Good thing they took "Do no evil" out of their manifesto years ago
Google Declaring War on the Web
31–40 of 466 posts
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#32The AI answers provide tons of source links. At the end of the day, is it really all that different to provide a list of links, versus an answer or overview of a few paragraphs with links to lots of different higher-quality sources? I follow those source links all the time . Not just to "check sources" but because they provide a ton more detail. And the links are usually much better than what I'll get with regular ke…
> The AI answers provide tons of source links.
A lot of the time, the answer itself is good, but the links are spam blogs and Tiktok videos. I don't think there's a real connection between how the text is generated and what "references" are picked for it. I just searched for a math history topic and the reference was a literal TikTok video that's an advertisement for a sketchy mobile calculator app?
So yeah, these references are boosting web content, but it has nothing to do with the high-quality sources used to train the LLMs in the first place.
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#33I would feel more sad about this if the web wasn’t so rotten to begin with. On average, any random site is just trying to throw ads at you and harass you to subscribe and such.
That rot was the direct result of the ad economy that made Google all of its money. Now maybe if they hadn't done it then somebody else would have, but they did do it, and poisoned the well we all drink from.
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#34We abrogated getting traffic to our websites to Google long ago. Mostly because Google was so good at it that the alternatives became significantly less useful. Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation. Anyone miss StumbleUpon?
Does a move like this give more power / value to websites like reddit? A link aggregator that is organized is much more useful for finding new websites.
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#35I don't understand the endgame here. Websites let Google crawl their content in exchange of traffic. If Google cuts that out completely, what incentive do websites have to not block the Google crawlers? I understand that Google is feeling an existential threat from other AI products that provide answers directly. But they must also understand their symbiotic relationship with the web.
The web is going to become China, which is a collection of walled gardens
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#36I don't know if it's Google AB-testing something, but the summaries below usual search result entries (the non-AI ones) are unbelievably bad today. Sometimes the link is a Reddit or SO post, but the summary is from a reply/answer with no vote contradicting the highest-voted ones. It's conspiracy, but it feels like Google is actively making the usual search worse so everyone will use AI overview more.
Don’t worry when I track down most AI answers it is usually just some Redditor’s comment, which is quite scary when you think about it and Redditors in general.
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
(sorry, nit pick, but I don't your usage of 'abrogate' is quite correct here, you can't abrogate to something)
> but I don't your usage If we're nitpicking, you don't what their usage?
> If we're nitpicking, you don't what their usage?
Abrogate their usage.
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#38It is not a war on the web, but on how it was traditionally used (and abused). And that "traditional" way was shaped by google too. As you want a cookie, i put you in a table, napking, serve you a bag of cookies and hope that you eat/find the cookie you want, while hearing my music, watching my ads, pushing you more foods that I sell and other services. And sometimes, that is the experience you are searching for. But…
Google pre 2010 was perfectly functional. No realtime search suggestions, advanced search parameters that were actually working, possibility of doing an exact string search if needed.
The technology for indexing the web was mature enough by then, already then.
I agree that much of the downward spiral was caused by google itself, tho.
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#39It is not a war on the web, but on how it was traditionally used (and abused). And that "traditional" way was shaped by google too. As you want a cookie, i put you in a table, napking, serve you a bag of cookies and hope that you eat/find the cookie you want, while hearing my music, watching my ads, pushing you more foods that I sell and other services. And sometimes, that is the experience you are searching for. But…
Google isn't a search company, and hasn't been ever since they bought DoubleClick. Their core business is advertising.
They're trying to pivot into AI because they have gobs of "evidence" that the vast majority of people have been typing natural language questions into Google instead of looking for specific terms
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#40I thought this was going to be about having to use your corporate approved phone to scan reCATCHA QR codes. Was just able to opt out of my first one but obviously won’t be able to forever.