While I’m somewhat skeptical with its business model, as I can’t see how they can become profitable, I can’t help but to appreciate Arc’s effort in redefining how a Mobile browser should be designed.
The emphasis they’ve put on search feels spot on on their so aptly called “Arc Search”, the whole bunch of design choices (open to the search bar, placing the toolbar close to the thumbs, tab previews…) feels so right on mobile!
Of course it’s still a prototype, as their CEO called it, but damn… it just feels like the browser I always wanted to have on my phone.
I’ve used it a few times since launch a couple of days ago, and yes, I’m impressed as well.
At a baseline, it at least lets me skip the “how useless is a basic Google search about this?” phase of my searches. Since it takes the top search results and summarizes them, it’s a quick way for me to get a sense of what the results of a query look like, and I can then formulate better queries.
I’m gonna keep using it as my default browser for now, anyway!
As a creator I’m disappointed - you will get the benefit of my work, without visiting my site. I’ve spent years writing in my niche and will get nothing for my effort. No eyeballs, no byline. No trust built?
As a consumer since we know that these are just prediction models, why would you trust it?
Isn’t that the issue for everyone using AI to search now? I have Perplexity set as my default search engine on my Macs, and I only click the source links if I think something is wrong or want to know more.
On the other side of things, I look up Excel formulas a lot, I have my trusted sites, but AI and Google also have another dozen with the same info. As a user, all I care about is the results. For a lot of sites I visit, I just want to cut all the clutter, get the info I need and most likely will never go back to that site again. Now if I am looking for everyday reads, that is different, but those are a rare find.
…And this is killing small independent businesses. Yes it’s a problem with all LLMs.
I will likely survive, I’ve got a 5+K mailing list and I can switch to advertising. However, without getting paid these tools have taken away a large chunk of my revenue. ~1/3 of my annual revenue has come from people who visit my website, subscribe to a newsletter and buy a course.
I love it too, but I really hope they add more features soon. Default search engine and extensions (especially a password manager) are pretty important.
No - I sell workshops and knowledge. I rely on visitors to my website (Agile and Scrum) to decide that my work is good enough to get a download or signup for a newsletter.
No traffic → No signups → … → less revenue.
I’m shifting gears, but am disappointed LLMs use creators like me for the knowledge they regurgitate and the creator gets no benefit.
So things like Arc Search that link to your site as one of their sources aren’t a good compromise? They are surfacing your free information and if it’s relevant/good enough, someone clicks through to the source to get deeper knowledge on the topics you cover?
Caveat I’m going to share material from my professional site. Scrum and all flavours of Agile are badly understood, by LLMs. Likely because they’ve harvested 1000s of badly written sites.
So first your LLM summary has a fair chance of being wrong, second even if correct it will miss all of the subtlety. I don’t have Arc installed to try this, so you will need to try it yourself. On google for: “Scrum Working Agreements” - this The Power and Purpose of Team Working Agreements - Scrum by Example is usually in the top 2-3 results. Look at what Arc feeds you and then read my blog post.
Second even if it did a good job, I spent several days rewriting this and making it better recently, don’t I as the creator deserve people visiting my site?
Flip the tables for a moment. Imagine you spend ~1 day week creating material for your website. How would you feel if the results were scrapped and people credited the LLM for what they learned?
I can understand your frustration as a content creator. But I think they do a good job showing the sources for people to dive deeper. I would argue if people are interested in a brief summary, they will not sign up to a newsletter anyway (at least I would not). Maybe see it as an „appetiser“ for interested people to come to your site?
To me, Arc Search feels like a futuristic version of what Google is doing anyway. Quite like it.
In the long run, this signals to the small independent players such as myself - get out of the writing business. I won’t move to the MacSparky model, but I do need to move.
In turn this degrades the AI summary model, because the summaries are only of bland vanilla material.
LLM generated content has been a problem since about 2 days after ChatGPT 3.5. To be fair people are just generating articles that google ranks.
In addition google is prioritizing homogeneity, there was a good article on the Verge for this recently.
@95omega I think it may get worse yet. As an independent, I could move to YouTube, but I think LLMs will colonize that soon enough. Further there is some content that is better written and not turned into 5-7 min video.
For those who buy your course, your target audience, why would a potential purchaser be satisfied w/ a summary snippet from an LLM-assisted search engine? If that is all the info they really need, how can they be a targeted customer?
If an LLM summary of your landing page causes your revenue to drop, that seems like a group of customers that didn’t need to be customers to begin with…
I appreciate that users on this forum mean well, However, you don’t know my business model. I will try to give a bit more information and then I will step out of this thread, I don’t appear to be adding anything.
Doing Agile well takes a great deal of learning and is subtle. Many people ask surface level questions only to discover there is more depth. Having things summarized by an LLM will miss all that.
In my case, I can tell that many people join our mailing list after reading one of our deeper blog posts and then attend a workshop 18-24 mths later. It’s those people I will lose to summarization feature.
My mailing list is large enough and I’m learning enough about doing a Lean Startup style approach through FB ads, I will regrow my business, However, the days of an indie publishing content to the web for free are winding down. I might do it for fun occasionally, but it no longer makes business sense.