Mastodawn

I do zero analytics on any of my web traffic, so this is just a guess, but I should be surprised if many people come to my sites via Google.

I am just a bloke with a Raspberry Pi running a website and two blogs.

I suspect that, of whatever traffic I get, most comes from links I (and others) post here, and from RSS subscribers.

Similarly, I don't think that I found any of the blogs or sites that I read regularly via a search engine.

Word of mouth (webrings, people posting about stuff they've enjoyed / their own work etc.) ftw.

Show thread

Drew Mochak 5d ago

@neil If google is no longer a search engine people will use another search engine. Every wrong answer drives traffic away. I can't imagine anyone will want to use this.

Show thread

Neil Brown 5d ago

@prism

> If google is no longer a search engine people will use another search engine.

I suspect that this could be true for people who actively want a search engine.

I don't know how many people just want an answer.

I agree though that, if the proffered answer is wrong too often, that it will drive (some) people away.

Show thread

Steve Hill 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺5d ago

@neil @prism my wife complained about Google presenting an AI answer whenever she searches. Which is a potential problem because her university have rules about AI use. I said "so just use a different search engine" and got back "what do you mean? I thought Google was the only one".

She is not super into computers - she uses them as a tool, rather than as an interest, but she is not a luddite by any means and learnt how to code a few years ago.

So that, is an insight into "normal people".

Show thread

Ben Tasker

@steve @neil @prism My littlun was taught about DuckDuckGo at school - I've no way to know whether that's one teacher or the norm, but it does give me a little bit of hope for the future (the catch being, people of littluns age have to get to adulthood before that information is invalidated)