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Google Declaring War on the Web

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Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#91

Post by alluro2 »

arjie wrote: post #49

These kinds of declarations rarely make sense to me because they don't seem to model the issues in the way that I see them. I have dual roles: one as a person who writes a blog (a "content producer" in our present parlance) and as a user. As a user, I want my browser user agent to act on my behalf to display web pages, and I want my search agent to extract information from numerous sources and synthesize them with ap…

I...have to agree about siding against the web...An optimistic part of me sees this as a move that pushes in the same direction that the "web" has already been going in for a long time - preventing users from getting the right information in an honest and efficient manner, preserving their attention budget, and choice. Until now, it was through increasing the noise to push monetary incentives, and now it's by cutting the noise to push monetary incentives. Why optimistic: up till now, there was no single enemy, and it was hard to fight a (somewhat) disjointed system; now, Google is positioning itself to push things further to the worse, with them (and small number of other companies) being the clear target.

My hope is that this will help overflow the proverbial glass for an increasing amount of people and we'll start pushing back towards the "old" web before Google and ad networks have transformed it, or find new modalities of interacting more freely with each other, and the content.

It's not going to be a small or easy fight, though...to a large extent, it's a fight against the current state of capitalism itself, and winning back our attention, critical thinking and choice.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#92

Post by StilesCrisis »

theendisney wrote: post #82

Out of my countless www experiments the website made for myself turned out most enjoyable. Technically it is a blog with links, quotes, categories, tags and search. Sometimes i download all pages it links to. (tens of thousands) Google dropped it from the index long ago. I had a fun discussion with some google folk where they kept arguing my website was designed wrong and that some pages had tomany links. Basically,…

At one point the web was drowned in "listicles," low-effort sites made to match queries like "best movies from the 90s" or "new music in 2023". Google attempted to downrank these sorts of sites because they were in general very very low quality and were just designed to catch a lot of traffic and display ads alongside low-effort content. (Think one page per list entry, each page transition is a whole new set of ads.) Users disliked these. It sounds like your site was misclassified as a low-effort listicle site.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#93

Post by jumploops »

jfengel wrote: post #86
jumploops wrote: post #79

It looks like Google has taken a note out of Facebook's "lose trust" playbook. Facebook had a huge opportunity in the post-AI world: real humans. Instead of focusing on connections, they've been optimizing their properties for doomscrolling. Google, similarly, has lost the plot on what made them trustworthy in the first place: navigating to citable content. Both companies started on this trend well before AI, but thi…

I don't think people cared all that much about whether or not the content was citable. You can't cite Wikipedia, and that's not going anywhere. Facebook may well fail when people don't enjoy it. But all Google ever promised was information, of variously dubious quality, and that's still their draw.

Fair, citable is probably the wrong term.

This is a problem Google has been battling forever, with all the SEO click spam.

In either case, Google was the tool that many people used to find "trustworthy" information (citable or not), compared to the other tools online.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#94

Post by WD-42 »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #27

I 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.

What I really don't understand is where the next generation of training material will come from. If websites stop being published and/or crawled, how will the machine continue to be fed.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#95

Post by bigfishrunning »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #84
gatlin wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a co-worker who does this now. He's very smart, very capable, very experienced and it's clear that he's just a frontend for Claude now. It's tragic.

Maybe organize to give these workers more equity or rev share instead of just a wage so they care more for quality results instead of the behaviors they’re evaluated on and you’ll find them more pleasant to work with.

That will only encourage this behavior

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#96

Post by jfengel »

tamimio wrote: post #61

Glad I haven’t used anything google for more than a decade. For internet searches, you can host searxng instance and use it. Other services too are self-hostable, even far better than google.

You host your own global search engine? That's impressive.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#97

Post by spankalee »

It is interesting to look at the past predictions on here of AI search/answer companies like Perplexity possibly dethroning Google search and comparing to the reactions of Google just doing the same thing themselves.

Why would it be good if Perplexity does it, but bad if Google does it? What are the principles at play here?

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#98

Post by AlienRobot »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #27

I 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 impression I get from Google's own marketing material is that Google doesn't believe in "the web". And it hasn't believed in the web for years.

Think about it. Pretty much every time they show a search box with someone asking for directions to reach a physical place, what hours is it open, etc.

The greatest thing about the internet is that it has removed distances around the whole world, but Google's major value proposition seems to be that... it can accurately index and query information about local businesses?

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#99

Post by bediger4000 »

WD-42 wrote: post #94
DeusExMachina wrote: post #27

I 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.

What I really don't understand is where the next generation of training material will come from. If websites stop being published and/or crawled, how will the machine continue to be fed.

Either Google is ignoring that, or crossing their fingers and hoping that one LLM can produce data to train another one.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#100

Post by nicbou »

analogpixel wrote: post #29

I feel like AI has gotten to the point where the message is: If you want to make something (art/code/music/writing) you can do it for your own enjoyment, but you aren't allowed to make money from it anymore; only the large corporations can make money from content. If you do release something creative, it'll just be fed back into the machine to be copied over and over.

No money and no audience.

Recognition and gratitude keeps me going. Money pays the bills, but if that was the only concern, I'd still be a software developer.

Anonymously feeding the slop machine is nothing like it.

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