881–890 of 961 posts
In my dreams, this is the moment Mozilla brings a search engine out of stealth mode, and says "sorry for looking like idiots for twenty years, we were secretly working on building a great search engine that doesn't suck or do AI"
I don't trust facts from LLMs. When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources. As soon as a number is involved, I do my best to not even look at the AI output. Even though the result is often good and combines information from multiple sources, it can also get things wrong by combining information from different eras or just plain outdated advice. AFAICT, without primary sources, the result…
> When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources. And therein lies the rub; for years now Google's search results have returned useless SEO garbage. For now, it definitely seems like an LLM answer is better than what was being returned and I guess this is the reason why Google ripped it out.
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> When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources. And therein lies the rub; for years now Google's search results have returned useless SEO garbage. For now, it definitely seems like an LLM answer is better than what was being returned and I guess this is the reason why Google ripped it out.
If Google can't filter out the SEO spam from their results, why do you think they did it for the LLM training data?
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> When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources. And therein lies the rub; for years now Google's search results have returned useless SEO garbage. For now, it definitely seems like an LLM answer is better than what was being returned and I guess this is the reason why Google ripped it out.
If Google can't filter out the SEO spam from their results, why do you think they did it for the LLM training data?
Imagine that you had 1,000 years to read every Google result on a particular topic, and literally infinite patience. You would read a lot of rubbish but ultimately you are a smart person, you would figure out the underlying truth and likely produce something that is more valuable than the average or even the sum of the parts.
Nilay Patel has been talking about "Google Zero" - the moment when Google effectively stops sending any traffic to other sites - for a few years now: https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...
Which as some running a website raises a fascinating question. If Google is just going to crawl my sites and present information as an AI summary on their site, then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?
https://kagi.com/ You’re welcome.
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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?
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Which as some running a website raises a fascinating question. If Google is just going to crawl my sites and present information as an AI summary on their site, then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?
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,…
This discussion was broached originally when discussing whether or not search engines and aggregators had any compensation obligation in respect of news articles. This was a hot topic in the IP and policy circles for a few years.
When the Canadian government attempted to create a mechanism to compensate content creators for the scraped content, there was widespread outrage from tech circles, despite the same community agreeing, across extensive policy discussions, that action had to be taken to prevent this universal man-in-the-middle value capture by search engines.
I've had fairly extensive discussion with the individuals involved in the academic, policy and internal industry analysis of the issue. Watching industry agree to address the issue, then aggressively spend to shape public narratives in public was eye opening.
The recent shift into "AI is obviously going to hoover up all your data and there's nothing you can do now that the theft is laundered through an LLM" is just the latest example of the same trend of short sighted capital-over-everything decision making we've become used to in jurisdictions that have dysfunctional legislatures.