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.

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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.

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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.

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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".

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itgrrl

@steve FWIW, until she’s ready to ditch Google 🤞 at some point, you can set up a “custom search engine” in her browser that invokes the param to show the web view for results rather than the view with the “AI” (🙄) summary – see my linked toot 👇

https://infosec.exchange/@itgrrl/114495075173286748

it may have the unfortunate side-effect of delaying her abandonment (or possibly open her eyes to other possibilities), but it will at least somewhat dis-enshittify her use of Google in the meantime

itgrrl :donor: (@[email protected])

@paco @[email protected] @[email protected] a little OT but FWIW the magic search URL param to prevent the AI slop summary showing on the Google search result page is (currently) &udm=14 - it corresponds to “show me the web view instead of the default view” you can add that param to your custom “search engine(s)” defined in your browser settings & use a keyboard shortcut to invoke a slop-free^ search from the omnibox 💁‍♀️ ^ well, “slop-reduced” - you still get the slop in the actual search results 😕 #udm14

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