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Google is burying the web alive

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Re: Google is burying the web alive

#201

Post by pphysch »

oceansky wrote: post #88
pphysch wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a corpse killed by Facebook, Reddit, Discord and other closed platforms.

How's reddit a closed platform? It's superbly indexed by Google. In fact searching site:reddit.com often greatly improve my results.

Reddit isn't the worst offender, but it's still one profit-motivated company that can unilaterally scrub posts, users, and entire subreddits, and its infested with guerilla advertising. And the whole "new.reddit.com" thing strongly suggests that Reddit is/was evolving to be a more closed platform.

Re: Google is burying the web alive

#203

Post by bookofjoe »

bsder wrote: post #196
WorldMaker wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs read like ad copy even when they aren't ads. LLMs presumably trained on a ton of ad copy. A lot of ad copy is considered "public domain". Aren't the ads already injected and the real trick will be getting the advertisers to foot more of the bill? I half believe Gemini already has an "AdSense billing model" in the works.

> Aren't the ads already injected and the real trick will be getting the advertisers to foot more of the bill? No, the ads aren't specifically injected. Yet. When you start finding LLMs that call all sodas "Pepsi", you will know the ads have arrived. (Side note: I avoided using "Coke" because there are already certain sections of the US where all sodas are referred to as "Coke".)

or "pop": https://archive.nytimes.com/ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/...

Re: Google is burying the web alive

#204

Post by bookofjoe »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #191
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…

> so it’s a bit baffling when Google Search product decisions are equated with burying the web alive. Just don’t use it! HN doesn't make up the Google users; it's the 85% of end users out in the world that do. They're not going to switch to DDG.

Precisely. I bet 99+% of non-HN peeps have never heard of DDG/Kagi/Brave etc.

Re: Google is burying the web alive

#205

Post by bookofjoe »

p3rls wrote: post #156
DisjointedHunt wrote: post #94

In my humble opinion, Google is the reason the web withstood as long as it did. At least the open part of the web did. Yes, sure, they monetized, but also they gave back as much as, and if not more than they took. We have so many machine learning frameworks, tensorflow, research, payouts to creators, advertising opportunities, careers, products, a lot of things built and taken down but most importantly built. They we…

it's so funny listening to people who are clearly not publishers give their takes on these things

99+% of people are not publishers

Re: Google is burying the web alive

#206

Post by bookofjoe »

shmerl wrote: post #76

I noticed that Google image reverse search turned into completely unusable garbage that can only produce AI lookalikes but completely fails at finding original images. Literally every time, exact match - zero results. I guess that's their current trend. Forget about quality search, inject AI everywhere.

I use Google image reverse search on a daily basis for my blog. I rarely get AI look-alikes but rather almost always real things. One caveat: I never reverse search for people, only things.

Re: Google is burying the web alive

#207

Post by shmerl »

bookofjoe wrote: post #206
shmerl wrote: post #76

I noticed that Google image reverse search turned into completely unusable garbage that can only produce AI lookalikes but completely fails at finding original images. Literally every time, exact match - zero results. I guess that's their current trend. Forget about quality search, inject AI everywhere.

I use Google image reverse search on a daily basis for my blog. I rarely get AI look-alikes but rather almost always real things. One caveat: I never reverse search for people, only things.

I mostly tried it for art to look for original authors. I'll check again.

Re: Google is burying the web alive

#208

Post by neochief »

Sadly, in the same boat for the time being (https://refactoring.guru). My strategy was to deliver ad-free open valuable content for the devs, focus more on the content than marketing, but it all seems pointless now. Traffic is steadily declining, despite site is being first in search results.
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