren't saying no.
This is a multi facet problem. There's a generation of advertisers who believe that advertising is clicking around in the AdWords interface, maybe sprinkle in a little ad spend on Meta and boom, you're done. The reality is that they can't advertising anything, they don't have the skills required to sell a product.
If they can't rely on Google, where can they go? Social media, AI? Nope, because many of us have been burnt by the major online platforms and won't trust any of them. I'm never signing up for another social media platform, hell, I'm reluctant to sign up for ANYTHING. The current generation of marketing has sacrificed the future for a quick profit now. Many aren't on social media, we use adblockers, we pay for services to ensure no ads, we don't watch TV, newspapers are dead, we don't go out much, so where are you going to advertise exactly? Even if you find a venue, many see so few ads that your attempt at marketing is going to feel like an assault, because you're so desperate that you don't dare tone it down enough.
Advertisement needs to reinvent itself, and it needs to stop funding the entire online services industry, because it can't, not without cannibalizing its own future.
I don't know what comes next, I just know it will be worse.
Plus to be honest alternatives aren't much better. I use duckduckgo but the results are still a deluge of spam (content mills).
There are other networks as well: X, Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn, Amazon ads. It depends what’s your target group. But all networks have targeting tools so you can test them with minimum budget just to see what works and what doesn’t.
For sure, you have some personalized landing pages with CTA (Posthog script included so you can see what works).
For ChatGPT (and similar) you need to have a strong FAQ page and lots of content marketing to increase the likelihood of being the suggested answer when a user asks ChatGPT a relevant question (it's a highly probabilistic system, look up AEO/GEO).
CloudFlare for example offers an option to block AI scraping bots by default. If you are in the services business, this is the opposite of what you want because having AI crawlers scrape your site would drive traffic down the road when users ask a related question.
We were marketing a product that many people were happy to know existed. The dashboard gave us tools to really delve into demographics. Of all the ridiculous personal data Facebook collected, the best demographic filter was allowing me to narrow in on pages someone liked or interacted with. We were selling things related to cruising sailboats, and we could target an audience within 30 miles of Fort Lauderdale who also liked Sailing Magazine. Moreover, we could use a pixel so that only people who had also visited our website saw the ads.
Facebook had a policy of rewarding high-quality ad content. If people clicked the ad, or better yet left positive comments and discussion, the price drastically decreased to fractions of a cent per impression and click-through.
Of course, they got rid of all that. But at the time, it was a great way to target an audience based on third-party pages they liked, giving them ad content about products they were generally interested in—and products they were happy to know they could purchase because they had value.
Ads configuration is like gambling in Las Vegas, in that the easier the game, the worse the odds—like slot machines—and the more the player has to interact, like Blackjack, the better the payout. When done well with good configuration, we were getting 1000s of click-throughs for dollars. It was amazing.
The point is that Facebook rewarded ads that people positively interacted with, as it meant the quality of the news feed wasn't hurt by the ad.
As others have stated in this thread, it's called the acquisition phase. Get people hooked, build the network, make it be the place that people have to be at.
After that comes the exploit phase where said network effects make it hard to leave. You can rake in billions (trillion?) of dollars this way. Who cares if it eventually kills the company, you've made more money than god at this point.
1. You can target a specific part of the funnel (informational -> purchase intent) in search ads. Targeting on social networks is more about overall user profiles rather than their immediate state of mind.
2. People going to a search engine expect to leave that search engine to go to another website. Whereas people on a social network expect to stay in that portal. So clicking on an ad then doing something after is a more natural flow (and better value for advertisers).
That does seem like a very good fit for a good video that can spread on TikTok etc on its own if some performers upload videos.
I rather would try to get an entry on google maps. Meaning when people browse the area, they see your thing. I certainly like to discover new stuff like this in new areas and some things I find are clearly there because of ads, but other got there by other ways. Making a entry by hand, publishing a picture there with further info ..
Instagram has apparently got hyper specific location targeting, so we are doing an ad on there now.
Mostly we do kids entertainment though, so that's not really going to convice moms to hire my magic show for Bobby's birthday
The platforms I use are very NOT local so it'd be pointless. Mainstream platforms are invasive with their data collection that would allow his ads to be specifically targeted and do well there, getting put in front of people who might actual use his service.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...
Also, incentives are super high for businesses to create quality content for the open web to drive business. For example a car tire manufacturer could publish reliable restaurant reviews in order to encourage driving.
So why would they publish anything other than ads?
Buying access to web search indices is not the same as having one.
(I love them but this is the hard truth)
With their current pricing they out of their league of having any full-blown index, crawlers, people, what have you.
I would say I am amazed how they are alive at all (unless I am missing something in their funding).
A competitive, general-purpose web search engine with its own full index is _brutally_ hard and expensive.
This is the reason there are only a few world-class like russian yandex, chinese baidu (to not state the obvious like google).
What do you think a site like Google is giving you these days? They are explicitly bad at indexing the small web. Their search technology is not better than Kagi, and made worse by ads and LLM ad bias. So what is this big "world class" thing they do that can't be replicated?
The web is not the same place it was years ago. Indexing all the slop and scams and ads is not useful to me as a consumer.
Though my gut tells me the probability of their 100% own search engine is very-very low.
From the current point in time very little people are in the market for a paid privacy focused search.
Most of the time I spend on kagi this year is a glorified bookmark to imdb, wiki, and what have you: around 700 queries per month, which is basically the same as I have in chatgpt according to yearly stats.
But I will continue be a paid Kagi user.
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.
There nothing about nostalgia, no real concern for Google as a company, or how the web used to work, etc. Just a small business trying to stay afloat.
I grew up before Google, I remember when it was just a useful search tool. Then an industry grew up around exploiting it in various ways and ads became a major revenue source for Google, completely changing the platform. I witnessed this entire online marketing/ad industry come into existence.
I have friends who worked in SEO for years. Very talented, smart people. But that industry is gone now. Likewise Google ads is clearly not long for this world as Google will probably get a lot more money leveraging their AI for product recommendations/sales etc.
People used creative thinking to create this industry, so the answer to "where do we go now?" is find the next one. It won't just be the same thing repeated, just like SEO and ad optimization where fairly major departures from the previous world of advertising and marketing they came from.
There you go.
It's not the neatest but it feels real, like these guys are into entertainment for parties, not web design.
That said, I don’t ever want to see ads for it either. If I lived in Durban and wanted a juggling act, I’d like to be able to find it, as I’m sure all their clients would. I wonder if the market is just very competitive, or if they don’t show up on regululat searches for some reason.
Off-topic reply but I don't want to start another comment:
The problem about Google and AI has deeper layers: AI answers has trained users to not look into the source information (a.k.a websites), and websites are combating it by making themselves harder to crawl (for example, by enabling Cloudflare protection/verification), which in turn makes creating new search engine harder.
This down circle is currently unbreakable, which is a hellish situation for new comers, but great for established players such as Reddit, Facebook etc since they have internal search engine as well as mountains amount of content to provide.
If one day the big platforms (there are only handful of them) completely blocked Google from crawling them, that will be the true death of Google.
And if they’re unable to invest in their site or they’re simply shut out of the modern world, I’d assume the same applies to other aspects of their business as well.
I dealing a lot with click fraud on Google Ads and it’s usually hard to detect it without special tools.
Off the shelf click fraud software (for search) has never been ROI-positive for me when I run in A/B tests.
Fou analytics is a fun tool though for social/native etc
Page loading + no image loading = blacklist API.
The first step you might take is to check that you are not advertising with AdWords partner networks, as they might be the reason for the clicks on your ads.
Second, you can check your server logs and verify clicks from Google Ads, especially the geolocation of those clicks. If they are not from your region and the visitors perform no action after viewing the first page, this is most probably click fraud.
I use our own open-source security platform (I'm a co-founder) for this purpose (1), as it's server-side and works even if bots aren't running JS. However, your website analytics might also be useful if they can collect events without JS.
1. https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno
lol
on youtube most of what i see is hyped hyperbolic content, polarized podcasts, shorts.. the way and reason why "content" is produced has changed
Today, this would be harder to figure. Because anyone can use a VPN and pose as a person in any country, any country’s intelligence people could be carrying out misinformation/disinformation campaigns at any time. How much of the left or right content on FB that mom is reading is from genuine actors vs intelligence actors? How many calls for violent action on the left and right are just FBI entrapment or Russian attempts to destabilize the USA?
When all of this was being built, this angle never occurred to me. It should have, but it didn’t. I naively thought, as so many did, that the ability of people to connect across national boundaries, across racial and gender lines, and across socio-economic divides would lead to a better, safer, and happier world. Sadly, I was completely mistaken. The internet became worse than life AFK on those fronts, people joined echo chambers, and radicalism increased.
I remember my brother loving to do channel surfing in the 80s when we were young. I've always hated it! maybe that's why I cannot stand the current Tiktok media format (so sad that Youtube is pushing more and more the same format).
Also, remember when telephones started and people who took vertical video where seen as sinners? How times change!
But at least, we could experience first hand that laziness beats thoughtfulness, when people are allowed to.
I was scrolling Emby last night, was about to put on the new Running Man movie. But then the thought of having to sit through 20 minutes of set up and exposition of his family and such made me not want to watch it. I just opened instagram reels for a bit and had laughs with my coffee.
When you find a working marketing solution, it's just a matter of time when it dries out, because of competitors and overall saturation.
‘Pic or it didn’t happen’ has now been replaced by ‘TikTok or it didn’t happen.’ Is it possible to enjoy something without there being video evidence of it? According to my gf and her female friends the answer appears to be no.
"Google Ads is dead, Where do I promote my business now?"
When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief).
If Google Ads is dead/dying the search is soon to follow...
[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
You might want to let Google know that, because the number of searches on Google appears to continue to be growing massively:
https://searchengineland.com/google-5-trillion-searches-per-...
Those numbers look like the exact opposite of dead or dying to me. As does Google's growing stock price over the same time period.
From a user perspective, google search results are awful and almost always a complete waste of time.
If search results are such a waste of time, why do people keep using Google? In ever-increasing numbers? What's the explanation there?
Google search results are a wasteland of ads and content farms, with vanishingly small value for humans
Dead internet theory might explain why you don't like Google. But it sure doesn't explain why its usage continues to grow.
Dead internet theory means real users are declining while bot users are skyrocketing.
For example google search is such a terrible experience these days that I’ll often ask an LLM instead.
That LLM may do multiple google and other searches on my behalf, combine, collate and present me with just the information I am looking for, bypassing the search experience entirely.
This is a fundamentally different use case from human traffic.
Most likely - yes. If Google has been dead for years people wouldn't pour hundreds of billions of dollars into ads there. The Search revenue keeps increasing, even since ChatGPT showed up. It might stagnate soon or even decrease a bit - but "death" ? The numbers don't back this up.
It does not follow that people making more searches means people are having more successful searches. If google found the exact thing you were looking for and put it top centre in the results, would the number of human searchers stay the same but the number of human searches drop?
It's over. Sorry.
I agree that paradigm is over and using Google search feels antiquated. It’s not a good outcome for website owners, but I want info retrieval.
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