LLMs need to consume websites to give answers. No websites = no LLM.

If your websites add no value to the LLM (hence to the searcher, to the world, how deep should we get?), well then thats a good side effect

Yes, the question is how do the websites get a return.

If it’s like a featured snippet, should work great. “Here’s an answer, read more here”

If the LLM Hoovers up all the knowledge and doesn’t show where it got it, then there is no incentive to produce the knowledge

I imagine Google is acutely aware of this, they have a symbiotic relationship with site owners. But we’ll see.

There is some sort of issue here not well addressed by copyright

Really I think the question is around "symbiotic relationship."

Google has failed to win decisively in the search result ranking arms race. Concrete example: sites that rip from stackoverflow have been ranking higher than stackoverflow in google search results. Other search engines fare worse.

If Google trained a discriminator that penalized these practices I think their search product would dramatically improve and the web as a whole might benefit - although tabloid article farms might sue.

> Google has failed to win decisively in the search result ranking arms race.

They have 84% market share which seems like winning in all the ways businesses care about, regardless of how it ranks your stackoverflow searches.

That's just applying a completely different and irrelevant metric to dismiss the point of the previous poster.

The arms race of "fast trash" websites vs quality search results is not being won by Google or anyone else as of today. Google having a business model that doesn't even incentivize them to win that race =/= Google not losing that race. It's closer to them giving up in defeat, which is a loss for all of us (many times over).

The ranking arms race isn't against competitors, it's against SEOs.

Can't edit my comment, but to add to it: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/until...

They can sue all they want, but they don’t have a leg to stand on. There is no right to demand be ranked highly or even at all.

what? the web page throws has good info that gets fed into the LLM. it's that users no longer visit the web page and see ads which pays for the sites operation

What if the website does add value to the LLM, but only in the training/indexing stage? Like, if I create a website that painstakingly measures and lists the weights of thousands of widgets, then the LLM ingests that knowledge and then never sends the user to my page.

Maybe it's more convenient for the user to pay the LLM for the info (paid via ad attention or whatever), but if I'm the one who made the measurements, then shouldn't I be paid too? If the user never "pays" me, then I'm going to stop publishing measurements, and the whole LLM falls apart.

Likewise for generative art. The people who made the training data are a critical part of the ecosystem. Cutting them out seems like cutting out some critical part of a food chain.

And that will be a tough problem to solve but Google may do something similar to what they do with YouTube Premium and paying creators an amount that is based on how much of their content the subscribers of Premium have watched.

Google Search could pay some small percentage back when they use their work. But it would be a weird one so not sure that's really going to happen.

How is google going to know where to send the check? And who negotiates the rate? We aren't talking about people uploading content to google search. We're talking about information google might take from other people's sites.

You just made me more hopeful that Google gets it right then. Anything that helps out an end to SEO is a good thing.

do you find that ChatGPT is useful for the search terms that are most valuable to your customers?

Not there yet, but if google manages to nail it and make it have always current knowledge, it could definitely be.