The Conversation: Using your AI chatbot as a search engine? Be careful what you believe. “Search engines rely on articles and text about a given topic, and then weigh how reliable those articles are. Generative AI instead relies on huge bodies of text, from which it measures the odds of words appearing next to each other. These ‘large language models’ are purely looking to generate […]

very handy link this ✓ (sorry the platform)
#websearch #cheatsheet

https://cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has-a-secret-reference-desk

Axios: Exclusive: Small publishers hit hardest by search traffic declines. “Over the past two years, referral traffic from traditional search engines has declined by 60% for small publishers, compared with 47% for medium-sized publishers and 22% for large publishers, per Chartbeat.”

Search Engine Roundtable: Google What People Are Saying With Popular & Latest Comments. “I am not sure how new this is but the What people are saying box within Google Search now also shows the more popular comments and latest comments for Reddit threads. I assume Google is able to get this data through its licensing deal with Reddit?”

Search Engine Journal: AI Search Barely Cites Syndicated News Or Press Releases. “Data from 4M AI citations shows syndicated press releases barely register in AI answers. Editorial content and owned newsrooms fare better.”

Search Engine Land: Only 15% of pages retrieved by ChatGPT appear in final answers: Report. “ChatGPT retrieves far more webpages than it cites. A new AirOps analysis found that 85% of discovered sources never appear in the final answer. … If you want your content cited in AI-generated answers, discovery isn’t enough. Most retrieved pages never become visible to users.”

University of Exeter: Reforms to Google’s web search dominance could address a “fundamental asymmetry”, researchers say. “Proposed Government reforms to tackle Google’s web search dominance could address a ‘fundamental asymmetry’ – but aspects need to be clarified and improved, experts have warned. The reforms are designed to tackle issues about fairness raised by news and web […]