'Existential crisis': how Google's shift to AI has upended the online news model

(www.theguardian.com)
10 points 01-_- | 9 comments | 07 Sep 25 15:12 UTC | HN request time: 1.704s | source | bottom
1. Bratmon ◴[07 Sep 25 16:47 UTC] No.45159804[source]▶
Didn't the news industry just spend half a decade arguing that linking to their news is such a burden on them that Google should pay them to do it?
replies(1): >>45160003 #
2. mort96 ◴[07 Sep 25 17:08 UTC] No.45160003[source]▶
Wasn't that mostly about how Google extracts a portion of the article to display inline below the search result? I don't think the issue was with the links themselves
replies(2): >>45160154 #>>45160188 #
3. gdulli ◴[07 Sep 25 17:20 UTC] No.45160154{3}[source]▶
Yeah I don't know if that was a bad faith or just confused take you responded to but clearly the press was ultimately arguing for their own survival, which, selfish or not, aligns with our interests too. Destroying the imperfect institution of the press is a perennially easy message for demagogues to sell but replacing it with the tech industry is much worse.

The press didn't foresee that this path would specifically lead to something as stupid as automated generation of the news but they knew it was going somewhere stupid.

4. skybrian ◴[07 Sep 25 17:23 UTC] No.45160188{3}[source]▶
Google News stopped displaying snippets below headlines many years ago. Now they clutter the page with useless images and removed the preference to turn them off.
replies(1): >>45161745 #
5. mort96 ◴[07 Sep 25 20:16 UTC] No.45161745{4}[source]▶
Not sure why you bring up Google News when Google Search still displays snippets in search results
replies(1): >>45162152 #
6. skybrian ◴[07 Sep 25 21:06 UTC] No.45162152{5}[source]▶
It's what I use. Do people use Google Search to read the news?
replies(1): >>45165492 #
7. mort96 ◴[08 Sep 25 07:26 UTC] No.45165492{6}[source]▶
People use Google Search to search for things, sometimes Google provides articles from newspapers as search results. Surely you too have seen that before?
replies(1): >>45170090 #
8. skybrian ◴[08 Sep 25 16:13 UTC] No.45170090{7}[source]▶
Yes, but that’s research. When you’re reading the news, it’s to learn about news stories that you don’t already know something about.

I suppose you could also search on something generic like “ai news?” When I tried that, all the news story results at the top of the page had no snippets. It’s not until way down the page that there are regular search results with snippets.