Earlier quoted context omitted.
This won't work because Google just pays Cloudflare to enable scraping.
Any evidence for this claim?
Google changes its search box
871–880 of 961 posts
Re: Google changes its search box
#872Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean this is already (kind of) the case for video. There's no real mainstream way outside of youtube to make meaningful money with free video content. But yes, interesting thought which does kind of make sense. The marketplace-ification of the textual web.
With google search you don't get money for creating content as people rely on summary provided by the search. Imagine people would go to youtube and watch previews of your videos solely; or the preview is your video, but condensed and given preferential treatment.
> With google search you don't get money for creating content as people rely on summary provided by the search.
I'm aware. And I'm curious how that will play out. Because same as with Youtube, historically Google Search gave the means and the discoverability to monetize producing valuable free content.
Youtube is directly dependent on people producing free content. If Youtube wouldn't pay its creators as well as it does, it would simply die.
Same with Google Search. Good content and good SEO gives the means for websites with free content to survive. Google usually takes a cut on ad placement on those pages with AdSense.
If Google Search now doesn't pay content creators as well as it used to, what will happen to free content on the web? It's bad for Google and it's bad for the creators.
We will see.
Re: Google changes its search box
#873Kind of Google to create a market opening for its competitors like this. I hope Kagi, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are taking notes.
reCaptcha is a pretty strong wall to allow only Google to index websites, especially now that you need device verification. Throw in Cloudflare too. There’s not much room to squeeze in when your competitors hold the keys to 15 million top websites.
> reCaptcha is a pretty strong wall to allow only Google to index websites
Why would website authors _want_ to prevent crawling by other search engines?
Re: Google changes its search box
#874Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right? No. It may be good for the consumer right now, but not ultimately (and on top of that, I would argue that reducing everyone to a consumer is already the wrong framing -- you need to ask what's good for the citizens). Having ten competing supermarkets with various interweaving supply lines is ultimately much better than having one giant supermarket, becaus…
Do you think Walmart’s prices are higher than you’d pay if there were just ten competing stores with the same product mix, each of which did not have the leverage to squeeze suppliers?
It doesn't matter what Walmart's prices would be -- because there'd be nine alternatives offering their products at different price points. Also, you seem to be implying that suppliers are inhuman and deserve to be squeezed (but Walmart somehow deserves all the wealth it extracts as a middle-man, go figure), which is exactly why I said that focusing on consumers only is a myopic view of the world.
Re: Google changes its search box
#875Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean this is already (kind of) the case for video. There's no real mainstream way outside of youtube to make meaningful money with free video content. But yes, interesting thought which does kind of make sense. The marketplace-ification of the textual web.
how about Tiktok - seems quite meaningfully getting money to people. Of course with short-format video, but still video, right?
As far as I know, Tiktok pays significantly less than Youtube. But yes, TikTok is a thing, as well as Twitch.
Still, it's all very centralized platforms, which historically isn't the case for all the monetized free content you usually get from google search (reviews, recipes, travel guides, converter sites etc. etc.)
Re: Google changes its search box
#876https://kagi.com/ You’re welcome.
Can you compare Kagi with DuckDuckGo? Some pros and cons?
Re: Google changes its search box
#877Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. For what it's worth, I think Google's business model is in trouble. They're putting in heroic effort to stay relevant during this shift to AI search, but how does their advertising model work when people expect summarised and accurate information instead of scrolling pages of ads? The search space is actually not that unhealthy. There are competitors. They just lack the reach of Google. These competitor will…
>... I think Google's business model is in trouble. >Google parent Alphabet profit jumps 81% in Big Tech earnings roundup https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/04/30/google-parent-a...
Both could be true. I think Google is milking their main asset and tanking it, before the party ends.
Re: Google changes its search box
#878Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly disagree. Altavista had exactly the same function as google, but with worse results. Both linked to original sources. Early google had a very good idea with pagerank and that payed off. An llm rephrashing / regurgitating other websites is imo different, because you loose the direct connection to the original source. Even if llms give sources they also directly give you a plausible (but unreliable) answer t…
> Altavista had exactly the same function as google I disagree, Alta Vista had excellent an excellent search UI with Boolean logic. Google discarded that because it thought it 'knew better' in terms of Page Rank. A-V could be fine-tuned to find a page with exactly the search terms, Google just gave fuzzy approximations from a very large search set.
> I disagree, Alta Vista had excellent an excellent search UI with Boolean logic. Google discarded that because it thought it 'knew better' in terms of Page Rank.
This is precisely what all the extreme LLM haters have memory holed.
Re: Google changes its search box
#879Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Without google crawling your site, you don't get any new traffic What about the stories of marketing managers who learned months after the fact that their credit card had expired and their google ad spend had ceased with no affect on traffic? Google isn't always an effective promotional vehicle.
What stories are they?
There were a couple similar stories in a previous HN article/discussion that I would have bookmarked had I anticipated this discussion.
Re: Google changes its search box
#880Earlier quoted context omitted.
A couple of years back I worked with a company which maintained specific data which was the main traffic driver on that page. Google approached them and wanted to pay for the rights to get the data and display it on top of the search results, a feature which was fairly new back then. This was an interesting dilemma because it was very clear that the money was way less than the loss in ad revenue due to traffic drop,…
That's the problem with the current monopolistic system, the money won't go down the stream, it's like a dam. One big dam owned by a few people is worse than many small dams
That's a pretty sinister system when the dam builders are suing the work of those downstream to build their damn. What happens when everyone downstream has been starved to death?