Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Declaring War on the Web

tante.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 466 posts

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#101

Post by AlienRobot »

hightrix wrote: post #34
LinuxAmbulance wrote: post #10

We 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.

But Reddit also doesn't want you visiting new websites.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#102

Post by nicbou »

spankalee wrote: post #97

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?

Perplexity does not control who gets traffic on the internet. They don't own a significant percentage of the mobile OS, browse and online search market share. They can't force the industry in one way or the other, consequences be damned.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#103

Post by xp84 »

munchler wrote: post #47

If Google stops driving traffic to websites, won't those websites stop allowing Google to crawl their pages? The pendulum might be in motion, but it seems like there should still be some natural equilibrium that it's heading to.

They don't think they really need any more content outside of a few deals they can cut directly with publishers. And they already have YouTube, which produces limitless free content for them to use as they see fit. My blog from 20 years ago, or indeed all of our blogs today, are not something Google feels will be any loss to their product.

Someone will search for "Kylie Jenner" and they will get some kind of shopping opportunity (with Google getting a commission) and links to her profile on YouTube. And maybe some publisher content on the subject. In all cases they'll probably want to angle to get more of an "aGeNtIc" experience, where Google just reads you the story or buys the lipstick for you, without you leaving google.com.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#104

Post by AlienRobot »

spankalee wrote: post #97

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?

People don't like Google because it's bad. If competition wins, maybe they'll stop being so bad. But if they become badder themselves, that's not good.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#106

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

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.

I'm not his boss; I'm on a different team. But we're a very small company with very good compensation and revenue share in the company.

That ain't it.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#107

Post by xp84 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #88

> The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information. Google’s Vision since they were founded: Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful They told everyone what they were doing the whole time

you're right, I think we didn't realize these implied parts: "make it universally accessible [to Google] and useful [to Google's financial interests].

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#108

Post by AlienRobot »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #83
newAccount2025 wrote: post #16

I 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.

I have a particular disdain for “subscribe to our newsletter” modals. Especially when I’ve spent a sum total of less than 3 seconds looking at the webpage. How such modals aren’t considered pop-ups is beyond me.

So you want websites to rely on traffic from Google instead of building their own newsletter? Interesting.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#109

Post by iamnothere »

teamonkey wrote: post #25
LinuxAmbulance wrote: post #10

We 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?

It feels strange there’s no decentralised search. I know this is likely to do with the nature of the problem, but that hasn’t stopped us from getting some wildly-unsuitable decentralised nonsense in the past.

There is, YaCy, it just isn’t very good as it suffers from lack of attention/interest.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#110

Post by johnea »

A nice, terse, little rant. I agree completely.

I surprised however, that it didn't describe phase 2 of the disaster, where in the models no longer have fresh www content to train on.

It's hard to understand the long term vision of this strategy...

Post reply on HN