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StLCyloneyesterday at 2:02 PM5 repliesview on HN

AI has successfully scraped enough of their content so that they are no longer needed. Thanks for creating the content, now someone else will make money with it.


Replies

spudlyoyesterday at 2:12 PM

Franky, good riddance. The websites that had SEO optimized their way to the top of Google's search results for queries like "how to change DNS settings", "best free VPN", or "best wireless earbuds under $300" were generally terrible, and I can't say I'm sad that that creating that kind of "content" is no longer economically viable.

There were large categories of information had become extremely difficult to search for thanks to SEO optimized content farms like these. People switching to Reddit for discovery because of this search index pollution was a direct response to this. To me, LLMs feel like a return to the golden age of AltaVista and Google, where the Internet was a place you could reliably find the information you were looking for.

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SirMasteryesterday at 8:24 PM

But where will the AI get new information when the websites stop publishing new info?

mjr00yesterday at 4:23 PM

Yet these sites now use AI to generate more "content" (slop) than ever, leveraging their high Google rankings and SEO to lure people in. The people who haven't switched to an LLM for search, anyway.

Truly an ouroboros of garbage.

seydoryesterday at 3:35 PM

good luck in 4 years when the only answer they can give about new hardware is "I don't know"

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