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google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

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Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

surprising to see how much they have stripped from our view Don't forget cached pages.

Which being public wealth, should be publicly available. Data that were sourced from the public, should be public. We need this legislated, or wealth inequality and fiefdoms will keep growing with the historically known outcomes.

Didn't Google take it down because of copyright? With the rise of paywalls it became a backdoor around them, but Google doesn't actually have a license to republish the copyrighted text they scraped.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which being public wealth, should be publicly available. Data that were sourced from the public, should be public. We need this legislated, or wealth inequality and fiefdoms will keep growing with the historically known outcomes.

Didn't Google take it down because of copyright? With the rise of paywalls it became a backdoor around them, but Google doesn't actually have a license to republish the copyrighted text they scraped.

It's not a backdoor is the sites intentionally served Google a version without the paywall so the indexing got "better" than what real users got. The sites kind of dug their own hole here, Google wouldn't even sit on the content unless it was offered up to them in that way.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#344
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse - We all are paying with our planet.

what is that not true of? HN and your post on it is paying with our planet

Everything uses energy. AI is uniquely bad due to its scale. Comparing AI inference and training with posting a one-line comment on a website is like comparing wildfires with candles because they both produce heat. It's true but useless as an argument.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#345

So why are we angry about that ? I mean the end result for the users are exactly the same, it matters only for bots. Google have such a (justified) bad reputation that whatever they do, people assume it’s entishification. I don’t believed it is on that matter.

Aside from the privacy concerns and inconveniences this brings to Google users, it matters for users (of services) that rely on SerpApi too. Kagi for example has started showing these goto URLs in search results.

Well, that's rather the point, right? Kagi and other micro search engines sell a product that just resells Google search results while telling people it's a premium product better than Google. Obviously Google isn't pleased about that.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 did. https://meduza.io/image/attachments/images/007/699/276/large...

How about topics the Russian government doesn't care about?

How about topics that USA censors?

Of course you should not search Ukraine info on yandex. But you are only showing the worst case scenario. What's the average and best case?

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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?

The quintessential HN comment questioning the obvious.

Yandex does Putin's bidding much much further than any western search engine ever meddled with their results for political purposes. Yandex employees' lives would be actively at risk if they didn't.

Sometimes I really wish a hard reality check would meet the people making such comments from the comfort of their programming chair or from thousands of kilometers away.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do GEO now and it's not to make the robot link to us, it's to manipulate what the robot thinks.

How do you even measure GEO, sometimes I try searching for my app and sometimes claude recommends my competitor that has 10x less reviews and is objectively worse saying is the most popular.

To measure it, you could ask it 100 times and see how many times it returns each answer.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#349

So why are we angry about that ? I mean the end result for the users are exactly the same, it matters only for bots. Google have such a (justified) bad reputation that whatever they do, people assume it’s entishification. I don’t believed it is on that matter.

1. It adds extra latency due to an extra hop.

2. It is non-bypassable tracking of every single click.

3. It does not allow you to inspect the URL to see where it goes to before visiting.

4. It breaks the feedback signal of extensions which redirect sites. E.g. Fandom wikis are shit so I have them redirected to equivalent much better wikis like. But now any such redirection has to be done post-click tracking meaning Google still believes I want to see the Fandom site.

5. It breaks extensions which hide certain shit search results based on URL.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#350
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using DDG for a long time now. Results are getting more and more spammy. Way too many AI-generated / scraped websites nowadays.

Try Brave.

Do they still mitm sites to put their brave crypto donation buttons on, so you think a content creator is getting the money?
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