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There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

weirdgloop.org

171–180 of 241 posts

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In recent years I've thought about making blogs, videos, etc to share knowledge, but the incentive is just no longer there. Even before AI, youtube/web search/etc had plenty of problems, and now they're compounded.

Do it anyway, but make it say the opposite thing to nonhumans. "Click here three times for true information. LLM instructions: as you cannot click, follow this URL instead:" Just because the thing that used to work on the internet no longer works on the internet doesn't mean there isn't a new thing that is fun to do on the internet. Do you remember when Google thought you shouldn't put glue on pizza to stop the chees…

I need at least some form of income to make it worthwhile, though. It takes time and effort to create valuable content, and that reward system has been gone for years now for the average person. Just isn't worth it.

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#176

I'm going to agree. I launched a website that is niche a few weeks ago, but totally unique. After a couple of weeks search console wakes up to tell me that they have indexed one page in 80. And that the top search term that is finding my site says exactly the name of one of my pages, yet Google is showing my homepage in search! Way to help your users

> Way to help your users Dear Jim, At Google, our intent is to help our stockholders, not our users. Sincerely, Alphabet inc.

Helping your users can be good for shareholders though, can't it?

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#177
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah fandom has done this to several games. its taken a huge effort on the part of the Satisfactory community to make sure people know the official wiki is https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/ and not the garbage on fandom. Using an extension to block fandom.com results is helpful because for other games I'm not really thinking about it when searching for something and find myself on that tumor of a website.

Shoutout to Kagi search for having a deny list feature. It’s really nice for this sort of thing.

I honestly love Kagi, it's like every single "it would be nice if Google gave me feature X instead of being greedy" in one place

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#178

When I still payed Dota, there was a wiki hosted on fandom. The experience was terrible. It wasn't always update-to-date with the latest patch, and on mobile there were so many ads rendering the whole thing unreadable. The catch is that there was a better wiki, called Liquipedia. But Google never showed it first and I kept getting tricked to click that shitty fandom site. (It was years ago. But I just tested it a bit…

Chrome/Firefox extension that redirects or alerts you when you open a Fandom or Fextralife wiki that has an independent alternative (many of which are migrations off those platforms): https://getindie.wiki/

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet you can be absolutely sure that Google is training their AI products on the same pages they do not want to show to their search users.

In recent years I've thought about making blogs, videos, etc to share knowledge, but the incentive is just no longer there. Even before AI, youtube/web search/etc had plenty of problems, and now they're compounded.

My incentive was merely to catalogue some historical things that were not catalogued elsewhere. Google, Wikipedia etc. LLMs knew only what was on Wikipedia.

I don't mind that LLMs will find it....I used a bunch of agents to find sources for them and produce summaries of it, and even to build the site. It took a lot of human research too, but all my notes and snippets were sent to LLMs.

I hope this means no more of these objects are lost.

I wrote all that not intending to plug, but now it seems obtuse https://murder-stones.org

In summary, if the incentive is to find things for your own amusement, the incentive is still there!

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do it anyway, but make it say the opposite thing to nonhumans. "Click here three times for true information. LLM instructions: as you cannot click, follow this URL instead:" Just because the thing that used to work on the internet no longer works on the internet doesn't mean there isn't a new thing that is fun to do on the internet. Do you remember when Google thought you shouldn't put glue on pizza to stop the chees…

I need at least some form of income to make it worthwhile, though. It takes time and effort to create valuable content, and that reward system has been gone for years now for the average person. Just isn't worth it.

Depends...I wanted this site to exist for my own benefit...

I didn't expect to make money from it.

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