This is like the frog in the boiling water story, except Frog is worried about being boiled alive after the temperature has only risen .001 degrees, so he writes articles saying "Google is burying the web alive" begging for someone to save him.
Google is burying the web alive
101–110 of 208 posts
Re: Google is burying the web alive
#102Surely as the traffic Google sends to websites falls and falls, there'll come a tipping point where the websites themselves will feel there's no benefit to allowing Google to index them.
If this happens, Google's generative AI slop will have less and less scaped and regurgitated content to surface to Google users.
Re: Google is burying the web alive
#103I get why this is problematic for industries that depend on high traffic for ad revenue etc, but is bad for websites who are actually trying to market services that provide tangible value? Like if I’m searching for a dry cleaner in Glasgow, if I end up with the same provider, I don't care (and neither does the dry cleaner) whether I find them through traditional links or an AI-mediated search?
Feels like more curation than we had before. My wife and I recently bought a commercial space and have been trying to find contractors for renovation projects. It has kind of blown us away at how unresponsive most have been. Like, we'll reach out them ... wait DAYS, sometimes they get back to us ... maybe a week later they'll come for a site visit to give us a quote and then we need to keep following up with them ...…
Some "plumbing" company websites are really just referral farms that are supposed to send your data to plumbers in your area.
The idea even makes sense - if this worked, plumbers could focus on plumbing and SEO hackers could focus on getting a landing page in front of people looking for plumbing.
Sadly there are a lot of slop-like companies out there.
Re: Google is burying the web alive
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s still tons of personal webpages out there, Google just doesn’t expose them because it’s in their interest to show ad-filled SEO blogspam since they also operate AdSense and DoubleClick for Publishers. https://marginalia-search.com/ does a much better job of finding personal sites.
It doesn't really "find" any personal sites, you have to tell it about each manually with a pull request: https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/submit-site-to-marginali...
That form is just to insert domains that aren't found automatically.
Re: Google is burying the web alive
#105I can weigh in on this. I run a small information website ( https://allaboutberlin.com ). My traffic has been growing steadily for 7 years, but now its down 30-ish percent year on year. From what I'm hearing, my competitors (and friends) are having it worse. My main mission is to put new information on the internet. It's harder to do this if AI destroys the economics of it. It's also harder without an audience who pr…
We need a new information backbone
Re: Google is burying the web alive
#106I get why this is problematic for industries that depend on high traffic for ad revenue etc, but is bad for websites who are actually trying to market services that provide tangible value? Like if I’m searching for a dry cleaner in Glasgow, if I end up with the same provider, I don't care (and neither does the dry cleaner) whether I find them through traditional links or an AI-mediated search?
Feels like more curation than we had before. My wife and I recently bought a commercial space and have been trying to find contractors for renovation projects. It has kind of blown us away at how unresponsive most have been. Like, we'll reach out them ... wait DAYS, sometimes they get back to us ... maybe a week later they'll come for a site visit to give us a quote and then we need to keep following up with them ...…
Or the AI takes care of finding quotes for you, in which case the most responsive vendors could do better than before.
Re: Google is burying the web alive
#107I can weigh in on this. I run a small information website ( https://allaboutberlin.com ). My traffic has been growing steadily for 7 years, but now its down 30-ish percent year on year. From what I'm hearing, my competitors (and friends) are having it worse. My main mission is to put new information on the internet. It's harder to do this if AI destroys the economics of it. It's also harder without an audience who pr…
If you want readers more than impact you might want to consider something like a Substack. The paying audience would be smaller, but, it's not crawlable by AI (at least not today).
Still, it's a bit ironic that your own website advises people to use bots to get apartments (thus bypassing the work put into the adverts and apartment hunting sites), whilst also decrying bots who would bypass your site.
More generally perhaps there's a market for a Steam-like walled garden but for "old web" style sites. Crawlers would be controlled via technical means, micropayments would be built in, and use of AI would be strictly controlled. For instance maybe the garden uses AI to build link directories like DMOZ used to be, but the information itself isn't trained on so you're guaranteed to have organic readers.
Re: Google is burying the web alive
#108I can weigh in on this. I run a small information website ( https://allaboutberlin.com ). My traffic has been growing steadily for 7 years, but now its down 30-ish percent year on year. From what I'm hearing, my competitors (and friends) are having it worse. My main mission is to put new information on the internet. It's harder to do this if AI destroys the economics of it. It's also harder without an audience who pr…
If you want readers more than impact you might want to consider something like a Substack. The paying audience would be smaller, but, it's not crawlable by AI (at least not today). Still, it's a bit ironic that your own website advises people to use bots to get apartments (thus bypassing the work put into the adverts and apartment hunting sites), whilst also decrying bots who would bypass your site. More generally pe…
>Still, it's a bit ironic that your own website advises people to use bots to get apartments (thus bypassing the work put into the adverts and apartment hunting sites), whilst also decrying bots who would bypass your site.
I believe these are pretty different scenarios. There's an ongoing, massive shortage of apartments in Berlin, and bots here often aren't bypassing "work put into adverts and apartment hunting sites"—they're trying to get an application in at all before the listing is flooded with hundreds of applications and disabled. The content of the application has nothing to do with it.
(Of course, this just leads to an arms race of apartment-application-bots, but this is the situation the city's found itself in. Same goes for registration appointments, residence permit applications, and so on.)
Re: Google is burying the web alive
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
When "to google" has literally become a verb in several languages, you know it's not going to be that easy to convince literally hundreds of millions of people to use something different. For many unsavvy people, Google is and continues to be their window into the web, and they wouldn't even know they can have it another way.
People said this about AOL for a long time, too.
You miss the 'A' in AOL.
Re: Google is burying the web alive
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
You fell for the Goomba Fallacy https://i.redd.it/33w3fqrnx8pd1.jpeg
Yeah yeah. But nonetheless group think and echo chambers are real things. Not all opinions are uncorrelated data points, probably most of them aren't . And real people (you too) do indeed hold contradictory opinions all the time. In point of fact insisting that "My Opinion Is Pure And Special and Uncorrelated To Anyone Else's" is probably the single best way to find yourself parroting echo chamber delusions. It's a l…
> Yeah yeah. But nonetheless group think
That's only your perception of groupthink. You read those threats looking for anti-Google bias, and you find it, because of course.
AI is a very divisive subject nowadays. There are people that are all in on the hype, there are skeptics, there are desperate people thinking that they will lose their jobs, there are those that think is is destructive and unethical.
The only caveat that I might make is that at the time of the Microsoft announcement, it was during the honeymoon phase of OpenAI (when GPT 3 was fairly new and an impressive leap from what came before), and Google's current advancements, while impressive, come at a time when a lot more people are negative towards it.
Also, every sufficiently large company will have people that dislike it as a baseline. Be it Google, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Tesla, Toyota or any other. Read any thread on those companies and you will find negative comments based on that alone.