In some way, the meaning of publish is to make something public, give the people and agents accessing that content some freedom to get and what do with it. And that what decide to do with that freedom may benefit you (i.e. making your site visible) or not. Google is a big player, and most of those content publishers may have been benefited by previous Google decisions, but it should be assumed that new decisions (like the AI summaries) will keep being made.
How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website
21–30 of 78 posts
Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website
#22Easy: just write content that is substantive enough that a summary isn't a sufficient replacement.
How will they know if they don't visit because of the summary?
Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website
#23I don't understand how these AI summaries don't cannibalize Google's future profits. Google lives off ads that direct users to websites, websites they are doing their damnedest to make unnecessary. Who will be building future websites that nobody visits.
I'm sure they added it with reluctance, and they had to do it because LLM services are eating Google Search's lunch. Google even put the AI snippet above their ads, so you know how bad it stings.
I'm pretty sure the sibling comment is right, though. Just like original Google, they will give you the summaries, then when they will slowly win the battle, they will start product placements galore in the summaries.
Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website
#24I have this in my Apache conf for a site I don't want indexed/archived etc. Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nositelinkssearchbox, nosnippet, notranslate, noimageindex" Of course, only the beeping Internet Archive totally ignored it and scraped my site. And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it. It seems to mostly work, I also have Anubis in front of it now to keep the scrapers…
> Of course, only the beeping Internet Archive totally ignored it and scraped my site. And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it.
In all honestly, if you're hosting it on the internet, why is this a problem? If you didn't want it to backed up, why is it publicly accessible at all? I'm glad the internet archive will keep hosting this content even when the original is long gone.
Let's say I'd read your website and wanted to look it up one day in the far future, only to find many years later the domain had expired, I'd be damn glad at least one organization had kept it readable.
Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website
#25Easy: just write content that is substantive enough that a summary isn't a sufficient replacement.
People will vastly more often choose the cheap and simple slop content as they came to choose slop food from McDonald's. Was the technology that allowed McDonald's to become the dominant force in food a net positive for society?
Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website
#26I would like an in-depth article on how to get llms to summarize my employers website. That is what my focus will be professionally in the coming months. But I get the point of the article.
Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website
#27I have this in my Apache conf for a site I don't want indexed/archived etc. Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nositelinkssearchbox, nosnippet, notranslate, noimageindex" Of course, only the beeping Internet Archive totally ignored it and scraped my site. And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it. It seems to mostly work, I also have Anubis in front of it now to keep the scrapers…
> Of course, only the beeping Internet Archive totally ignored it and scraped my site. And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it. In all honestly, if you're hosting it on the internet, why is this a problem? If you didn't want it to backed up, why is it publicly accessible at all? I'm glad the internet archive will keep hosting this content even when the original is long gone. Let's say I'd read you…
A totally fair question. I want to be in control of my content is the simple answer. Yes, I know it being public means I've already "lost control" in that you can scrap my website and that's that. But you scraping my website vs a anyone-can-search it website like IA are two different things. IA claim they will honour removal requests, but then roundly fail to do so. And then have the gal to email me and ask me to donate.
Additionally, when I die, I want my website to go dark and that's that. It's a diary, it's very very mundane. My tech blog I post to, sure, I'm 200% happy to have that scraped/archived. My diary I keep very up-to-date offline copies of that my family have access to, should I tip over tomorrow.
I realise this goes against the usual Internet wisdom, and I'm sure there's more than one Chinese AI/bot out there that's scraped it and I have zero control over. But where I allegedly do have control, I'd like to exercise it. I don't think that's an unfair/ridiculous request.
Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website
#28I don't understand how these AI summaries don't cannibalize Google's future profits. Google lives off ads that direct users to websites, websites they are doing their damnedest to make unnecessary. Who will be building future websites that nobody visits.
Google is probably even more afraid of ChatGPT replacing it. So giving the user what they want is likely their way to try to hang on.
IMO a LLM is just a superior technology to a search engine in that it can understand vague questions, collate information and translate from other languages. In a lot of cases what I want isn't to find a particular page but to obtain information, and a LLM gets closer to that ideal.
It's nowhere near perfect yet but I won't be surprised if search engines go extinct in a decade or so.
Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website
#29I have this in my Apache conf for a site I don't want indexed/archived etc. Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nositelinkssearchbox, nosnippet, notranslate, noimageindex" Of course, only the beeping Internet Archive totally ignored it and scraped my site. And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it. It seems to mostly work, I also have Anubis in front of it now to keep the scrapers…
RE "...Of course, only the beeping Internet Archive totally ignored it and scraped my site. And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it...." Why would you NOT want internet archive to scrape your website? (Im Clueless - thank you)
It's a personal diary - very mundane. I don't _want_ to pollute search with the fact I struggled with getting my socks on yesterday because of my bad back.
Yes I could password protect it (and any really personal content is locked behind being logged in, AI hasn't scraped that) but I _like_ being able to share links with people without having to also share passwords.
I realise the HN crowd is very much "More eyeballs are better for business" but this isn't business. This is a tiny, 5 hits a month (that's not me writing it) website.
Re: How to stop Google from AI-summarising your website
#30I have this in my Apache conf for a site I don't want indexed/archived etc. Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nositelinkssearchbox, nosnippet, notranslate, noimageindex" Of course, only the beeping Internet Archive totally ignored it and scraped my site. And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it. It seems to mostly work, I also have Anubis in front of it now to keep the scrapers…
The term blog existed in 1999, and "weblog" in 97.
Thank you - I started my diary in Oct 2000 and I didn't hear the term until after then. Or I chose to ignore it, it's that long ago I can't recall :)
I have updated my comment above.