91–100 of 208 posts
I used to hate the AI overview, but I've slowly been getting used to it and now I will often settle for what the AI gives. It's better than scrolling through loads of links and trying to weed out garbage SEO optimized sites.
Soon, quick and dirty solution: User-Agent: * Disallow: /
So if Google innovates with AI, it's a problem because they're hiding their "ten blue links." But if they don't, they're suffering from the innovator's dilemma and are going to die with their ten blue links. The fact is, Google is so big that they're always going to upset some people. Embracing AI and moving forward is the only thing they can do.
Why is it a foregone conclusion that embracing AI is the only way to move forward, and that embracing AI is necessary to succeed? I'm certainly curious to see how it works out - it's a possible source of growth etc - but it's weird to me seeing people just assume that AI is not only The Future but is The Only Future.
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 were probably the most positive force for the internet age in the past 20 years and more than anyone will ever give them credit for. Only in retrospect will we realize how lucky we were to be alive in the Google age. Full stop.
What really killed the web was the rise of closed wall gardens platforms such as Apple, Facebook, Instagram and others. Putting up walls around content that didn't need to necessarily exist or not honoring open frameworks to exchange information and making things more widely indexable.
But even here there have been significant benefits. The present AI boom would arguably not have been as large as it is right now without Mark Zuckerberg choosing to put an unconventional amount of investment behind AR ambitions to take on Apple, an investment the size of which many conventionally run publicly listed or private enterprises could hardly imagine to take up, leading to the concentration of capital, talent, technology and hardware in a place that gave birth to open source Llama and others. Google as well was very well poised because of their investments in compute fueled by their business model which kept the web alive and also returned capital into places where computer scientists would be paid significant amounts of money and have job security and freedom of will. to do as they pleased as opposed to chasing a paycheck, working as a physicist at CERN or something.
All I'm saying is this article does not fully capture how significant the positive outcomes from Google have been.
As someone who remembers what the web was like 25 years ago, I have a feeling that they're burying a corpse.
There’s still tons of personal webpages out there, Google just doesn’t expose them because it’s in their interest to show ad-filled SEO blogspam since they also operate AdSense and DoubleClick for Publishers. https://marginalia-search.com/ does a much better job of finding personal sites.
I can weigh in on this. I run a small information website ( https://allaboutberlin.com ). My traffic has been growing steadily for 7 years, but now its down 30-ish percent year on year. From what I'm hearing, my competitors (and friends) are having it worse. My main mission is to put new information on the internet. It's harder to do this if AI destroys the economics of it. It's also harder without an audience who pr…
We are surviving, but we've changed our entire focus as the web we know is a dead man walking. AI bots are the new frontend for the web, and I am curious about what the web will look like in 2 to 10 years. I hope the AI companies start paying to access the data as they answer queries or construct dynamic frontends (but I doubt it).
I have many friends who ran great indie websites, and it has been sad to see that 90% of them are now frozen or closed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s still tons of personal webpages out there, Google just doesn’t expose them because it’s in their interest to show ad-filled SEO blogspam since they also operate AdSense and DoubleClick for Publishers. https://marginalia-search.com/ does a much better job of finding personal sites.
It doesn't really "find" any personal sites, you have to tell it about each manually with a pull request: https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/submit-site-to-marginali...
I can weigh in on this. I run a small information website ( https://allaboutberlin.com ). My traffic has been growing steadily for 7 years, but now its down 30-ish percent year on year. From what I'm hearing, my competitors (and friends) are having it worse. My main mission is to put new information on the internet. It's harder to do this if AI destroys the economics of it. It's also harder without an audience who pr…
Or the credit. Or even just the feedback.
Even LLMs get at least some feedback.
A core concept underpinning our shared market place, is that its not about facts, its about ideas being exchanged.
Critically, that exchange creates friction, debate and downstream of all that - society. I've commented elsewhere how the marketplace is broken today, and why.
But with GenAI, theres a new, twist, that I can barely contemplate.
See, our conception of this liberal democracy based society, exists in that exchange between people. Even a crappy exchange, is part of the process of learning and building our ideas. My half formed ideas, your half formed ideas, everyones ideas.
We have considered what happens when your ideas don't get heard.
But in no place, did we consider what happens when we bounce our ideas into a machine, and that machine talks back. And if that machine talks back in a manner thats can be as good as what a person might write or text. Your half baked idea goes into the machine, you get text back that helps you get to a fully baked idea.
But the counter party is the machine. Not a person. The way those ideas have been bouncing around, has changed.