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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.

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[-] Cherry@piefed.social 173 points 3 months ago

Search engines are pretty much redundant because they don’t return what we are looking for.

They cooked themselves.

[-] DaddleDew@lemmy.world 77 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

[-] LadyMeow 16 points 3 months ago

Well when you put it that way…..

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[-] GameOverFlow@lemmy.zip 7 points 3 months ago

If you have a technical problem and enter "reddit" in you search often you find help. But this is so stupid. 

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[-] SaraTonin@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago

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

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[-] Hond@piefed.social 109 points 3 months ago

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.

[-] treadful@lemmy.zip 70 points 3 months ago

Just add Wikipedia to your search bar

[-] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 35 points 3 months ago

Use the DDG bang :

  1. Go to https://duchduckgo.com/
  2. Enter !w <your-search-here>
  3. It searches Wikipedia specifically for

There are bangs for "image search" (!im), "github search" (!gh), "search PubMed" (!pm)

You cannot live without this

[-] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 13 points 3 months ago

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?

[-] TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago

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?

[-] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

(P.S.: This workflow also allows using the keyboard for keyword-triggered search, while the search interface on some sites is getting less accommodating and assumes me mousing around.)

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[-] treadful@lemmy.zip 8 points 3 months ago

You can completely skip DDG's systems by just using your search bar though.

[-] CluckN@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

I know I speak for everyone on Lemmy that they prefer entering their question into Grok.

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[-] proudblond@lemmy.world 30 points 3 months ago

...why don’t you just go to Wikipedia to begin with? I’m honestly asking. URLs still exist.

[-] Hond@piefed.social 23 points 3 months ago

Wikipedias search kinda sucked 15 years ago. So i never bothered to try it again since then tbh

[-] jqubed@lemmy.world 12 points 3 months ago

It seems significantly better now. A lot of topics, I just go straight to Wikipedia now.

[-] MunkyNutts@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago

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

[-] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Only if you are a good netizen and using DDG ;)

https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

Also, it works at the start too: "!w buffalo buffalo"

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[-] mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 64 points 3 months ago

at least some of this has to be because people use other search engines

Google search doesn't actually return useful material anymore

[-] NOPper@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 3 months ago

I tried kagi a while back and liked it so much I subscribe now. Google messed up the one thing they ever did right.

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[-] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 47 points 3 months ago

So what the new business model is?

  1. Steal content from creators
  2. Train AI model using that content
  3. Sell this content to users as original

When creators go out of business and there's nothing to steal, how will this business continue?

[-] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 32 points 3 months ago

Yes. Also combined with:

  1. replace all entry level jobs with AI
  2. run out of experienced people because nobody new can learn the skills required
  3. ???
  4. profit

But you see, for a brief moment, we made the shareholders very rich, and that was a beautiful moment totally worth everything.

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[-] teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 12 points 3 months ago

They can't see past their next set of financial statements. And the government wants those content creators to fail so they can control all information.

[-] Luminous5481@anarchist.nexus 41 points 3 months ago

Who uses Google in this day and age? They haven't had good results for a decade or so.

[-] magguzu@lemmy.pt 39 points 3 months ago

Literally everyone, do people ever leave the Lemmy/reddit bubble?

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[-] Sxan@piefed.zip 8 points 3 months ago

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?

[-] pomegranatefern@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 months ago

Hang on, you have successfully thorn-baited me. Are you typing them manually or do you have a macro or something swapping them in? For what purpose are you doing this? Give me your villain monologue.

[-] criss_cross@lemmy.world 14 points 3 months ago

He thinks it throws off AI scrapers. It does not

[-] pomegranatefern@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 months ago

Aw, that's a way more mundane answer than I was hoping for, but I appreciate you explaining. (And I find myself doubting that it does much to AI scrapers, yes.)

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[-] elucubra@sopuli.xyz 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Please stop using "þ".

I understand that using the character is more economical, but it makes things more difficult to read, especially for speakers of English as a second language.

EDIT: Maybe using a more unique glyph may work. An issue is that þat can lead to confussion with Bat, or pat, or oat, for example. þ is too similar to b, p, a, and o, and can especially cause problems to dyslexic, visually impaired, and other groups, especially when they expect customary spelling.

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[-] pyramid20@lemmy.world 31 points 3 months ago

I thought this was wild, that no way it could have dropped THAT much: hell, I still search for things and didn't rely on LLMs.

Then I remembered I switched my default engines to Duck Duck Go, and Startpage,

[-] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 30 points 3 months ago

The first thing I do when searching google is to scroll past that AI shit they put at the top and look for a valid link to a valid website.

[-] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 14 points 3 months ago

DDG lets you just turn off the AI crap.

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[-] imjustmsk@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Do yourself a favor and don't use Google at all

Here are alternatives

  1. Brave Search or DuckDuckGo They do have similar AI features but you can disable them.
  2. Or, Just use StartPage, It's basically shows you Google results but without any if Google's bloat nor their tracking.

edit; stupif typ0

[-] Kkk2237pl@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago

The first you should use other browser like ecosia or qwant

[-] BenchpressMuyDebil@szmer.info 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

https://udm14.com/ , you can also add "&udm=14" to your normal google link so you don't have to rely un udm14.com, there should be a tutorial on the site

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[-] BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

Unfortunately, most of the first page of results is often AI slop at this point...

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[-] dudesss@lemmy.ca 14 points 3 months ago

I'm preaching to the choir here, but for those who don't know

https://www.qwant.com/ (France)

https://www.ecosia.org/ (German)

Both of the above are currently in partnership as well.

[-] shirro@aussie.zone 6 points 3 months ago

There are a few probs with qwant unfortunately and I assume ecosia might be the same. It isn't available in all countries so it's sometimes blocked when I am on a VPN. The performance is shocking on the other side of the world. Terrible latency. Often fails completely to return results. Then the search results aren't really good enough either. Tends to return a lot of links from similar sources like it doesn't have much of an index. Its ok for really simple mainstream searches but I regularly need to fall back to no AI ddg or udm14 google.

Unless I want a clanker response. Actually I never want a clanker response but web indexing has become so poor in the pursuit of ad revenue then AI that sometimes it's hard to get anything useful out of search queries these days. It's very frustrating.

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[-] org@lemmy.org 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)
[-] GutterRat42@lemmy.world 74 points 3 months ago

No, fewer people getting past the AI summary

[-] Addv4@lemmy.world 34 points 3 months ago

Given the state of a lot of the summaries I've seen lately, that is scary.

[-] org@lemmy.org 6 points 3 months ago

Which is probably enough to find the info 90% of the time

[-] foodandart@lemmy.zip 15 points 3 months ago

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.

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[-] GameOverFlow@lemmy.zip 12 points 3 months ago

Steal it. Wrap it up. Give it away. The perfect crime by google. 

[-] AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago

No amount of bad reports or low profitability will convince these people AI is not the end-all-be-all they think it is.

[-] Iusedtobeanalien@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

Google prioritised advertising over content to the point where it's chrome browser and YouTube have become unusable

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this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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