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Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine

travellemming.com

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Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine

#131

Post by gorjusborg »

maeil wrote: post #102
gorjusborg wrote: post #39

I can't get past the sloppy and inflammatory use of English here. This is not 'censorship'. It probably isn't banning, nor is it 'shadowbanning'. Google tunes its algorithms and lets the chips fall. Some win, some lose. While I understand how Google's dominance in search can have outsized effects on Internet commerce, the writer has near-zero credibility with me based on their writing. Honest people making honest sta…

And I'm tired of this sort of sloppy and inflammatory discrediting. It fits 'shadowbanning' to an absolute tee. Without any kind of notification, or any recourse, a switch is flicked to "off" in a single moment, putting a domain on the shitlist. This is now very well documented, including by this post, and incredibly obvious from the graph.

I doubt it is even a ban. It definitely isn't a shadowban.

A ban is when you are preventing from participating in something. Google is a service that indexes the internet and provides references to relevant information. Website providers aren't the users here, web searchers are. I guess you could argue that the site was 'banned' from search results, but I doubt that the author would care enough to search 100 pages of search results to see if they were still there, they just care that they aren't a first page hit.

A shadowban is when a participant has been banned, but has no idea it has happened. This came about on certain link aggregation/social media sites as a solution to people being banned and creating new accounts and resuming their behavior.

Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine

#132

Post by toss1 »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #76
bgwalter wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing other people's output and then cutting them off from discovery isn't a right either. Since politicians do not protect us from these criminals, we are fortunate that no one except for CEOs under the influence of cocaine wants "AI".

You (and others) keep using "stealing" and "robbing". I get emotions are high because of the impact of AI, but in no meaningful/legal sense is this true. Is there space for nuanced/critical discussion?

One organization has already monopolistic power. It encourages, with monetary rewards thousands to change careers to build properties "written by people for people", with a clear exchange: "you build good human content, we'll promote it".

Then they unilaterally change the deal to basically, "you create the content, we will take it and without attribution, slice & dice it into our automated output".

It is straight-up bait and switch, and absolutely unethical. Just because it was not planned a decade in advance and was just opportunistic does not make it any more ethical (that'd be like arguing it was more ethical for you to steal a car because the keys were dropped next to it vs planning to hotwire the car).

And yes, I'm 100% in agreement with the caveats that building a business based on someone else's platform is like building a house on sand — a definitely risky idea. But the risk that the big player will change their platform is one thing, the risk they'll actively steal from you is another risk people weren't taking.

Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine

#133

Post by wslh »

arrowsmith wrote: post #91
wslh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with AI is that prompting LLMs tends to fail when the task involves returning a long list of alternatives and/or selecting niche options unless the user explicitly names them.

Do it iteratively. Ask the LLM for a long list of alternatives but without detail, only the names. Then start a new chat, paste in the list of names, and ask for more detail.

I've done this several times when benchmarking lesser-known companies, and manual compilation using a search engine consistently outperformed LLMs even when those companies are part of the model's training data.

My intuition (could be completely wrong) is that lesser-known companies have much less density around them that popular brands, except if you are very specific. It would be great if this could be tweaked somehow.

Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine

#134

Post by kebokyo »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #3

The article treats as axiom that organic traffic is a right. It's not. Most people don't want to read an article on travel advice when AI gives us much better and specific advice, with references, when we want it.

Who is “most people”?

AI has seen mass adoption, but trust is still low and many are aware of how it can make errors. https://kpmg.com/xx/en/our-insights/ai-and-technology/trust-...

Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine

#135

Post by tndibona »

FinnLobsien wrote: post #128
tndibona wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is true that all the click bait and unoriginal content deserves to perish. But, what about the carve outs for people putting money on original content. Like perhaps a local news gazette with paid journalists. They need google to be found, they also can't afford to get scraped and be AI-regurgitated up. Let's take a practical example, if you searched for let's say "Whats the latest research on intermittent f…

Yeah I totally agree! But I think it's a reaction on Google's part to the SEO industry. I mourn the loss of independent media, blogosphere etc. and the trend to everything being either more generic or more outrageous.

Yep. This SEO industry is a result of "Lets hack the pagerank algorithm". Maybe a sensible use of AI for google would be to use it to differentiate between genuine and derivative content. Drop the page rank based search.

Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine

#136

Post by sumtechguy »

tndibona wrote: post #115
sumtechguy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically if you serve information or content. AI or even just some smart coding google can do that too. If you do something with that information Google has not been doing so good at that. Microsoft in the early 2000s did that very well. They would let you have the data but would gobble up any company that could transform data and make it their own. But data without applications is useless. Applications without data…

I see your point, data is no good without actions and vice versa. Initially, I thought google couldn't possibly compete with perplexity because they are building a company from the ground up sans the surveillance ad-network. If you skim the article this thread is about, It seems google is basically headed to create a monopoly on the answers being dished out to search queries. I.e, if they know the answer they'll gene…

> I think we are in the middle of this transformation.

Totally. Had a bit to think on my second point. Lets say I used to do something like 'who was the king of england in 1732'. That would in the past may lead me thru at least 3 websites. All serving ads. Now google can have that above the fold. They will have some ad's on the side like they always did. But I have the thing I want. I am probably not going to drill onto those other sites. Seeing those ad's too. Ads more than likely being served by google. In effect it will be showing me something like 80% less ad's. I am pretty cool with that. But the ecosphere around it is going to collapse or at least be substantially curtailed. This will also subtract on what they can charge for ad's. As they will be serving less of them.

Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine

#137

Post by roryirvine »

krapp wrote: post #22
Aldipower wrote: post #9

I see it in a positive light. For me it means back to the roots. People will visit your website by typing in your URL directly into the address bar. Direct marketing and mouth-to-mouth will be a thing again.

No one ever discovered websites through "mouth to mouth" or direct marketing (whatever that's supposed to mean.. flyers? Junk mail?) Web portals and link aggregators and bookmarks and other means of discovery were a thing from the very beginning of the web, well before Google even came along.

Sure they did. Search engines and hierarchical directories didn't take off until late 1994, and the first link aggregators like WebRing didn't come along along for at least another year after that.

Before then, website discovery was almost entirely word of mouth, supplemented by a little bit of self-promotion on various mailing lists and newsgroups.

The only other routes were asking your local sysadmin, taking a trip to your local bookstore to browse the few web-related pages in the Whole Internet Guide and Catalogue, or a handful of links in magazines like Mondo 2000 and Wired - but they were very minor, and tended only to be used by true neophytes.

Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine

#138

Post by eviks »

blinding-streak wrote: post #25

> As one Google executive recently explained: “Organizing information is clearly a trillion-dollar opportunity, but a trillion dollars is not cool anymore. What’s cool is a quadrillion dollars.” This uncited, anonymous quote sounds very made up. Cursory search couldn't find anything like this. Regardless, while the article makes some good points, it is also dripping with entitlement. Google gave you incredible moneti…

Cursory google search quadrillion dollars "Organizing information" brings up multiple sources on the first page

Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine

#139

Post by dragonwriter »

roryirvine wrote: post #137
krapp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one ever discovered websites through "mouth to mouth" or direct marketing (whatever that's supposed to mean.. flyers? Junk mail?) Web portals and link aggregators and bookmarks and other means of discovery were a thing from the very beginning of the web, well before Google even came along.

Sure they did. Search engines and hierarchical directories didn't take off until late 1994, and the first link aggregators like WebRing didn't come along along for at least another year after that. Before then, website discovery was almost entirely word of mouth, supplemented by a little bit of self-promotion on various mailing lists and newsgroups. The only other routes were asking your local sysadmin, taking a trip…

> Search engines and hierarchical directories didn't take off until late 1994, and the first link aggregators like WebRing didn't come along along for at least another year after that.

> Before then, website discovery was almost entirely word of mouth

Yeah, but before that there were almost no websites to discover, and no one discovering them; even by the end of 1994—generally held out as the first year websites aimed at the general public were available at all, and, as you note, also the year search engines and directories took off, displacing any word of mouth as the main discovery route, there were still only a little over two thousand websites in total.

Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine

#140

Post by eviks »

gorjusborg wrote: post #126
eviks wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google tunes its algorithms and lets the chips fall This is even more sloppy and could be easily applied to any real censorship, where some (censored) lose and some (not censored) win If you're "tuning" your algorithm with the goal of blocking all small independent websites, then yeah, you're doing the shadow (if you don't tell the sites about it) banning. By ignoring the intent of the policy and replacing it with…

Censorship is about filtering out messages that are somehow 'undesirable'. That is not what is happening here. What's happening here is that someone has built a business that relies heavily on search hits from Google, Google made changes that negatively impact the number of hits. I'm not trying to minimize what is clearly a significant problem for the author, I'm just saying that misusing words like 'censorship' can…

Censorship is also about filtering out the messengers. But I wasn't talking about that, even my example was about banning, not censorship. And it wasn't about you minimizing it either, just that the argument which you've repeated here doesn't hold - if you ignore why Google changes negatively impacted the number of hits you can make no counter re. censorship.

By the way, if they made changes to filter out travel advice messages (from small travel sites) because they think such messages are undesirable since they hurt their ability to earn money from AI models, than the same negative impact would meet your definition of censorship, no?

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