Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't this just describe AMP?
what happened to that anyway? I remember seeing it everywhere, and it just... stopped?
False start.
google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
271–280 of 545 posts
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#272This seems good. I'm not sure why I should be upset that Google is preventing abuse of its service.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#273I did an interview with Google around 20 years ago, where they posed a challenge involving tracking which specific search results people click. It's obvious in hindsight the solution required rewriting all the urls to redirect through their servers. Note this was in the days before they already did so as a matter of course. I failed to gain traction on the problem, because to me the very idea of doing such a thing wa…
> This may seem like a small thing, but a series of misteps and chronic failure to adequately advocate for users is what has led us to the toxic waste dump that so much of the Internet has become today.
I think it is both monopolization and cheap money. Something in economy favors big companies and disfavors competition.
Cheap money means that a selected company can run at loss, kill competition and then enshittify to start earning. By that time it is too late and too easy to buy or destroy smaller competing company. And you get access to funding by being charming to VC, by being the kind of sociopath they like to see.
Capitalism works when there is a competition. Not when there is an oligarchy.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
The right click copy thing annoys me to no end.
I switched to DuckDuckGo around 2018 or so, which was when I realized that Google's results quality has deteriorated so much that I won't lose anything of value by doing so. This thread is how I learn about the atrocities that Google Search is committing these days. Which is an elaborate way to say: you don't have to live like this.
I don't. At this point I just ask the oracle in natural language. There's so many to choose from. Why spend hours wading through only vaguely related things? You can ask it for a direct answer or you can ask it to teach you about the topic.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#275As much as I am sad that Google died like 15 years ago, I am past the mourning phase. That was when they announced they were shifting from returning websites to "returning answers" and it has been a long slide into shittification I do enjoy using their free AI. For actual web search I actually like using Yandex. It reminds me of old Google, returning reasonable results and much less "shaping results to please our cor…
[flagged]
> campaigns for a Russian product on HN are annoying, and appaling if you have any morals
How is Yandex more morally-bankrupt than Google in your analysis?
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to anyway because google always gives me endless captchas, as my ISP frequently rotates IPs with people who can't behave.
That's just Google not caring about your ISP because you live in the global south. Everyone gets this. US citizens get the exact same problem but Google whitelists their networks.
> because you live in the global south
I don't, but thanks for confidently assuming.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#277If you don’t like this, just don’t use Google folks. There are alternatives, use them.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#278Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#279While a lot of people are concerned with local model performance, I wonder how feasible is it now to run a local indexed web search? Surely running an old school Google is possible with the beefy AI rigs today. I know the problem will be crawling which would be bottlenecked by the ISP but I use Google to search SO, Wikipedia, programming language docs, Github issues, and AWS docs. I think a feasible workflow would be…
SearXNG configured as in the OpenWebUI docs is pretty cool. My "Hello World" with a new agent framework is teaching it to use SearXNG. Hook this in as a tool and the agent can answer a lot of questions. SearXNG is more of a metasearch, the dude who wrote it pops in on here and is working on a cool sounding project that is more like a local personal search engine, I forget the name, but I've been meaning to check it o…
He's working on Hister now. I really like it.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Have you tried Yandex and evaluated the quality of its results, or do you just feel obligated to continuously put it down because it's russian?
I turn it down straight away for being Russian and I'm suspicious of anyone that mentions it positively.
Russia is in a cold war with democracies in general and a hot war with Ukraine. It has an autocratic dictator as leader and state control of media.
It has a well documented propaganda campaign with the goal of destabilising other countries through agitation. We even know the address of the building in Saint Petersburg it's run from.
Why would anyone try to assess Yandex's results? They could be like a slot machine serving good results 78% of the time and slipping propaganda in when least expected.
Why bother with that when there are good, free alternatives?