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Google Search referrals to the web have plummeted, AI links are 'less than 1%' of traffic (9to5google.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (1 child)

    Interesting, I've never heard those points before. They're both super fast for me, and give me really good results.

    I was using DDG for many years, but the results were often super bad and I hadn't noticed until I started using Google search again. Then I started using Ecosia and Qwant, and the results have been sometimes better and sometimes worse than Google -- mainly only worse whenever I need Google Maps for its various features around businesses that OpenStreetMap is missing.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    I am in Australia. Searches on local content and niche tech subjects don't do very well compared with other engines. It might be lack of tuning more than index and I am sure it will improve. Latency might be due to lack of local servers or resources or my choice of browsers but Qwant breaks all the time. It runs a lot better if I keep ad blocking on. Noticeably faster and more reliable though still high latency on the first result showing. If you turn ads on to support smaller companies you immediately get punished. Ad supported businesses aren't compatible with good quality service unfortunately, no matter where they are based.

    It is amazing that Google was so usable for so long really. Their search people must have fought hard to balance out product quality against the demands of the money people for a long time. I think every service that follows in Google's footsteps will inevitably repeat all their mistakes.

    I recommend trying Qwant, Ecosia and others though. It is my default browser search at the moment, mostly because it isn't US based. It might be all you need.

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