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Google is burying the web alive

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Re: Google is burying the web alive

#181

Post by move-on-by »

nickfromseattle wrote: post #180
NewsaHackO wrote: post #4

This is actually a good thing, now we don’t have to sift though a dozen semiautomatically created SEO gaming website that try and make the same point 5-6 said in slightly different ways.

Search is one of the best ways for startups to compete against incumbents. AI will prioritize known / most popular brands. Want to start an alternative to QuickBooks? Using search you could get hundreds of thousands of people on your website. In the future? AI will recommend QuickBooks.

> AI will prioritize known / most popular brands.

This is the fiction that the AI creators want you to believe. The truth is that AI will recommend whatever its creators have trained it to recommend.

Re: Google is burying the web alive

#182

Post by sanderjd »

p3rls wrote: post #155
sanderjd wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? I'm sure Google deserves some, maybe a lot, of the blame, but the web has just deteriorated steadily over the past 15 years or so and I really don't think it's all their fault.

Wet streets cause rain-level observations from non-publishers in this thread. The web everyone is nostalgic about was killed by google.

Maybe, but I honestly don't buy it. (As I said, I do buy that they deserve some blame.)

To me, the web everyone here is nostalgic for was mostly killed by the much larger majority of people whose revealed preference has been for something totally different. Nobody I know outside techie forums would have any idea what we're talking about with this critique of the web. They don't know or care about the "indie web" or other information-rich independent websites. They know and care about facebook, instagram, and tiktok. This isn't (entirely) Google's fault, it's what most people have shown that they want.

Re: Google is burying the web alive

#183

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

ninth_ant wrote: post #23

Implicit in this article is the idea that you have to use Google, and that Google Search equals “the web”. I’ll be the boring nerd, I guess, who has to be the one to say there are many other search engines out there. If you don’t like Google (I don’t), or don’t like where they are moving their products (I don’t) — please use a competing search engine. I’ve used DuckDuckGo for years and I don’t miss anything about Goo…

> Implicit in this article is the idea that you have to use Google, and that Google Search equals “the web”. I’ll be the boring nerd, I guess, who has to be the one to say there are many other search engines out there.

This is true for us, but a majority of non-software savvy people associate Google/Chrome (search implictly) with "the internet".

Re: Google is burying the web alive

#184

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

mouse_ wrote: post #37
ninth_ant wrote: post #23

Implicit in this article is the idea that you have to use Google, and that Google Search equals “the web”. I’ll be the boring nerd, I guess, who has to be the one to say there are many other search engines out there. If you don’t like Google (I don’t), or don’t like where they are moving their products (I don’t) — please use a competing search engine. I’ve used DuckDuckGo for years and I don’t miss anything about Goo…

I find it extremely challenging to believe you actually think that. I can't even host my own email anymore without all of my messages getting filtered as spam, because if your email service doesn't play nice with Google, then you might as well not exist. Not to mention youtube, adsense, Android (Google is trying to kill AOSP to sink their claws more deeply into Android in light of the recent antitrust suits), Google…

I pay for FastMail with my own domains, and a huge portion of my email gets silently dropped, even when sending via FastMail vended domains. It's awful.

Re: Google is burying the web alive

#185

Post by [deleted] »

Magi604 wrote: post #67

I used to hate the AI overview, but I've slowly been getting used to it and now I will often settle for what the AI gives. It's better than scrolling through loads of links and trying to weed out garbage SEO optimized sites.

[deleted]

Re: Google is burying the web alive

#186

Post by csa »

baq wrote: post #85
pixl97 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ... just to get a quote. Jeesh these companies are dumb... they could be selling referrals to other businesses but are instead dropping them on the floor.

The best way to sell your boring contracting company is to take it off the web and wait for private equity to make an offer.

> The best way to sell your boring contracting company is to take it off the web and wait for private equity to make an offer.

Could you expand on your experience or knowledge of this?

I’ve read some articles, but I would love a more “Inside Baseball” type of perspective.

Re: Google is burying the web alive

#187

Post by csa »

lzy wrote: post #150

This feels like the culmination of a long trend. Google shifting from indexing the web to replacing it. The idea of an “AI answer mode” burying actual sources is worrying, especially for niche or emerging topics where LLMs hallucinate confidently. I’d love to see metrics on how often users click through to original sources under the new interface. At some point, if Google becomes too self-referential, it risks losing…

> if Google becomes too self-referential, it risks losing the very web it was built on

This ship has sailed.

Paywalls and wall-gardens are the mid-term future, imho.

Most of the useful internet spaces I interact with fall under these categories. It feels like a Balkanized version of the AOL/Compuserve days.

Re: Google is burying the web alive

#188

Post by adrian_b »

ninth_ant wrote: post #23

Implicit in this article is the idea that you have to use Google, and that Google Search equals “the web”. I’ll be the boring nerd, I guess, who has to be the one to say there are many other search engines out there. If you don’t like Google (I don’t), or don’t like where they are moving their products (I don’t) — please use a competing search engine. I’ve used DuckDuckGo for years and I don’t miss anything about Goo…

DuckDuckGo has not been infected yet, but for example also with Bing, if I make some search, a good part of the screen is wasted with some unwanted "Copilot Answer".

As expected, the "Copilot Answer" is not only useless for me, because I always want to see the original sources, but it is also unreliable.

Just today, I have made a search for the public holidays in some European country for the year 2025, and the "Copilot Answer" has presented a list with most of them. However, one holiday was omitted despite existing, and it was exactly the one in which I was interested, because I was not sure if it is a non-working day in that country and I did not know which is its date in 2025.

Re: Google is burying the web alive

#189

Post by joshdappier »

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Please give us a try (https://dappier.com/demo to schedule a demo) and let us know what you think!

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