Replacing Google with open source. Imaging this:
1) An open-source competitor to Google Search exists
2) It exists in "Front-end nodes". This is the website user interface. Search query entered here. It then searches cached indexes.
3) Searches fall in two patterns.
a) Frequent searches (top 20m search query phrases),
b) long-tail rare (beyond top 20m)
4) Here is how "Frequent Searches" results are built.
* They are built before. Updated once a month
* There are LLM prompts on how to assess web pages against a search query. This is about taking the top 5,000 website contenders, and ranking those exactly
* There can be contention on these LLM. This is how that is solved.
* Stake holders. Each is a company or an owner of a website with human content. They have the ability to vote. This is towards "fair" LLMs to reason on finding the best match for a term.
* They vote away LLM prompts that skew or overly focused on one area.
5) Long-tail searches may be redirected to a DuckDuckGo like solution. Bing / Google / DuckDuckGo compete to be fair to win the traffic
6) The search front-end gets add revenue for Frequent searches. Their job is to do advertising to get customers to switch from Google search
7) The Frequent Search final results of voting are saved in the blockchain. From the once a month LLM compute.
8) LLM compute may happen with different LLM vendors, to weed out bias.
9) The LLM prompt runs (once a month), may happen at ~200 (or 2,000) different open source servers. Run by different people. What wins, is consensus on what most matches. This weeds out bad actors and bias.
10) Big non-tech companies may pay for this, in order to get SEO to work again, for their revevnue. Organic traffic. Ford, GM, Home Depot, AT&T, SalesForce, Oracle, J&J, P&E, GE, Colgate-Palmolive, General Mills, Kraft, etc.
Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine
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Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine
#22I 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.
Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine
#23The 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.
> when AI gives us much better and specific advice
When. At the moment, not.
Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine
#24The 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.
I haven't been able to get much practical travel advice from AI yet, any tips? For stuff like hiking routes, permitting, local cuisine, etc. I don't think it can replace a good blog from an experienced person at this point.
It depends. I've found o3 exceptional at finding things off the beaten path. I told it "I will be in city A, B and C in [month]" and would love to find out what to do. I have a car, am willing to drive and generally care most about gastronomy, food and culture. There's also flexibility in terms of timing and stays."
It read things like websites of municipalities of surrounding towns and found local food festivals in towns I never would've found out about otherwise. It's exactly the kind of stuff I'd previously read the experienced person's blog for.
Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine
#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 monetizable traffic for two+ decades. At some point you need to capture your audience and make a real connection with them so they don't need Google to interact with you. Give them a value prop.
Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine
#26The 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.
I haven't been able to get much practical travel advice from AI yet, any tips? For stuff like hiking routes, permitting, local cuisine, etc. I don't think it can replace a good blog from an experienced person at this point.
It's a trade-off. AI gives you speed but lower quality. Blog posts are higher quality but take longer to find/curate.
For hiking routes, I ask AI for a list of suggested hiking routes in [area] based on my criteria (e.g. dog friendly, accessible by public transport, whatever) Then I google the specific suggested routes to fact-check the AI and get more detailed/reliable info.
Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine
#27The 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.
I haven't been able to get much practical travel advice from AI yet, any tips? For stuff like hiking routes, permitting, local cuisine, etc. I don't think it can replace a good blog from an experienced person at this point.
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.
Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine
#28I 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.
That's exactly what I mean with "back to the roots". Search became already so bad, if it continues, aggregators and bookmarks will be maybe a thing again.
Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine
#29The 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.
And where the training data for your AI advice comes from?
Factual data mostly came from sources like wikipedia, news and social forums. I see these as continuing.
Opinion data - from all other SEO sites. These were low signal mostly, and AI seems to have got the general gist of how to structure content for consumption. So rather information reaching our mind through a SEO writer, it's now being AI written, which is atleast more standardized, and can be grounded more easily, and personalized to boot.
Re: Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine
#30The 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.
> don't want to read an article on travel advice when AI gives us
A bit of a tangential anecdote, on the subject of "human written" stuff pre AI.
Circa 99-2000 I knew a US company that would hire students from CEE to write travel content for their many .com properties. The students were instructed to write "as if they'd travelled there", or "as if you're living there", or "in an official tour-guide style", and so on. Judging by how spread the content of my friend's writing was, and how "stereotypical" the other pieces were on those properties (that we found after searching for known content), it was pretty clear that nothing on those sites was genuine. Everything was fake! Since then I take everything with a bit of cynicism, knowing how much of the "natural, organic content" is in fact faked with low-paid contributors. But hey, during those times the gig was pretty good for my friend doing it.