llm/7c7e49f1-870c-4915-9398-3b2e1f116c0c/topic-12-e3968f38-3838-4a3b-9001-a8704511b319-input.json
You are a comment summarizer. Given a topic and a list of comments tagged with that topic, write a single paragraph summarizing the key points and perspectives expressed in the comments. TOPIC: Google search integration decline COMMENTS: 1. There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also... For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user interface for years. And it worked. It worked pretty well! Until it didn't. At some point, Google started surfacing fewer "tried and true" Q&A examples and more unanswered, poorly-answered or moderated examples. This broke the fundamental assumption that sat behind SO's moderation - that curating a smaller set of posts was preferable to encouraging more, and newer. Suddenly, Google wasn't a very good UI for SO anymore. ...and SO didn't really have a fallback. Heck, for a while during this period they actually stopped showing questions on their homepage unless you were already logged in; the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing. LLMs weren't the start of the problem, they were the end - the final wake-up call. I don't know that a site like SO can exist without the old Google, the old Internet; it is a product of all that, in the same way that mass-market TV shows were a product of 20th-century broadcast technology, or trade paperbacks of a particular intersection of printing tech and reading habits. [0]: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html 2. There was some of that for sure; sites that were all but designed to be attractive nuisances and took near-heroic efforts to moderate at all, with little chance of not causing a lot of drama. OTOH, topic-specific sites like Mathematics, MathOverflow, Physics, even small ones like Home Improvement or Seasoned Advice... Managed to collect a lot of good stuff: common niche questions with good answers that have a good chance at staying relevant for a long time to come. In a sane world, a few relevant ads on these sites would be enough to fund them for decades. But that appears to be another area where Google kinda shit the bed. 3. It still seems a bit too simplistic… no one imagined that Google could behave less than 100% virtuously in the future? Really? 4. > The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet. Not provide a service for the question-asker or answerer. Sad now though, since LLMs have eaten this pie. 5. > It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly. No, it is not up to me to figure that out. I have heard it said quite loudly many times, over a period of many years. What you are missing is: I. Do. Not. Care. The goal was never for the site to be "not dead". The goal was for the site to host useful information that is readily found. The site already has tons of useful information. But it's drowning in... much less useful information, and Google has become much worse (to some extent intentionally) at surfacing the good parts. > And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026 This is a bizarre thing to say to me, of all people. I am always the one catching flak for telling people that 2.7 had to go, that the backwards-incompatible changes were vital, that the break wasn't radical enough, and that people were given way more time to switch over than they should have needed. But really, the feedback for Stack Overflow is trying to take it in the direction of places that existed long beforehand. If you want forums, you know where to find them. And now you can also find LLMs. Which, as commonly used by people seeking programming help, are basically a grizzled forum guy in a can. >Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you. "Everyone actually agrees with [me]" is the polar opposite of what I actually believe and am actually saying. I am well aware that the model is unpopular. My point is that the popularity of the model is irrelevant to me. > Can I guess you had a lot of reputation points and you desperately don't want to believe they're worthless now? I have a lot of reputation points (the site still exists), far more than I ever felt I deserved, and I never really felt like they were worth anything. A huge percentage of them come from an answer to a terrible question (that was still terrible after heroic attempts at editing; this all happened long before there was a common understanding of the purpose of question closure or what would make good standards for questions) that, once I understood things properly, I closed and tried to get deleted. Over the last few years, with that new understanding, I have been trying to give away my superfluous reputation points in bounties, trying to get missing answers written for the few really good questions lacking good answers that I identify, always to no avail (the bounty system promptly became a honeypot for ChatGPT hallucinations as soon as ChatGPT became available). You do not know me or my motivations in the slightest. 6. Top-level view: from the perspective of people who aren't explicitly trying to teach on their own initiative, overall the site has outlived its purpose. In that time it drew way too many total questions to surface what's actually valuable; between that and no functional search (the internal search was always bad; Google et. al. got worse over time, partly intentionally) you're lucky to find anything valuable. I'm not generally worried about out-of-date answers; the truly outdated answers are mostly on outdated questions , describing situations that don't come up any more or premises that are no longer valid for ordinary programmers (e.g., fixing problems with obsolete tools). Combing through to curate properly is too little, too late now. Much stronger (but polite, of course) gatekeeping was required earlier on, which in turn required (among other things) proper means for communication between "core" users and the public. At this point, it's best to start over (hence the part where I'm now a moderator at Codidact). There's a lot more I want to say, but I don't have it organized in my head and this is way downthread already. Perhaps I could interest you in a hypothetical future blog post? 7. This is because the real goal was SEO. 8. It doesn't appear to have worked. 9. > They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet This is mostly how I engaged with SO for a long, long time. I think it’s a testament to SO’s curation of answers that I didn’t ask almost any questions for like 5+ years after starting programming 10. Sad? No. A good LLM is vastly better than SO ever was. An LLM won't close your question for being off-topic in the opinion of some people but not others. It won't flame you for failing to phrase your question optimally, or argue about exactly which site it should have been posted on. It won't "close as duplicate" because a vaguely-similar question was asked 10 years ago in a completely-different context (and never really got a great answer back then). Moreover, the LLM has access to all instances of similar problems, while a human can only read one SO page at a time. The question of what will replace SO in future models, though, is a valid one. People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. So many site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's. 11. This doesn't mean that it's over for SO. It just means we'll probably trend towards more quality over quantity. Measuring SO's success by measuring number of questions asked is like measuring code quality by lines of code. Eventually SO would trend down simply by advancements of search technology helping users find existing answers rather than asking new ones. It just so happened that AI advanced made it even better (in terms of not having to need to ask redundant questions). 12. Too bad stack overflow didn't high-quality-LLM itself early. I assume it had the computer-related brainpower. with respect to the "moderation is the cause" thing... Although I also don't buy moderation as the cause, I wonder if any sort of friction from the "primary source of data" can cause acceleration. for example, when I'm doing an interenet search for the definition of a word like buggywhip, some search results from the "primary source" show: > buggy whip, n. meanings, etymology and more | Oxford English Dictionary > Factsheet What does the noun buggy whip mean? There is one meaning in OED's entry for the noun buggy whip. See 'Meaning & use' for definition, usage, and quotation evidence. which are non-answer to keep their traffic. but the AI answer is... the answer. If SO early on had had some clear AI answer + references, I think that would have kept people on their site. 13. Google also played a part. After a while, I noticed that for my programming related questions, almost no SO discussions showed up. When they did appear on the first page, they were usually abysmal and unusable for me. When it started all kinds of very clever people were present and helped even with very deep and complex questions and problems. A few years later these people disappeared. The moderation was ok in the beginning, then they started wooing away a lot of talented people. And then the mods started acting like nazis, killing discussions, proper questions on a whim. And then bots (?) or karma obsessed/farming people started to upvote batshit crazy, ridiculous answers, while the proper solution had like 5 upvotes and no green marker next to it. It was already a cesspool before AI took over and they sold all their data. Initial purpose achieved. 14. I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel that at some point you will find yourself on or beyond SO's "knowledge frontier". The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead. I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless since even the original poster would disappear, and anyone who found my answer from Google wouldn't be able to give me an upvote either. 15. It seemed to me that pre-llm, google had stopped surfacing stackoverflow answers in search results. 16. My memory is there were a spate of SO scraping sites that google would surface above SO and google just would not zap. It would have been super trivial to fix but google didn’t. My pet theory was that google were getting doubleclick revenue from the scrapers so had incentives to let them scrape and to promote them in search results. 17. What you're arguing about is the field completely changing over 3 years; it's nothing, as a time for everyone to change their minds. LLMs were not productified in a meaningful way before ChatGPT in 2022 (companies had sufficiently strong LLMs, but RLHF didn't exist to make them "PR-safe"). Then we basically just had to wait for LLM companies to copy Perplexity and add search engines everywhere (RAG already existed, but I guess it was not realistic to RAG the whole internet), and they became useful enough to replace StackOverflow. 18. Right. I often end up on Stack Exchange when researching various engineering-related topics, and I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are. We get small glimpses of that on HN, but it was absolutely out of control on Stack Exchange. At the same time, I think there was another factor: at some point, the corpus of answered questions has grown to a point where you no longer needed to ask, because by default, Google would get you to the answer page. LLMs were just a cherry on top. 19. People overestimate the impact of toxicity on number of monthly questions. The initial growth was due to missing answers. After some time there is a saturation point where all basic questions are already answered and can be found via Google. If you ask them again they are marked as dups. 20. Seriously where will we get this info anymore? I’ve depended on it for decades. No matter how obscure, I could always find a community that was talking about something I needed solved. I feel like that’s getting harder and harder every year. The balkanization of the Internet + garbage AI slop blogs overwhelming the clearly declining Google is a huge problem. 21. Not to mention, it's not indexed by search engines. It's the "deep web". 22. The discoverability, both from the outside and within is absolute trash, but the closest I find of those old forums nowadays are Discord servers. 23. Agreed, it’s the discoverability that’s the real problem here at the end of it all. All the veterans are pulling up the drawbridges to protect their communities from trolls, greedy companies, AI scraping, etc. which means new people can’t find them. Which then means these communities eventually whither and stop being helpful resources for us all. 24. AI is generally setup to return the "best" answer as defined as the most common answer, not the rightest, or most efficient or effective answer, unless the underlying data leans that way. It's why AI based web search isn't behaving like google based search. People clicking on the best results really was a signal for google on what solution was being sought. Generally, I don't know that LLMs are covering this type of feedback loop. 25. I too, around 2012 was too much active on so, in fact, it had that counter thing continuously xyz days most of my one liners, or snippets for php are still the highest voted answers. Even now when sometimes I google something, and an answer comes up, I realize its me who asked the same question and answered it too. 26. > - Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask. I think this is one major factor that is not getting enough consideration in this comment thread. By 2018-2020, it felt like the number of times that someone else had already asked the question had increased to the point that there was no reason to bother asking it. Google also continued to do a better and better job of surfacing the right StackOverflow thread, even if the SO search didn't. In 2012 you might search Google, not find what you needed, go to StackOverflow, search and have no better luck, then make a post (and get flamed for it being a frequently-asked question but you were phrasing yours in a different / incorrect way and didn't find the "real" answer). In 2017, you would search Google and the relevant StackOverflow thread would be in the top few results, so you wouldn't need to post and ask. In 2020, Google's "rich snippets" were showing you the quick answers in the screen real estate that is now used by the AI Overview answers, and those often times had surfaced some info taken from StackOverflow. And then, at the very end of 2022, ChatGPT came along and effectively acted as the StackOverflow search that you always wanted - you could phrase your question as poorly as you want, no one would flame you, and you'd get some semblance of the correct answer (at least for simple questions). I think StackOverflow was ultimately a victim of it's own success. Most of the questions that would be asked by your normal "question asker" type of user were eventually "solved" and it was just a matter of how easy it was to find them. Google, ChatGPT, "AI Overviews", Claude Code, etc have simply made finding those long-answered questions much easier, as well as answering all of the "new" questions that could be posed - and without all of the drama and hassle of dealing with a human-moderated site. 27. This is horrifying. Given the fact that when I need a question answered I usually refer to S.O. , but more recently have taken suggestions from LLM models that were obviously trained on S.O. data... And given the fact that all other web results for "how do you change the scroll behavior on..." or "SCSS for media query on..." all lead to a hundred fake websites with pages generated by LLMs based on old answers. Destroying S.O. as a question/answer source leaves only the LLMs to answer questions. That's why it's horrific. 28. Reddit is a forum morphed into social media. I usually use "question + reddit" on Google to confirm my suspicions about a subject. It is a place to discuss things rather than find answers. It is extremely politicized (leftist/liberal), but that's a whole other story. 29. One factor I haven't seen mentioned is the catastrophic decline in quality of Google search. That started pre-llm and now the site is almost unusable to search web. You can access something you know exists and you know where it exists, but to actually search..? Most SO users are passive readers who land there using search, but these readers are also the feed of new active users. Cut off the influx, and the existing ones will be in decline (the moderation just accelerates it). 30. I'm glad I learned how to program when you could coax useful answers from Google searches. Whenever a Stack Overflow result comes up now the answer is years old and wrong, you might as well search archive.org. 31. SO has been a curse on technology. I've met teams of people who decide whether to adopt some technology based solely on if they can find SO answers for it. They refuse to read documentation or learn how the technology works; they'll only google for SO answers, and if the answer's not there, they give up. There's an entire generation like this now. 32. Wonder if this is a good proxy for '# of Google Searches'. Or perhaps a forward indicator (sign of things to come), since LLMs are adopted by the tech-savvy first, then the general public a little later, so Stack Overflow was among the first casualties. 33. Stack overflow was useful with a fairly sanitized search like “mysql error 1095”. Agentic LLMs do there best work when able to access your entire repository or network environment for context, which is impossible to sanitize. For a season, private environments will continue to be able to use SO. But as LLMs capture all the good questions and keep them private, public SO will become less and less relevant. It’s sad to see a resource of this class go. 34. I suspect a lot of the traffic shift is from Google replacing the top search result, which used to be Stack Overflow for programming questions, with a Gemini answer. 35. Has AI summarization led to people either getting their answer from a search engine directly, and failing that, just giving up? 36. Probably similar for google. My first line of search is always chatgpt 37. Good riddance to bad rubbish (TLDR: Questions are now almost never being asked on Stack overflow). The most annoying example I can think of (but can’t link to, alas) is when I Googled for an answer to a technical question, and got an annoying Stack Overflow answer which didn’t answer the question, telling the person to just Google the answer. 38. I wonder if google search saw a similar hit 39. My personal bet is that traditional search engines face a -70% usage drop at the moment. 40. I doubt it. If I want to ask AI a simple question I type it into Google now. 41. anecdotally, i personally stopped using google a lot in the last few years 42. It makes sense to see the number of questions decline over time as people google questions and get results. It would be interesting to look at the number of comments and views of questions over time to see if that has declined as LLMs have driven declining engagement and discussion. Write a concise, engaging paragraph (3-5 sentences) that captures the main ideas, notable perspectives, and overall sentiment of these comments regarding the topic. Focus on the most interesting and representative viewpoints. Do not use bullet points or lists - write flowing prose.
Google search integration decline
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