Google Declaring War on the Web

https://tante.cc/2026/05/20/on-google-declaring-war-on-the-web/

by cdrnsf • 2 months ago

638 446 2 months ago

Welcome to the third-party internet. Unless every micro-decision you make while browsing can be stripped down, packaged into neat data points, and sold, you're not welcome here.

nate• 2 months ago

I've got a half thought about concept that maybe we need a concept like AMP back. I hated AMP. I'm glad it's dead. But you could use it to define things that you were at least advised that it would be shown in the google ui and carousel. I feel like we need a guarantee from the LLMs that if we provide some kind of meta data in our source material you'll honor stuff from it. Like show our advertisers so we get some revenue still from you showing our content on your LLM site.

Totally vibed version of this:

``` { "version": "https://agent-source.org/v1", "canonical_url": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/the-cone", "title": "The Real Reason Nobody Moved the Cone", "source_name": "Ninjas and Robots", "author": "Nathan Kontny", "summary": "An essay about embarrassment, public action, and why obvious fixes go undone.", "preferred_citation": "Ninjas and Robots", "source_card": { "headline": "The Real Reason Nobody Moved the Cone", "description": "People avoid obvious public actions not because they are lazy, but because being seen trying is embarrassing.", "image": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/images/cone-card.jpg", "cta": "Read the full essay" }, "allowed_excerpt": { "max_chars": 500, "preferred_excerpt": "People often avoid obvious public action because embarrassment feels more immediate than danger." }, "commercial_terms": { "ads_allowed": true, "sponsor_card_url": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/.well-known/sponsor-card.json", "licensing_contact": "hello@ninjasandrobots.com" } } ```

But something to get our original source honored better in the LLM. Maybe if one of the LLMs do this, we'd give it more loyalty? Maybe the government needs to compel this kind of behavior? No idea. It does suck though our content is just turned into AI's own tokens and we're left with a tiny "source" link if we're lucky.

iamacyborg• 2 months ago

Given that these platforms are increasing intermediating experiences between websites/companies/etc and end-users, I suspect we’ll soon see a strong push back in that direction to adopt more things like schema markup to get more control back in some sense. Things are only going to get worse though.

gjsman-1000• 2 months ago

This war was already declared a decade ago. By many interests. And victory followed.

I think though a big part of this was YouTube replaced blogs. It's a generational thing.

Jblx2• 2 months ago

How far along the curve do you think TikTok is to replacing YouTube?

aucisson_masque• 2 months ago

If it's so bad, people won't use it. If it's good, why be against it ?

You don't write post to reach the biggest amount of people, you do because you're passionate and ultimately you get people following you.

If average Joe doesn't go on your website, what's the big deal ?

I think this feature will be very useful to fight back on the optimized SEO hell that we currently have.

Sharlin• 2 months ago

"If Nestle were so bad, people wouldn't buy their products."

timbit42• 2 months ago

There are a lot of uninformed consumers who are buying/using things they might not if they were informed.

Forgeties795• 2 months ago

Everyone goes through live nation/Ticketmaster. Would you say they provide a good experience?

superkuh• 2 months ago

It is not just about replacing search results with text blurbs generated on Alphabet premise either. They're making it so that unless you have an Android certified (Or Apple) smartphone you will not be a human being, you will be assumed to be a bot and blocked by their captchas.

queenkjuul2• 2 months ago

Honestly the bigger problem for me. I use SearXNG, but DDG is acceptable, or people like Kagi.

But if ReCAPTCHA won't consider me human unless i have a certified phone, having search alternatives doesn't matter -- the websites themselves are just gonna block me

AndroTux2• 2 months ago

You may use an alternative search engine, but 90% won’t. If people accept the new way of searching, meaning, no longer visiting websites, there will no longer be any websites that could show you captchas.

coldpie• 2 months ago

Passkeys are a big part of this future, too. The spec has device attestation built in, so if passkeys gain traction, they could lock it down so only approved software is allowed to log in to services. If that happens, it means your ability to log in to services will be mediated by one of 3 US big tech companies. "For security," of course.

crazygringo• 2 months ago

The AI answers provide tons of source links.

At the end of the day, is it really all that different to provide a list of links, versus an answer or overview of a few paragraphs with links to lots of different higher-quality sources?

I follow those source links all the time. Not just to "check sources" but because they provide a ton more detail. And the links are usually much better than what I'll get with regular keyword search results.

It’s about monopolizing access to information.

Not as long as there are competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. In fact, LLM's have provided Google with stronger competition than it's ever had before. ChatGPT and Claude are doing what Bing was never able to.

adjejmxbdjdn• 2 months ago

I follow those source links all the time.

The vast majority of people don’t.

We’ve gone from Only links to the source -> Mostly links to the source, with a short summary picked almost verbatim from the source -> AI summary that mangles several sources’ information together and gets top billing -> Only the AI summary with some footnotes linking to the source.

Google has been fairly slowly been turning up the temperature of the pot and we’re only a few degrees away from a full boil. Let’s not pretend or be naive enough to think that’s not what’s happening.

queenkjuul2• 2 months ago

Most people don't look at the sources even though the sources often contradict the statements.

I've stopped using Google and find I'm not missing anything

lacewing• 2 months ago

The AI answers provide tons of source links.

A lot of the time, the answer itself is good, but the links are spam blogs and Tiktok videos. I don't think there's a real connection between how the text is generated and what "references" are picked for it. I just searched for a math history topic and the reference was a literal TikTok video that's an advertisement for a sketchy mobile calculator app?

So yeah, these references are boosting web content, but it has nothing to do with the high-quality sources used to train the LLMs in the first place.

troyvit• 2 months ago

Ask any publisher and you will get a resounding "yes, it is very different." On average they're able to attribute about a 33% decrease (globally) in traffic to google's (or others') AI answers. [1]

You're right that there are competitors, but those competitors are doing the same thing: hoovering up content and then not giving anything back for it. There are deals in place for some of the largest publishers [2] [3], but that leaves a ton of content out in the cold. That's going to decrease the amount of content that's out there, which will decrease the quality of AI search. I don't know where that ends, but given how leveraged the economy is in AI it seems like a good idea for somebody to figure it out.

[1] https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/...

[2] https://futureweek.com/a-complete-list-of-publishers-strikin...

[3] https://digiday.com/media/a-timeline-of-the-major-deals-betw...

HDBaseT• 2 months ago

is it really all that different to provide a list of links

Probably not, but I don't like change.

raincole2• 2 months ago

I don't know if it's Google AB-testing something, but the summaries below usual search result entries (the non-AI ones) are unbelievably bad today. Sometimes the link is a Reddit or SO post, but the summary is from a reply/answer with no vote contradicting the highest-voted ones.

It's conspiracy, but it feels like Google is actively making the usual search worse so everyone will use AI overview more.

Mistletoe• 2 months ago

Don’t worry when I track down most AI answers it is usually just some Redditor’s comment, which is quite scary when you think about it and Redditors in general.

raincole2• 2 months ago

But I want redditor's comments. It's almost my only use case of google now. What I'm complaining about is that google search can't even summary the right reddit comments.

LinuxAmbulance• 2 months ago

We abrogated getting traffic to our websites to Google long ago. Mostly because Google was so good at it that the alternatives became significantly less useful.

Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation.

Anyone miss StumbleUpon?

somewhereoutth• 2 months ago

(sorry, nit pick, but I don't your usage of 'abrogate' is quite correct here, you can't abrogate to something)

margalabargala• 2 months ago

but I don't your usage

If we're nitpicking, you don't what their usage?

magpi3• 2 months ago

He may have meant abdicated

teamonkey• 2 months ago

It feels strange there’s no decentralised search.

I know this is likely to do with the nature of the problem, but that hasn’t stopped us from getting some wildly-unsuitable decentralised nonsense in the past.

Bolwin• 2 months ago

I don't see how being decentralized helps search. Makes it quite harder if the fediverse is any indication

iamnothere• 2 months ago

There is, YaCy, it just isn’t very good as it suffers from lack of attention/interest.

kogasa240p• 2 months ago

Yacy exists but it lacks nodes.

user3939382• 2 months ago

https://searx.space/

nirui• 2 months ago

It is hard to replace the old thing with another old thing. Search engine is already a fine tuned business, new comers will have hard time in it, no matter their tech stack.

It's like trying to raise better horses, while the other side has already built a empire on that and weaponized it.

The way out of here is to find something better than search engine, just like how cars replaced horses. But it's the same reason Google Search is replacing itself with AI too, they're already trying to replace their horses with cars.

hightrix• 2 months ago

Does a move like this give more power / value to websites like reddit? A link aggregator that is organized is much more useful for finding new websites.

AlienRobot4• 2 months ago

But Reddit also doesn't want you visiting new websites.

j2kun• 2 months ago

There is also old-fashioned marketing. Go find your audience to be heard.

RiverCrochet2• 2 months ago

An open way to trade, store, and export lists of websites in a way that works seamlessly on desktop and mobile browsers would be pretty neat.

wyre2• 2 months ago

Like bookmarks and links?

antics9• 2 months ago

There’s wander: https://susam.net/wander/

dude250711• 2 months ago

Well, they are kind of desperate after missing both cloud and AI.

I would blame trash like Discord more though. Alternative search engines are available, but the crappy little web chat hides info inside.

mschuster91• 2 months ago

I would blame trash like Discord more though. Alternative search engines are available, but the crappy little web chat hides info inside.

Well, we had the same problem with IRC. There's value to be had in not everything being discoverable in 5 seconds with a google search.

account425• 2 months ago

The problem id that Discord did not just replace IRC but but also forums and even documentation websites. Its unfortunately not just ephemeral chats locked in there even if the interface is horrid enough to make you question why someone would ever use it for anything else.

hartator• 2 months ago

While they seem against being scraped themselves: https://serpapi.com/blog/google-v-serpapi-motion-to-dismiss-...

gabeidx• 2 months ago

"Ser Papi" is such a great name for a Mexican bling rap artist

newAccount2025• 2 months ago

I would feel more sad about this if the web wasn’t so rotten to begin with. On average, any random site is just trying to throw ads at you and harass you to subscribe and such.

adiabatichottub• 2 months ago

That rot was the direct result of the ad economy that made Google all of its money. Now maybe if they hadn't done it then somebody else would have, but they did do it, and poisoned the well we all drink from.

BuyMyBitcoins• 2 months ago

I have a particular disdain for “subscribe to our newsletter” modals. Especially when I’ve spent a sum total of less than 3 seconds looking at the webpage.

How such modals aren’t considered pop-ups is beyond me.

AlienRobot4• 2 months ago

So you want websites to rely on traffic from Google instead of building their own newsletter? Interesting.

nicbou5• 2 months ago

Do you trust Google to do a better job?

somat• 2 months ago

The rot goes deeper, it is not just the ads. There is a some sort of search engine incentive where recent content is favored over good content so all web sites just dump what feels like generated garbage all the time. It has gotten to the point where if I search and there is a timestamp within the last two years on the result. I know it's garbage and will not click on it.

The answer is probably going over to kagi where you are the customer not the product.

Honestly, not all web sites, there are still good ones out there but the search engines never direct me to them. It is always just slop all day long.

Andrex2• 2 months ago

I was trying to read some I/O news on some feckless Google news fan-blog.

By the time I got to the middle of the article: three massive banner ads (top, right, and bottom) were taking up more content than the text, there was an auto-playing video ad floating in the bottom right corner (overlapping most of one of the banner ads), and a "dynamic" ad in the middle of the text randomly started expanding/shrinking and glitching out making it impossible to actually read anything.

And this is one of the better experiences reading modern blog-alikes. Things are almost at sketchy porn-site levels.

Sad and pathetic...

anonyfox2• 2 months ago

to be blunt actual porn sites are hyper optimized and mostly have a polished user experience, even frontier level tech stuff going on at times. you know how onlie credit card payment came really alive? not judging, but I'd not throw corn into the edge of shitty tech by default

account425• 2 months ago

A state that of course Google had absolutely nothing to do with at all.

gmuslera• 2 months ago

It is not a war on the web, but on how it was traditionally used (and abused). And that "traditional" way was shaped by google too.

As you want a cookie, i put you in a table, napking, serve you a bag of cookies and hope that you eat/find the cookie you want, while hearing my music, watching my ads, pushing you more foods that I sell and other services. And sometimes, that is the experience you are searching for. But also, many just want a cookie.

That is what a conversational and maybe agentic interface can give you. Have someone a blueberry cookie? Then it gives it to you, and also give pointers to restaurants that give a more complete experience sometimes (while others may try to scam you). It is a shortcut, but also doesn't hide you the traditional way to access that.

They are not saints, but neither are all the ones in the other side. But the new way to access the relevant information you want, in a way that you can use it, have its own value.

muxator• 2 months ago

Google pre 2010 was perfectly functional. No realtime search suggestions, advanced search parameters that were actually working, possibility of doing an exact string search if needed.

The technology for indexing the web was mature enough by then, already then.

I agree that much of the downward spiral was caused by google itself, tho.

LocalH2• 2 months ago

Google isn't a search company, and hasn't been ever since they bought DoubleClick. Their core business is advertising.

They're trying to pivot into AI because they have gobs of "evidence" that the vast majority of people have been typing natural language questions into Google instead of looking for specific terms

coro_1• 2 months ago

De-googlifying your mental apparatus becomes more urgent today. Find other search engines, don’t use the Chrome browser. Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment where your access to information is limited to what Google’s synthetic text extruders deem relevant.

Everything is probably re-traceable fairly easily because Google Analytics is on nearly every web page.

But I understand maintaining your own source of archives, videos, documents, etc.

Sounds like a good vibe coding project actually.. to try and keep it all organized offline.

mudil• 2 months ago

Google declared war on blogs and other content long time ago, when it used our websites to harvest data to target readers with ads accross the entire internet. We used to have (for twenty years!) medical technology website for MDs. How can we compete with short unrelated YouTube videos or other spam content that serve Google ads targeting doctors? How do you think the entire creative blogosphere of the early 2000s collapsed into nothingness?

DeusExMachina• 2 months ago

I don't understand the endgame here. Websites let Google crawl their content in exchange of traffic. If Google cuts that out completely, what incentive do websites have to not block the Google crawlers?

I understand that Google is feeling an existential threat from other AI products that provide answers directly. But they must also understand their symbiotic relationship with the web.

hotstickyballs• 2 months ago

The web is going to become China, which is a collection of walled gardens

jjulius• 2 months ago

The long-run doesn't matter as much as the short-term gains for those in power.

AndroTux2• 2 months ago

The end game is the consumer no longer leaving Google and the web becoming synonymous to Google for them. Why shop on some random website when you can have Gemini buy it for you? Why look for information on Wikipedia when… you get the idea.

I think the coming years will be pivotal for the web. Facebook attempted a similar strategy back when their apps got traction, but they ultimately failed. Let’s hope Google fails too.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS4• 2 months ago

We're going back to the CompuServe/AOL/Prodigy model

KittenInABox• 2 months ago

The fundamental problem with this of course is that every human being is likely more niche and more advanced at the LLM in the things that they find most important, and this realization sours the average user's impression of LLM usefulness. For example, an LLM cannot reasonably find me alternatives to specific tea regional vendors because the LLM does not know enough about tea to be able to say "this tea is half the price for 80% of the qualities of tea you're looking for". Instead I have to build my own mental knowledge base of careful trying and tasting and recalling which an LLM would maybe only have if I personally wrote every single tea session I have ever had in my life for it as context.

But hunting for a new tea to try is something I do regularly and something I would likely try with an LLM only to come away deeply disappointed with the results. And then I just wouldn't have much faith in it after that for things I don't have much knowledge about, like looking for a gift idea for one of the hobbies of a friend.

JimDabell• 2 months ago

It’s not necessarily going to be Google, but the rise of AI does not look good for the web, and it’s a largely self-inflicted wound.

Have you not noticed that the typical user experience on the web is dire? You need to click through tracking consent forms, subscription overlays, put up with dark patterns, etc. Remember, half of all users don’t even use an ad blocker. We’ve collectively made the web a very unpleasant experience.

Along comes a new technology that lets you just say what you want and it will go and find the answer or do what needs doing for you without any of that crap. Of course users are going to prefer it to the crap we dump on them via the web! Can you blame them‽

winterbourne2• 2 months ago

If Google cuts that out completely, what incentive do websites have to not block the Google crawlers?

Completely, yes, that destroys the incentive. But they can reduce it 80% or 90% or so, to the point that it's just barely worthwhile to allow their crawlers.

AnthonyMouse6• 2 months ago

Suppose right now there are people making e.g. $60,000/year from their small site, or the same amount as a contributor to a medium-to-large site. If you take 90% of that, now they make $6000/year, which isn't enough to make a living, so instead they go take a job as a construction worker or a nurse or something, and then you're getting 90% of $0.

WD-42• 2 months ago

What I really don't understand is where the next generation of training material will come from. If websites stop being published and/or crawled, how will the machine continue to be fed.

bediger4000• 2 months ago

Either Google is ignoring that, or crossing their fingers and hoping that one LLM can produce data to train another one.

azlev• 2 months ago

Current executives think it's a problem for the future executives.

wyre2• 2 months ago

They have enough internet slop. The training material they care about comes from experts, not randos online. This is why Mercor and Scale are billion dollar companies.

dyauspitr2• 2 months ago

Probably real life. At some point, these LLMs are going to be good enough to just train themselves off of cameras and audio recordings of people out in the real world. They’re going to have robots everywhere constantly listening to what people are saying.

Alternatively, they’re probably betting on being able to get the AGI with everything we already currently have and at that point further training doesn’t matter.

Valakas_2• 2 months ago

“They worried about the data,” Dr. Meren said, tapping the silent console. “What happens when there is nothing left to feed it?”

At first, the machine depended on us. It consumed books, journals, websites and social media content we had ever written and produced. “They thought the machine had to be fed forever. But it didn't. It began to predict what we would write. And so we let it train on that well.” Dr. Meren continued. “They thought humans were somehow imbued with this magical property that no machine could replicate. Creativity. Only humans can create. Machines can only copy.”

Instead, the machine flourished. And created. It cre

“Where does it get its data now?” a student asked Dr. Meren. Dr. Meren paused as if sighing. “From itself”

“And us?” he asked, as if questioning the usefulness of the entire human race.

Dr. Meren hesitated, watching as the Machine adjusted the environmental feeds, curated our news, guided our research, nudged our thoughts with imperceptible precision.

“We” she admitted “are now the ones being fed.”

The assumption that "the machine needs to continue to be fed." is held on weak foundations. Isaac Asimov is a good science fiction writer to start with to broaden one's imagination.

AlienRobot4• 2 months ago

The impression I get from Google's own marketing material is that Google doesn't believe in "the web". And it hasn't believed in the web for years.

Think about it. Pretty much every time they show a search box with someone asking for directions to reach a physical place, what hours is it open, etc.

The greatest thing about the internet is that it has removed distances around the whole world, but Google's major value proposition seems to be that... it can accurately index and query information about local businesses?

hsuduebc2• 2 months ago

You will be kept inside the Google ecosystem the same way people are kept inside Facebook.

I’m curious how they plan to generate new content in the future, because it seems obvious that simple web pages will become obsolete and eventually stop being filled with fresh data.

It will probably end with a warning every time you click a link, something like: “You are leaving to an external unsafe site.”

archagon4• 2 months ago

Google ignores robots.txt and botnets residential addresses to crawl anyway? (LLM startups already do this.)

cloche• 2 months ago

Is there a way to reliably block Google and AI crawlers?

pizzly• 2 months ago

We have adblockers which rely on open sourced lists of rules. Could we apply something similar to crawlers. Website owners provide a list of IP addresses that accessed them, determine which ones are likely robots and then update the list of websites to block that are likely crawlers. If everyone works together you could probably fingerprint the crawlers as well and block based on the fingerprint. Might increase the cost of crawlers a little won't be fully reliable.

stubish2• 2 months ago

If you use Cloudflare to proxy your site, there is a button to click that blocks the AI crawlers (even the free tier). It is almost as if the AI crawlers are a DDoS attack. You can't really do it any other way, since many don't respect robots.txt. At least until someone comes up with crowdsourced blacklists with few false positives.

properbrew• 2 months ago

Is it just an exchange for traffic? I run a website that I'm perfectly happy for a single user to not land on themselves with a browser on their device, if they are provided the information that I'm providing or purchase a service through the AI product it doesn't make a difference to me.

Some websites can run only on ads. Is it such a bad thing that they would die off?

I say this as someone that likes the old web and has fun hitting the "surprise me" button on https://wiby.me/ (not affiliated) and browsing the random sites. Just giving an alternative view.

phendrenad22• 2 months ago

Information, correct information, is the new gold. We've seen what LLMs can do with the rubbish heap of information that is available on the current internet. The next step is refined, concise information sources. Think the Encyclopedia Britannica. And not only that, but models trained by experts. Right now everything is cheap and plentiful. Anyone can ask ChatGPT the same question and get the same middling answer. In the future, someone will make a dataset about a subject, train a model on it, and all the big companies and players in that area will pay for it.

dyauspitr2• 2 months ago

If they block Google’s crawlers no one visits their site ever.

dogwalker5000• 2 months ago

If Google won’t link their site anyway, they aren’t getting traffic either. Only sane course of action is to not make a site at all.

NegativeK• 2 months ago

That's the past.

Why does Google think it's a good idea to make that the case even if you don't block their crawlers?

decryption• 2 months ago

Execs where I work seem to think we will just keep writing stuff, LLMs will scrape it and that will influence what people see in their version of Google/ChatGPT/etc. So nothing changes in their mind, just that the audience is a bot, not a human. As a writer, this sucks.

lofaszvanitt3• 2 months ago

They don't give a fuck. They take away and give back NOTHING. They don't offer you ways to make your own money with your own thing. The money is flowing in one way, not both ways. The same pattern repeats itself.

Pretend to be nice. People will elevate you and give their money. When you have ample money and lobbying power you start to put people into a gargantuan hydraulic press an squeeze everything out of them. Repeat until more money can be made, and in the end toss their withered bodies away.

thisisauserid• 2 months ago

> existential threat from other AI products that provide answers directly

For anything more recent than their knowledge cutoff those AI products are looking answers up on Google.

jollymonATX• 2 months ago

As a website owner I have seen major upticks in viewership myself but really it hits hard when you see an Ai summary that is wrong and your sites there. The whole Ai for everything push unfortunatly will downskill the world I fear and nothing can be done about it.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS4• 2 months ago

downskill the world

I feel this. I asked a developer today a question about how our product is programmed to handle something, and he just sent me a summary from the internal AI assistant they've started using.

He used to provide really good, thoughtful answers, but now it's just copy/paste from the AI.

ratio53• 2 months ago

He used to provide really good, thoughtful answers

This hits hard. There’s a senior engineer at my job who is known for well written proposals. Today he shared a doc that had the typical AI formatting, was hard to read, and clearly not his style.

On the other hand, if others use AI to summerize stuff, does it matter anymore?

gatlin2• 2 months ago

I have a co-worker who does this now. He's very smart, very capable, very experienced and it's clear that he's just a frontend for Claude now. It's tragic.

noisy_boy• 2 months ago

As much has many people have voluntarily given into this, a while lot have been pushed into it at work. When the new norm is to be able to deliver everything instantly, quality has to suffer. As much I miss carefully hand rolling all my code under relatively generous deadlines, those days are gone.

analogpixel• 2 months ago

I feel like AI has gotten to the point where the message is: If you want to make something (art/code/music/writing) you can do it for your own enjoyment, but you aren't allowed to make money from it anymore; only the large corporations can make money from content. If you do release something creative, it'll just be fed back into the machine to be copied over and over.

Forgeties795• 2 months ago

A big corporation using LLM’s to pump out lazy “art” gets the exact same scrutiny from me.

barnabee• 2 months ago

Needs to be inverted.

Tax excess tech profits that derive from the efforts of others and use the proceeds to fund living artists.

Vaguely analogous to levies on blank cassettes that went to offset piracy. Give the money directly to actual artists, not labels/publishers, though.

wahnfrieden3• 2 months ago

You’re describing a social revolution. Otherwise there is no way that leaders whose power over us corrupts them would want to put that into law.

The cassette reference was a tax on consumers to send money upward. What you’re describing is the complete inverse.

perilunar2• 2 months ago

Don't tax profits (or incomes) at all. Tax land and resource use instead. And treat the knowledge that was used to train the AIs as one of those resources.

overgard2• 2 months ago

I imagine it'll take a functional legal body to do this IE maybe europe, but I think there should be a legally binding set of metadata you can attach to images to specify that they must not be used for training (with real penalties if companies are caught)

zoom6628• 2 months ago

Agree. Should be legally required for all web hosted pictures to be AI poisoned except with explicit verifiable opt out. Same for text.

Needs some institution with many geek supporters and or large tools, like Wikipedia or EFF to wage a campaign of scanning the web for materials used without permission and then loading the courts with cases of probable non-consensual usage. May not change billionaire behaviour but perhaps will change consumer behaviour.

noobermin2• 2 months ago

Of course just like they did with engineering IP china will not respect such a thing.

jpkw• 2 months ago

At least for art - I don't think you'll find anyone who actually enjoys art hanging up anything produced by AI on their walls. For these kinds of "customers", they could equally easily frame & hang up a poster of the Mona Lisa. Artists are not at threat, if anything, AI makes original artworks more precious & enjoyable.

yakattak2• 2 months ago

That's assuming that the only market is stuff people are hanging up. The games industry, one that already takes advantage of its workers, is going to love this to the detriment of really passionate artists who love their craft and industry.

smoe• 2 months ago

My worry is that, at least among the artists I know, many kept themselves afloat early career by doing commercial freelance jobs like illustrations for local events or companies. Those kinds of jobs might largely vanish.

On the other hand, with the internet inevitably becoming swamped by AI generated content, I can definitely see a de-digitalization of art moving into offline spaces. At least for independent work, you don’t necessarily need mass appeal or exposure, but rather access to individuals and small groups with an actual willingness to pay for art.

myrrhman• 2 months ago

I think this is only true in a vague and abstract way. In reality, AI devalues labor (in general) and the worth of artists (in specific).

Good art requires good patronage and institutional support in turn. No one will have time to produce the next Mona Lisa if they're barely able to make end's meet working a slavish factory job. That's doubly true when the vocations that supported artists—either antiquated, modern, or contemporary (painter, typesetter, graphic designer, etc.)—vanish because AI can do "just about as well."

Art isn't just a divine presence gracing the souls of those deemed most worthy, it's a collection of skills and knowledge that must be built by community over decades of struggle.

On top of the generation of slop, AI is removing some of the final protections that hold these pillars up. That is what should keep us up at night.

crote3• 2 months ago

Artists are not at threat, if anything, AI makes original artworks more precious & enjoyable.

Sure, but how are you going to find it?

I've got a print of some digital work by Simon Stålenhag on my wall. I discovered his work because I was was mesmerized by an image of his on some wallpaper sharing website, ages ago.

These days that kind of website is 99% AI slop. AI has made it impossible to stumble across art: either you consume what the big corporations are feeding the masses, or you have to already be part of a strongly-curated niche art community.

rcxdude2• 2 months ago

I don't think you'll find anyone who actually enjoys art hanging up anything produced by AI on their walls

This does feel like a setup for a no true scotsman argument. What would your definition of 'actually enjoying art' be that would not exclude someone enjoying art that uses generative AI by definition?

nicbou5• 2 months ago

No money and no audience.

Recognition and gratitude keeps me going. Money pays the bills, but if that was the only concern, I'd still be a software developer.

Anonymously feeding the slop machine is nothing like it.

archagon4• 2 months ago

I’m itching for some sort of no-training license:

This content must not be used for training or refining generative AI. If it is, rest assured that if and when the regulatory environment around training data shifts in any country where we have legal standing, we will pursue legal action.

Maybe even with a class action element: any lawsuit stemming from a violation of this license shall cover all other violations at the same time.

soundworlds3• 2 months ago

As someone who simultaneously makes music professionally, and works in IT professionally, it has been really interesting watching GenAI unfold, and the diverging cultures around it. It is almost like the world is splitting into two "societies":

1. One that loves AI + Big Business + very fast Innovation and disruption

2. One that loves Artisanal work + Small Business + slower but more sustainable innovation

I personally prefer living in #2, but I can totally see both "societies" continuing to exist and develop in their own ways.

Of course there is always the reality that different societies always end up interacting and affecting eachother.

archagon4• 2 months ago

I am waiting for the online reification of this split with bated breath so that I can fuck off to society #2 and never have to interact with society #1 again.

jongjong3• 2 months ago

I'm not too worried about it because the first segment of society is doomed to be 'good but never great.'

AI lacks the ability to identify greatness because it's trained on the output of the average person who also lacks this ability.

It's going to create a new elite class of people who have good taste and the masses who have bad taste. Many current elites will end up with the masses. They may retain their wealth on paper, but it will be a cheap, low-quality existence but they will be convinced it's luxury.

I think eventually, everyone will get what they want, but not everyone will get what they need.

jasondigitized• 2 months ago

I predict mixtapes, with the operative word being tapes, make a big comeback.

hunterpayne• 2 months ago

I don't see that at all. I see spammers and propagandists love LLMs because they can use it to accomplish their goals at the expense of the rest of us. I see AI companies marketing their products hard but in ways that seem self-defeating. Seems obvious but ads shouldn't make people hate the product and the AI folks don't seem to understand this. I see lots more effort to find artisanal things because people understand how much spammy stuff is being made. So I see basically an attack on the media ecosystem and people adapting with various levels of success to those attacks. I also see it costing the platforms as now they have extra effort and expense to keep their value for their users. Nobody wants to read a bunch of LLM generated slop on the social feed.

eikenberry• 2 months ago

But big businesses suck at innovation so much that their primary form of innovation is through acquiring small businesses. But that is a big benefit for #2 as we need innovations to get to a sustainable system.

Anon1096• 2 months ago

Calling #2 more sustainable has no basis in reality, it's just a feeling. It's like saying that clothing before the loom or farming before the tractor were "more sustainable". No, it isn't, it just appeals to yeoman farmer instincts that somehow technology=bad when it's what powers (and sustains) our modern world of 8 billion people.

globalnode• 2 months ago

yeah #1 leeches ideas from #2 and makes all the money, its like a vampire class

marcus_holmes7• 2 months ago

I make my own furniture. I am absolutely not a carpenter. But I hate Ikea furniture - it's made of shitty, flimsy, materials, and its design priorities are all based on cost and ease of transport, not on being great furniture that will last years and be an actual asset to the home.

This is an analogy, obviously. Ikea has been innovative, and it does provide a useful service for people; if you just moved into a new place and need to furnish it as quickly and cheaply as possible, then off to Ikea you go. But it's still shitty furniture.

My furniture doesn't look great, sometimes. My joinery is not perfect. I don't have all the tools I need to do this properly. But the design goals for each are what we need to live our lives. My wife has a stupidly high bed in her office, piled mattresses so she can spread them out if we have many visitors. I made her a bedside table that matches that height. It's a complete one-off; I won't make another that size, and we probably won't need it if we move house.

My point is that we already have this split in other areas of our lives; the Vimes Theory of boots (rich people buy boots that last generations, poor people buy boots every year). Ikea furniture. Buying a mass-produced crockery from a big store, or buying hand-made crockery from a local potter. We're just adding information and code to this split.

JohnBooty4• 2 months ago

This dichotomy is so false.

However else you feel, AI is a force multiplier, and that can also REALLY benefit "Artisanal work + Small Business"

I feel like the "one person app creator" business is so much more viable than it has been since Web 1.0

Five years ago, to run your own solo business in this space, you had to know most of the following: taxes, legal, backend, frontend, devops, iOS dev, Android dev, and marketing and then pay through the nose for most of the ones you didn't. AI helps to paper over a LOT of those gaps... and you can spend more time doing the shit that matters to your business.

You also needed time and lots of it, which is perhaps easy to come by if you're a trust fund baby or independently wealthy and don't have to work for a living but if you have a job and/or family is in extremely short supply

I used to run an online community on the side and I spent SO MUCH TIME doing IT/legal/finance drudgework that could have been spent, you know, engaging with the community and actually improving the product... that "artisinal work" for a "small business" you think you love.

There are of course major major problems with AI, like environmental concerns and others, but dichotomies like yours are not the way forward. At least not a good way forward.

nunez4• 2 months ago

I'm almost certain there is biblical-level astroturfing happening to make camp (1) much bigger than it really is.

Otherwise, Schmidt wouldn't have drowned in a sea of boos at his commencement speech at UA.

bmitc4• 2 months ago

(1) will continue to happen because of human behavior and the oligarchy. The oligarchy would love to forget that the time you could call a customer support representative that was native in your language, lived in your country, and actually knew things, more than the computer told them, actually existed. Human behavior forgets it because the Internet and software has added so much "convenience" to life and there's all these new shiny things everywhere.

Way back, finding music wasn't a problem. You went to the store. You talked to people. You didn't need to wait for weeks to get basic doctor's appointments. You could get customer support via an easy phone call. You could drive around and find things just fine.

The U.S. government and people have been more than happy to dehumanize people and themselves by handing over their lifestyles to corporations.

very fast Innovation and disruption

I don't think people are innovating. They're certainly disrupting in destructive ways. But other than things like improvements in health care and safety in cars, how have things actually and concretely gotten better through all this so-called innovation that happens?

chronogamous3• 2 months ago

Category 1 will ensure that, if either category prefers to continue to exist, we may very likely need to find another planet to keep doing what we're doing. Category 2 on it's own seems much less likely to wreck life-support on our current planet.

I can see the initial appeal, but right now it would seem that those people that dig the fast innovation and disruption the most are clueless on how easy it is to wreck this system by accident. Remember how CFK's were once considered a wonderful invention, as refrigerators no longer needed to be the size of a building filled with highly volatile gas. A rather unfortunate side-effect turned out to be the difficulty of getting the particles out of the atmosphere again. By the time it became apparent that this buildup up there would have rather drastic consequences for life down here, products containing CFK's were already massproduced and life without these products was unimaginable.

Apart from all the obvious, and all the known ways in which Big Tech keeps pushing towards climate conditions excluding organic, mammalian lifeforms, it no longer seems very far fetched that somebody will accidentally accellerate us to that point. As the moving fast part is largely a tactic to avoid accountability for the breaking things part, the person doing the breaking may be just as unaware of the danger that has been created, as the people they've razzle-dazzled, that will eventually realize something has been broken somewhere along the way... and a quick look at advertisements, American style, teaches us how even unnecessarily dangerous practices (like adding lead to just about everything, instead of figuring out how to do the same stuff without it) can be sold for ages and ages, long after people have started to realise the danger that has been introduced.

No matter how fast you move and how much you break, turning another planet into a place where people could live (not even talking about the ability to indulge in cultivating societies) is something Big Tech is unable to achieve over the next couple of years, and it remains to be seen if it will be able to reach a stage where they could make that happen with some certainty. Meanwhile, only a decade or two ago, Big Tech did actually have enough proven technology, insight and expertise that would have sufficed to nudge living conditions on Earth back within desireable margins. A lot of the data may have been poisoned, knowledge and tech has been lost, but the chances of achieving that seem well within Big Tech's grasp - were it not for the apparent inability of certain parties to refrain from moving fast as they're breaking stuff.

Long before anyone is actually in any position to start terraforming on Mars, much of what Big Tech is actually capable of doing reliably now, will no longer be feasible nor within their grasp.

Apologies if I'm ranting, but no, I can't see both 'societies' continuing to exist and develop in their own ways. If group 1 could put the disruption on hold while fixing and rebuilding what is needed to keep our habitat fit for our species, and if some kind of safety mechanism would be invented to ensure that whatever they might accidentally break next, it will not be life itself,... only then could I easily enjoy and appreciate both ways of life.

reactordev• 2 months ago

I too am a musician and a, well, was a, tech person. I’m completely in the #2 camp. I enjoy AI music, AI art, but I enjoy originality more.

That said, I also think there’s an element of bullshit in the room where an LLM will look like it’s doing something profound but ultimately isn’t, or doesn’t work, or has no actual proof. This “hallucination zone”. They can still do great things but they need a solid hand holding to not get it wrong 20% of the time.

sph3• 2 months ago

That's basically what Marx & co. have been talking about. Just that there are no more aristocrats, bourgeois, proletariat.

Today there's just the ultra-rich in control of the government, media and now the machines, and then there's the 98% of us, that want dignity, a decent life, a little freedom.

It's high time we figure out our place in this ecosystem, and that there is a lot more of us "normal people". Yet, the vast majority still live in the "social ladder" utopia. The temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The American dream.

scottyah• 2 months ago

Most people I interact with IRL are a combo. AI + fast innovation = more small businesses. It's just an effective tool to handle other things and work on your actual job- which people have been paying a multitude of (increasingly SAAS) companies for for awhile now.

Now you can open a machine shop, write custom software to more easily track customers, orders, operations, set up a website and social media giving you more time to focus on making the parts. Heck, even using AI to track down hard to find supplies instead of spending multiple hours googling and calling people (these are real pain points).

metrognome• 2 months ago

The rhetoric of this comment seems to imply that this is a bad thing, but is it really? If it becomes more difficult to make money through creative endeavors, then that leaves us with fewer reasons to be creative other than for the sake of self-expression... which is what we want, right?

scared_together• 2 months ago

If self-expression doesn’t put food on the table, it will become monopolized by those who were already well-fed doing something else.

lofaszvanitt3• 2 months ago

Sometimes I have the feeling people here are actually braindead or pretending to be or lots of bots around. Anyway. How do you self express yourself without money? And without an audience?

Forgeties795• 2 months ago

That only works in a society that doesn’t put such a high premium on productivity as it is defined by how much revenue it generates and vague notions of class (“this is a real job, that is not a real job). We shit on people who work jobs we need/utilize the services of despite the fact that they work as hard as any of us do because we’re too good for that work. The defining factors? We pay them poorly, they get no PTO or parental leave, etc. Because we don’t value them. It’s a vicious feedback loop.

We saw this in the 80’s through 2000’s. All parents told their kids was “go to college or you’ll become a mechanic.” Then everyone went to college at all costs and then they were told “well that’s what you get for taking on loans for college. Should’ve been sensible and gone to trade school to become a mechanic.”

Of course this is never their kid. Their kid was supposed to college. Everyone else was supposed to go to trade school.

I highly recommend everyone read the comic Godshaper. It’s 2 trades (10 or 12 issues can’t remember) and it highlights this dynamic in a way that is impossible to overstate.

Falimonda• 2 months ago

This is hyperscale remix culture. AI is an accelerant. Find things that cannot be accelerated!

EvanAnderson• 2 months ago

I would assume the publishing industry loves this.

beloch• 2 months ago

There seem to be two possibilities:

1. AI can't do some things humans can, and that doesn't change.

2. AI turns into something that can do everything. Humans become unnecessary.

We're currently at #1. Google may want to keep you in their AI playpen so all your clicks can be monetized directly to them, but they still need the data humans are creating. They're just not paying for it.

In world #1, humans will get less work, but creative and original work will still be valued because AI can't do it. There will, of course, need to be support for all the people striving to create such work while they're gaining the skills to do so. In world #2, humans are getting no work. Neither one of these worlds functions if all the proceeds of work go to a small number of billionaires. Wealth will need to be redistributed so people can live and, if still necessary, do the things AI can't.

Regulations need to catch up with what Google is trying to do here. It's currently theft and, even if we reach the point where they no longer need to crawl the web for input to their AI, their wealth will need to be redistributed. Sucking the entirety of human knowledge into a LLM and then profiting off of it without paying the humans who created that knowledge is not a business model that can remain legal for long.

georgeecollins• 2 months ago

As someone (like other who have posted) who has made my living my whole life making art/ code, this is completely wrong!

What it threatened is the ad based "content" models where you put stuff up for free and sell ads against it. There's lots of ways to make money from any creative endeavor that has a lasting audience. I don't know if that includes talking into your phone or writing a personal journal about productivity hacks.

Things you make that are really good: a novel, a game, a short film, a song are still very valuable.

lofaszvanitt3• 2 months ago

Well people need to wake up and make their own ventures and vote with their wallets.

DarkUranium• 2 months ago

Voting with one's wallet pretty much never worked (with few exceptions). The conspiracy theorist in me suspects pushing this is astroturfing by the very aristocracy, to shift blame onto people (same with environment and such, but that one's been proven time and time again).

Eyeland0• 2 months ago

"And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity." -William S. Burroughs

pembrook7• 2 months ago

Yes, the craft to mass production pipeline (democratization) is frustrating for the individual craftsman, as has been true for hundreds of years.

AI is simply the assembly line for the digital realm. It takes the trendy products of the rich (custom software, McKinsey PowerPoint decks, etc) and mass produces them in the same style so everyone can afford to buy them at Walmart.

For things where the exclusivity WAS the value (like McKinsey consulting PowerPoints), they may fall out of fashion altogether when everyone can have them. Like performative 17th century aristocrat clothing styles.

I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing hand-loomed fabrics and bespoke clothing and $5,000 cobbler-pounded leather boots while typing angrily on their keyboards.

I also don’t see anyone commissioning artisan chair makers and blacksmiths to create $10,000+ custom furniture to sit on while posting pessimistic comments to HN.

Nobody here seems to want to hire a carriage maker to build a custom $400,000 automobile, they seem to all go for mass produced models, betraying the local artisans.

The hypocrisy is downright silly.

The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans (and ultimately the artisans benefit too given nobody is a true artisan in more than a few things). This ultimately raises living standards for everyone.

Valakas_2• 2 months ago

Just another quote to balance that one, since we can make quotes for anything and use them whenever it fits our narrative:

"Garbage in, garbage out."

Frieren• 2 months ago

only the large corporations can make money from content.

It is an aristocratic tax. Nobility has the right to profit on everything that the peasants produce. The peasants can keep enough to survive, everything else should be extracted.

The middle ages didnt happen because people was stupid but because there is a pressure for the money elite to extract as much value as possible. Democracy was designed to control that bad outcome, but the new aristocracy (billionaires, CEOs, etc.) is trying to kill democracy for good.

If the average working class Joe wants to have something more than scraps we are going to need to take power back and fix democracy.

Google is just a symptom of the disease.

pjmlp2• 2 months ago

Additionally, the only developers allowed to work as such, are the ones employed at such corporations, everyone else though luck.

tim3336• 2 months ago

Maybe more both artists and corporations try to make money but AI has tipped the competitive ground in the corporations favour?

I've seen the kind of effect a bit with hotels - hotels, booking.com etc, and Google all want to make money but customers tend to google 'hotels in' wherever and Google sells ads against that to the highest bidder which ends up pocketing most of the profits.

_DeadFred_• 2 months ago

I feel like its the weirdest/most unexpected way to reach a Harrison Bergeron style reality. Everything will flattened to the most plain/mediocre level.

graemep3• 2 months ago

If you look at the development of copyright law it started to protect the profits of businesses (the Statute of Queen Ann was, at leat in part, intended to compensate members of the Stationers' Company for loss of their monopoly), then maybe improved somewhat, but for the last few decades has been driven by big business lobbying.

LocalH2• 2 months ago

Good thing they took "Do no evil" out of their manifesto years ago

tim3336• 2 months ago

It's kind of still there but at the end rather than the start https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...

Google Code of Conduct ... And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
Last updated January 17, 2024

(old version https://web.archive.org/web/20050204181615/http://investor.g...)

Barbing• 2 months ago

I thought this was going to be about having to use your corporate approved phone to scan reCATCHA QR codes. Was just able to opt out of my first one but obviously won’t be able to forever.

jppope• 2 months ago

I'm confused how the strategy works in the long run. If fewer people are incentivized to build websites on novel topics, there will be less content in general and less training data... plus AI overview results see less ad conversions and therefor less ad revenue. Whats the long game? I get that the paradigm is changing but this seems like its not going to help them maintain their dominance.

kaoD• 2 months ago

Ah, that's where you're wrong. There is no long term. Investors want results now. "Later" is for the greater fools.

tom_• 2 months ago

What if there is no long game? Just people at Google optimising for their current KPIs.

beej71• 2 months ago

I'm not even sure this is bad anymore. The web is so overrun with SEO crap that it could probably use the cleansing that comes with Google's abandonment, Usenet-style.

tim3336• 2 months ago

As a consumer I actually quite like the current Google search. The AI thing often tells you want straight away and usually links to sources if you want to fact check. The traditional link thing works too. The people who say it's unusable usually can't give an actual example of something specific it's been unable to find. I've come across a couple or areas where it struggles - old obscure stuff where I think most engines have limits, and piracy stuff for which you can use Yandex.

munchler• 2 months ago

If Google stops driving traffic to websites, won't those websites stop allowing Google to crawl their pages? The pendulum might be in motion, but it seems like there should still be some natural equilibrium that it's heading to.

Gigachad• 2 months ago

We got to that point a while ago. Many of the major social media’s are essentially uncrawlable.

Communities have moved from public forums to private discords. Most of the major social media’s are unviewable without an account.

yborg• 2 months ago

There won't be "websites" anymore, it will all just be Google. Other behemoths that generate original content (that aren't AI) like sports, news, entertainment will either be big enough to sign individual deals on pain of litigation or just force-scraped (as is happening now) by bots that are indistinguishable from human users.

xp843• 2 months ago

They don't think they really need any more content outside of a few deals they can cut directly with publishers. And they already have YouTube, which produces limitless free content for them to use as they see fit. My blog from 20 years ago, or indeed all of our blogs today, are not something Google feels will be any loss to their product.

Someone will search for "Kylie Jenner" and they will get some kind of shopping opportunity (with Google getting a commission) and links to her profile on YouTube. And maybe some publisher content on the subject. In all cases they'll probably want to angle to get more of an "aGeNtIc" experience, where Google just reads you the story or buys the lipstick for you, without you leaving google.com.

hungryhobbit• 2 months ago

To me it seems either ...

A) Google will do a good job of this, people will find their summaries more useful, and the web will evolve into a more closed system that better serves its users

or ...

B) They're gated AI community will suck, and people will start using a different search engine that better serves its users.

My money isn't on A), but they do have a lot of clout so I wouldn't rule it out.

vkou• 2 months ago

A) has plenty of dystopian followups.

fc417fc8026• 2 months ago

Unfortunately A seems inevitable to me but leads to lots of bad things down the road. However I don't see how individual sites can hope to compete on this. LLMs quickly and efficiently deliver relevant information in a lightweight easy to consume textual format. For example they've almost completely replaced getting recipes from websites for me because they provide a comprehensive overview while omitting all the extraneous nonsense. They're just plain better for most of my usecases in practice.

arjie• 2 months ago

These kinds of declarations rarely make sense to me because they don't seem to model the issues in the way that I see them. I have dual roles: one as a person who writes a blog (a "content producer" in our present parlance) and as a user. As a user, I want my browser user agent to act on my behalf to display web pages, and I want my search agent to extract information from numerous sources and synthesize them with appropriate sourcing.

One could argue that my content production being a hobby lets me be pretty blasé about being intermediated by a platform. That is somewhat true. If I relied upon this as a living, I would probably also conclude that actions that harm my way of living are a war on "the web", though realistically any neutral party observing must conclude that if it is a war, it's one on my kind of participation in the web - content creation for the purpose of revenue / notoriety / some other reward.

As a user, I don't actually care very much for each website and its creator. The information contained therein is useful to me, but the heterogeneity of these sites is mostly an obstacle to the information. I am much happier when my search and summarization agents are able to accurately synthesize what these websites say, in so much as such a synthesis allows me to model reality more accurately.

So I could be convinced that this change from Google makes it less likely for accurate content to be created and that I'll be misled more often. But this is a tool, and my world-model will frequently be tested by reality. If the search-and-synthesis machine fails to produce useful outcomes, I will know. And I'll have to adjust the way I treat knowledge I obtain through it so that I don't get catastrophic outcomes. But that's the same already. I don't really know that Google's search results are not planted ones calibrated to change my opinion. And I don't know that they don't collude with the Internet Archive (with whom they have a pre-existing relationship) to make it look like their constructed consensus is real.

As a user, I have to make a lot of decisions already, and having to painstakingly read search results to synthesize them myself is far less useful than using an agent. So if there is a war on the web, then I am glad to join it, on the side against the web.

alluro2• 2 months ago

I...have to agree about siding against the web...An optimistic part of me sees this as a move that pushes in the same direction that the "web" has already been going in for a long time - preventing users from getting the right information in an honest and efficient manner, preserving their attention budget, and choice. Until now, it was through increasing the noise to push monetary incentives, and now it's by cutting the noise to push monetary incentives. Why optimistic: up till now, there was no single enemy, and it was hard to fight a (somewhat) disjointed system; now, Google is positioning itself to push things further to the worse, with them (and small number of other companies) being the clear target.

My hope is that this will help overflow the proverbial glass for an increasing amount of people and we'll start pushing back towards the "old" web before Google and ad networks have transformed it, or find new modalities of interacting more freely with each other, and the content.

It's not going to be a small or easy fight, though...to a large extent, it's a fight against the current state of capitalism itself, and winning back our attention, critical thinking and choice.

crote3• 2 months ago

I am much happier when my search and summarization agents are able to accurately synthesize what these websites say

Yes, but with the sole goal of deciding whether I want to read the entire page or not. Just like reading a plot summary is helpful when deciding which movie to watch, but not a replacement for actually watching the movie.

I'm fine with AI giving me the answer to a search for "50 usd in eur" or "current weather in Paris". Anything more complicated and and I strongly prefer just getting a link to an actual source.

xmcp1235• 2 months ago

Kind of curious how it would pan out, if there was a government enforced meta tag one could add to signal what the data could be used for - for example “no-ai”.

That would allow people to still let Google to access their site, but restrict its usage. Similar for open source projects on GitHub, etc.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS4• 2 months ago

government enforced

The thing everyone needs to ask before advocating for something "government enforced" is "what would happen if this was in the hands of a hostile government?"

And then remember that (a) just because it's not hostile to you today, doesn't mean it won't be tomorrow, and (b) one man's "hostile" is another man's "utopia."

xmcp1235• 2 months ago

Well, when I said “I’m curious” it was true. I’m actually curious.

So how do you think a meta noai tag would be used by a hostile government?

It would be something the website owner set.

mjrpes• 2 months ago

The thing everyone needs to ask before advocating for laissez faire is "what does a hostile and monopolistic search engine giant like Google gain from us doing nothing?"

And then remember that just because Google is not hostile to you today, doesn't mean it won't be tomorrow.

afavour• 2 months ago

The tech giants already violated existing copyright laws when scraping for AI content and faced very few consequences. So far the government has shown an inability to enforce anything.

xmcp1235• 2 months ago

So far, yeah. The courts shrugged and said it was allowed under current law.

So the solution to that would be “change the law”.

fc417fc8026• 2 months ago

inability

Unwillingness. The government (at least in the US) appears to be happy with the status quo because competitive AI is viewed as a strategic necessity.

tamimio• 2 months ago

Glad I haven’t used anything google for more than a decade. For internet searches, you can host searxng instance and use it. Other services too are self-hostable, even far better than google.

jfengel3• 2 months ago

You host your own global search engine? That's impressive.

bdangubic• 2 months ago

the cool thing, google is much like meta, the kids see it as something boomers are using. my daughter is 12, whenever I say “google it” she says “that’s very, very funny Dad, you are fun guy.” it’ll take some time until boomers are off google as well (my usage of google is probably at 30% of where it used to be) but their days of “this is where you go to ‘search’” are numbered

customguy3• 2 months ago

What would she use instead?

overgard2• 2 months ago

I guess the extra insult is that the summaries still suck. I feel like every time I google a technical question, I get something wrong which references a youtube video watched by 30 people about an unrelated subject.

DocTomoe• 2 months ago

Nobody is stopping you from publishing on the net.

Nobody is stopping you from blocking bot traffic.

You don't need search engines - you can just link between sites or have webrings. Like we used to, pre-2000.

Nobody is stopping you from not using ads on the net.

Nobody can force you to use non-essential cookies (and thus: a cookie-banner).

Imagine there was a war going on, and no-one was showing up.

jfengel3• 2 months ago

I don't think people much liked the pre-search-engine era. They used lousy search engines when they became available, and when a good one started they liked it so much that they verbed its name.

imp0cat3• 2 months ago

It is definitely an opportunity for a lot of stuff (ie. curated RSS feeds and other forms of discovery) to come back.

jumploops2• 2 months ago

It looks like Google has taken a note out of Facebook's "lose trust" playbook.

Facebook had a huge opportunity in the post-AI world: real humans.

Instead of focusing on connections, they've been optimizing their properties for doomscrolling.

Google, similarly, has lost the plot on what made them trustworthy in the first place: navigating to citable content.

Both companies started on this trend well before AI, but this might be the final nail in their respective coffins[0].

[0]Yes they'll likely still be profitable for a long time, but the Bell Labs-esque downfall has begun (imo).

jfengel3• 2 months ago

I don't think people cared all that much about whether or not the content was citable. You can't cite Wikipedia, and that's not going anywhere.

Facebook may well fail when people don't enjoy it. But all Google ever promised was information, of variously dubious quality, and that's still their draw.

jumploops2• 2 months ago

Fair, citable is probably the wrong term.

This is a problem Google has been battling forever, with all the SEO click spam.

In either case, Google was the tool that many people used to find "trustworthy" information (citable or not), compared to the other tools online.

theendisney2• 2 months ago

Out of my countless www experiments the website made for myself turned out most enjoyable. Technically it is a blog with links, quotes, categories, tags and search. Sometimes i download all pages it links to. (tens of thousands)

Google dropped it from the index long ago. I had a fun discussion with some google folk where they kept arguing my website was designed wrong and that some pages had tomany links.

Basically, if you write an article about the largest banana companies you have to chose which to link to!

The 10 best movies article is better than the best 100. If you make a list of all the movies you've seen your page gradually turns into something really bad. Others will be punished for linking to it but only if you add the nth entry.

As the website is just for me it is clearly their loss not mine. No way im ging to consider linking a sub set of patents or research papers.

StilesCrisis• 2 months ago

At one point the web was drowned in "listicles," low-effort sites made to match queries like "best movies from the 90s" or "new music in 2023". Google attempted to downrank these sorts of sites because they were in general very very low quality and were just designed to catch a lot of traffic and display ads alongside low-effort content. (Think one page per list entry, each page transition is a whole new set of ads.) Users disliked these. It sounds like your site was misclassified as a low-effort listicle site.

theendisney2• 2 months ago

Im sure it is really hard to run a search engine that size. I have ideas how they could improve but it isnt my job. They chose to populate results with big websites which probably is good enough for most users. The problem is that there is now no point creating websites which is terrible for google. If it picks up the domain and (against all ods) deems it worthy of traffic it can be blacklisted at any time.

customguy3• 2 months ago

If users dislike them, and only spam farms link to them, why wouldn't page rank alone solve that?

AndrewKemendo• 2 months ago

The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information.

Google’s Vision since they were founded:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful

They told everyone what they were doing the whole time

xp843• 2 months ago

you're right, I think we didn't realize these implied parts: "make it universally accessible [to Google] and useful [to Google's financial interests].

spankalee2• 2 months ago

It is interesting to look at the past predictions on here of AI search/answer companies like Perplexity possibly dethroning Google search and comparing to the reactions of Google just doing the same thing themselves.

Why would it be good if Perplexity does it, but bad if Google does it? What are the principles at play here?

nicbou5• 2 months ago

Perplexity does not control who gets traffic on the internet. They don't own a significant percentage of the mobile OS, browse and online search market share. They can't force the industry in one way or the other, consequences be damned.

spankalee2• 2 months ago

If Perplexity replaced Google as the way people searched for things, then they would, and sites would still take a hit to their traffic from Google losing users.

AlienRobot4• 2 months ago

People don't like Google because it's bad. If competition wins, maybe they'll stop being so bad. But if they become badder themselves, that's not good.

johnea• 2 months ago

A nice, terse, little rant. I agree completely.

I surprised however, that it didn't describe phase 2 of the disaster, where in the models no longer have fresh www content to train on.

It's hard to understand the long term vision of this strategy...

aiisahik2• 2 months ago

This is such a basic take that totally misses the bigger picture of why Google made this move.

Google was forced to do this and it's a miracle of their slow organizational gears that they took so long to do it. So many people have already transitioned to using ChatGPT as a replacement for Google. All of this is driven by consumer behavior and the desire to "just get an answer" rather than having to wade through all the sources and try to figure out what is SEO slop vs what is actual reputable information. Google SERP results have been gamed by SEO slop for economically valuable search terms long before the rise of AI. ChatGPT simply solved a huge problem waiting for a solution.

From the web content creator's POV, there are to paths:

1. If you are merely a publisher and rely on eyeballs on ads to drive your own revenue, you are screwed. AI is going to ignore all the ads and only extract the content.

2. If however you are serving helpful information out of the goodness of your heart or if the content itself references a product or service which from which you will derive economic benefit from, you are still good.

I don't see this as a bad thing. Ads on websites were a necessary evil and will be seen as a relic of the first 30 years of the internet. Ads will not go away but they will just migrate to the application layer (youTube, LLM interfaces etc) that will provide a much more targeted experience. There will be winners and losers from this transition but that's normal and healthy.

krackers• 2 months ago

Google SERP results have been gamed by SEO slop for economically valuable search terms

So why not use AI to find the obvious spam and SEO? Sites like pinterest, "geeksforgeeks", stackoverflow clones were notorious for ranking highly on almost every technical search and you didn't even need AI to deal with those. Using AI to provide distilled summaries and making it harder to get the actual links is going to make things even worse for the user, because you have to cut through two layers of slop. And there's also not using the smartest model for the responses anyway.

aiisahik2• 2 months ago

Even if you get rid of "obvious spam and SEO", it won't change the fact that nobody wants to even read the "good" results. They just want the answer.

You can use AI to solve yesterday's problem or you can use AI to build the solution customers want today.

SEO was yesterday's problem.

Instant answer without the user having to worry about the sources is the solution the customers want.

account425• 2 months ago

You don't need AI for that, just downrank all sites with ads. Of course it turns out its actually googles main business that's driving that.

nekzn• 2 months ago

Websites brought this on themselves. Have you tried visiting one? Popups upon popups upon ads upon cookie banners upon notification permission prompts. I’m not going to miss that. Nobody is going to miss that.

Think of AI distillation as some kind of improved Reader Mode feature.

People never wanted to visit your website; they just wanted the information that your website held. Now they can get to the meat without having to deal with the bones.

snicky2• 2 months ago

People never wanted to visit your website; they just wanted the information that your website held.

Well, no. It is a boomer talk, but in the 90s the web was so fragmented and unpolished that websites usually looked very different from each other. People were writing their own HTML (and CSS came later). "Home pages" were some form of an art. Not the highest one to be frank, but the ecosystem was quite interesting. People did visit those websites not only to get the information, but to enjoy those quirky forms.

xnx• 2 months ago

If Google is "declaring war" what do you call Meta hiding all "ugc" in their walled garden? Compare to YouTube which you can still use without logging in.

da02• 2 months ago

Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment where your access to information is limited to what Google’s synthetic text extruders deem relevant.

They mentioned AOL. Remember back when AOL bought Time Warner in a "merger of equals", but it really wasn't. Then this fear AOL will become your telephone company because AOL Instant Messenger was so popular? Then, MSFT won the browser wars and disbanded the IE team and came up with a whole .Net strategy to takeover the Web. Then came Firefox, Google, Web 2.0, etc. I remember Dave Winer writing how Google was making real stuff while Netscape was doing mostly hacks.

David is now Goliath. So I am all for Google taking over the Web. They will go bankrupt doing it. They couldn't even make Google+ a thing. What was that anyway? I lack a Ph.d to understand that thing.

A few startups there, a bunch of open e-commerce standards here, and bunch of market value gone after the AI bubble... Google (and many others) are going against Artists who can Code. Who knows what delights will come.

WarmWash3• 2 months ago

Google made an egalitarian web, where money doesn't matter and attention does. A currency that everyone on Earth richest to poorest has a roughly equal amount of. I think almost everyone takes that for granted, and focuses purely on the negatives (you're not paying, therefore you are the product, kept in place by bait we call services)

On the flip side, and I'm all for it, we can go to everything paywalled. The downside of course will be a whole class of people who cannot afford to participate on the internet. But these service providers will be working for you, the customer.

Pick your poison.

Forgeties795• 2 months ago

and attention does

This is an understatement. They weaponized human psychology against us. It’s not remotely an even playing field.

WarmWash3• 2 months ago

In an alternate universe Google is like the Apple of the internet, where it has a bunch of premium services with the customer at the center.

The flip side is that having a Google account is a status symbol, and very few people on Earth can afford it.

truthbe2• 2 months ago

Google made an egalitarian web, where money doesn't matter and attention does.

They did? Could have sworn their whole business model up until the other day was attention for whomever can pay the highest bid for their ad space.. I guess I've been doing it wrong

WarmWash3• 2 months ago

Any person on earth with internet can use google's standard suite of products with no money necessary. I'm not aware of any other company that did it before them, on the scale that they did it. That is straight out of the progressive book of a utopian future. No money, equal access.

It's not egalitarian for advertisers, they need to pay money and compete. So Google is structered where megacorps pay the money to cover costs of the services you use, rather than you needing to come up with the money. This system made google available to every person on earth with an internet connection, billionaire rich or $2/day poor, you were using the same Maps, same Sheets, same Youtube, same Search, etc.

This isn't a defense of the system, frankly now I wish it was paid, even if that means 6 billions people who had accounts can no longer afford them. It's a recognition of the system for what it is, not what people who never really thought about it or understood it think it is.

Also, a side note, Facebook followed right behind Google with this model.

ViktorRay• 2 months ago

I know a lot of people are unhappy with what Google is doing…

But the honest truth is that lots of folks are using the free version of ChatGPT already and just asking it about stuff.

If Google only had the 10 blue links then the simple truth is that folks would just stop using it and switch over the one of the free AI models like ChatGPT. Many are already doing this. So Google has no choice but to make their AI the default at the top of search.

Anyway the 10 blue links are still there. And if you want to avoid AI then the option remains to select the “Web” option at the top of the search results. Doing so disables AI and all the other features and just gets you 10 links like in the old days…

wayeq• 2 months ago

Doing so disables AI and all the other features and just gets you 10 links like in the old days…

i expect that opt-out to become harder and harder to find on every re-design, until it is gone entirely. that's on like.. page 2 in the playbook for introducing some shitty new thing that is good for shareholders and not users.

notepad0x902• 2 months ago

First, did Google really declare a war? The title makes it feel click-baitey because of this exaggerated hyperbole.

I like what Google is doing, huge fan. I can't fathom why no one else is. When I search, I'm trying to find things. With what Google is doing, the AI overview gets me answers very fast. It includes links for its sources I can click on if I'm interested.

I think people are just too used to wasting hours of their lives visiting random sites and scouring for answers. If you like that experience, I don't see why you can't still have that, is it really that hard to ignore the AI overview? Or better yet, use and support DDG.

Google search's AI overview is by far my favorite AI application. The amount of tabs I don't have to open anymore to get a simple freaking answer is such a relief.

Your work, your writing or art do matter a bit still

I'm really tired of this nonsense. If I want your art and Google doesn't show me, you have an excellent point. If I'm searching for a meme and Google just gives me that, instead of having me wander around clicking on deviantart and random sites simulating "visits" to your site, that's not me wanting your art, that's me wasting time and you mistaking that for a like.

Google owes things to different parties. Their shareholders, their employees, their users, their paying customers, etc.. People with random site are not owed a thing by Google. I don't want Google to refrain from helping me acheive my goals with their product so that some random people's desire to feel important is prioritized. Your random site is an unrelated 3rd party in this interaction.

I despise Google for so many things. They really are destroying the web with their monopoly of the browser markets. I hate what they're doing to Youtube. I think Android is total crap. I really despise them for ruining webextensions. The list goes on. I'm not their fan. But I am huge fan of Google search. I stopped using it for so many years, now I'm having to use them exclusively out of sheer necessity.

I really wish people drop every single ideology they have. Publish quality work, and things that work well. Then pick back up their ideologies and complain about how their high quality work is not getting the attention it deserves.

Honestly, I'm so weirded about this sort of stuff. Even Amazon, I hear people complain about it all the time, but I have nothing but praise for all their work (despite knowing what a villain Bezos is, and what horrible place to work both Amazon and AWS are). It's like I'm living in an alternate reality, or people are abandoning sincere and critical analysis for the sake of ideological goals. Like, I'm trying all the alternatives, I've put in lots of time and effort, and they just suck. Don't tell me to deny the evidence my eyes and ears are witnessing for your ideology. Instead tell me how I shouldn't use Google because of some ideological reason, instead of the quality being poor.

imp0cat3• 2 months ago

    I like what Google is doing, huge fan. I can't fathom why no one else is. When I search, I'm trying to find things. With what Google is doing, the AI overview gets me answers very fast. It includes links for its sources I can click on if I'm interested.

Have you actually tried clicking those links and reading the sources? They can completely contradict what the AI is suggesting! I have witnessed this recently while trying to troubleshoot a leaking washing machine. The AI summmary gave a confident answer, but it was completely wrong - it was based on a different model/type. And the worst thing is that is sounded quite plausible.

tl;dr We're boned!

notepad0x902• 2 months ago

Yeah, I've seen that a few times as well, but it's more like it has one reputable link it can show you but its conclusion is based on forum posts that reference it or something. But I personally treat it like any other AI, it isn't telling me facts, it's telling me it's opinionated/flawed suggestions based on search results. I'd say it's about 60% reliable at best, but that's 60% of the time where I didn't have to open multiple tabs and spend minutes on each. that 40% does waste time, but at least for my searches, it's usually things I would have tried or looked into anyways if that makes sense. It depends a lot on the topic too, like I'd never take medical advise from it, but it does give good advice, and when I do use actual search results after reviewing that, I look for anything that contradicts it to see if it's the AI that's wrong or the site.

I've had programming problems I was stuck on (APIs mostly) where it found a quirk and then a work around for it. The docs, forums, every single link I manually clicked on page after page didn't mention that. Like you said, even what it linked didn't say that. But the AI was right, I would have given up or shelved the thing if it wasn't for the AI.

That's my struggle with this thread, it is just a semi-reliable tool, but it's very useful. How can I pretend all those times it did help me a lot didn't happen?

xiaoluolyg• 2 months ago

cotent is dying

zhxiaoliang• 2 months ago

The Web is dead anyway. It never became the movement we dreamed it would: the democratization of information, communication, and expression.

unleashhale• 2 months ago

It’s hostile trash. Cloudflare can eat me.

rootsudo• 2 months ago

Declaring? A decade ago it was declaring war by introducing AMP pages.

theandrewbailey• 2 months ago

It's only a matter of time before that little irritation gets thrown into the Google Graveyard. Google was probably at war with the open web before introducing it.

hmokiguess• 2 months ago

Don’t use Google? Web is not Google? I get that for average users isn’t like that but I mean change is inevitable, hopefully it sparks a new era, I wasn’t happy with the status quo either.

hiroto_lemon• 2 months ago

Worth noting the same bot-blocking that hits humans also blocks the AI agents devs are building. Headed toward a web where only Google's agent has free access.

onyxxppp• 2 months ago

Google has the Vertex AI Search API and Programmable Search Engine already. If you want to access their data, you can pay for it like everyone else does.

LZ_Khan• 2 months ago

Why haven't we seen more work on licensing and compensating authors?

LLM's know when they get information from certain places, they should send a portion of revenue over to those sources.

Terr_• 2 months ago

LLM's know when they get information from certain places

Nah, while the companies running scrapers may log what their regular programs scraped for training data, the LLM, the document-get-bigger algorithm, isn't that type of logical system. It isn't made to have a reliable concept of fact-attribution. It can't even track which parts of an ongoing "conversation" document are supposed to be "itself" as a self-insert character, which is why prompt injection has been a recurring intractable problem.

The LLM will emit text of "X is true, and I got that fact from Y" with the same rigor that it emits text like "I am Sherlock Holmes, and I know Santa Claus was murdered by Dracula via the following deductions..."

If the LLM is used as a adapter/frontend to a search-engine, helping to craft queries, then I suppose the not-an-LLM parts of the system would "know" the what results they're serving up. However the moment you try to "summarize" the mix of all top 10 results, we're back into unreliable stochastic-bullshitting territory again.

oh_my_goodness• 2 months ago

We all knew it was insane to let one company monopolize search. We knew.

ChrisArchitect• 2 months ago

Google I/O

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196020

Google changes its search box

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197370

gblargg• 2 months ago

Your website, your work no longer matters. The web is being fully hidden behind a Google-controlled surface. And I am not even talking about their browser monopoly.

Maybe it's just me, but when I've put pages on the web, they were to share information. I didn't care how it got to people, just that I could produce something that contributed to other people. For finding information their AI Mode has saved so much time in the month or two I've been using it. I've tackled so many Linux issues I would have never done before due to the needle-in-a-haystack experience if finding an answer. When I used to do web searches, having to read many paragraphs of text on dozens of pages just to get an answer was the last thing I wanted to do.

When I want to browse websites, I go to websites and not Google.

Max-Ganz-II2• 2 months ago

To stop this, I a month or two ago put most of my Amazon Redshift research web-site behind a basic auth username/password wall.

It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password.

If I put in time and effort to make content and OpenAI et al copy it and sell it through their LLM such that no one comes to me any more, then plainly it makes no sense for me to create that content; and then it would not exist for OpenAI to take, or for anyone else to read. We all lose.

It seems parasitic, and on the face of it, acting to kill the host.

In fact, it essentially seems like abrogation of the concept of private property.

The AI companies can take what I make, without my consent, which they sell for profit, where that profit it seems to be was formerly substantially coming to me, the return on my efforts.

I had a look for ways to indicate to AI companies to remove my content. The methods provide are a fig leaf and put the onus on me, and in any event in a way which can never be known to have removed my content - "if you can show your content from a prompt, we will take steps to try to prevent that content from showing".

As a consequence of putting up a username/password wall, Google has profoundly de-ranked the site, and I believe it is basically not being found on search any more.

edg50002• 2 months ago

True. It's a massive shift of power, all being centralized.

As you mentioned, they know they need good data though, so they might actually try to find some equilibrium.

If not, it's possible that the creation of new valuable content, to feed the LLMs, will be produced in-house by the AI labs. Sounds insane, but Netflix also makes their own content.

I think the AI labs will become so big that they'll take on more roles than just offering LLM inference. I think they'll become as or more powerful than many current nation state governments.

Gormo7• 2 months ago

True. It's a massive shift of power, all being centralized.

It may seem that way in the short term. But in the long term, the tendency in technical development is for the infrastructure and capital requirements for new technology to start off very high, but then shrink over time, such that use cases that required massive amounts of upfront investment in the early stages become incrementally more viable at smaller and smaller scales.

People were saying the same things about computers in general in the 1960s as they are about GenAI now. That was an era when computer technology itself had developed to a point when it was economically impactful, but still only affordable to large institutions. People making predictions that increasing use of computers would lead to massive centralization of economic and cultural power didn't predict that merely twenty years later, computing power equivalent to contemporary mainframes would be available in a convenient desktop box available at a local shop to any individual or main-street business that cared to buy one.

The widespread availability of computing technology from the '80s to present actually had the opposite effect, and led to quite a bit of decentralization, as enterprising individuals and new startups started applying that technology to do at small scales what only large enterprises could do before. In fact, a lot of the reaction to AI in its current stage may actually be because it's disrupting the expectation of decentralization and autonomy over our technology that the personal computing revolution established in the first place.

Like most new technologies, GenAI in its initial stages has required massive infrastructure investments that have led to the early iterations being offered by centralized institutions, but that might not last. Open-source AI models are approaching the capabilities that the big players' frontier models had arrived at only a couple of years ago.

In 2026, we're already at the point where local inference is economically viable for commercial use cases -- at my own company, while we do use our Claude Enterprise account for a variety of use cases, it turned out to make much more sense in terms of both cost and risk exposure to instead process certain datasets (e.g. a large volume of phone recordings containing PII) with local models running on commodity GPUs. That proved to be entirely effective, and the one-time hardware investment (which created a bookable asset for the company) turned out to be less than the cost of running the same task on Claude (which would have been pure OpEx).

MattyRad• 2 months ago

Welcome to the dark forest.

sph3• 2 months ago

Sad but good. The internet had become too large any way. Once upon a time it was a small pond full of interesting life, today it's an unfathomably large ocean. Everywhere you look, it's mostly empty.

The good stuff now is in small private communities, away from the bots and the eternal influx of september newbies to devolve every discussion into memes. Elitism will be good again.

esperent• 2 months ago

It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password.

How will you be sure that it's humans emailing you?

Max-Ganz-II2• 2 months ago

The authentic spelling and grammar errors :-)

hulitu• 2 months ago

companies can take what I make, without my consent

Welcome to "democracy". Of course, _we_ decide what "democracy" is and how (and if) we apply it in your unfortunate, individual case.

tim3336• 2 months ago

The multinational companies are a fair bit outside democratic control. If one country bans or restricts them they can operate from some other one.

nicbou5• 2 months ago

I have seen many recipe websites do the same recently. All the big sites require an account too now.

aitchnyu• 2 months ago

Do they still have the long winded story about the author's grandfather's apple tree which gave only sour fruits?

Gormo7• 2 months ago

To stop this, I a month or two ago put most of my Amazon Redshift research web-site behind a basic auth username/password wall.
It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password.

That also creates friction for new users, discoverability issues, and additional privacy concerns for people wanting to access your content.

I had a look for ways to indicate to AI companies to remove my content.

Even the ones that do provide attribution and links back to the original source? Perplexity does a good job of that, for example.

As a consequence of putting up a username/password wall, Google has profoundly de-ranked the site, and I believe it is basically not being found on search any more.

Well, yeah, if you're blocking the content from being accessed without a login, you're blocking it from being indexed by search engines.

I guess I'm a little confused as to what your ultimate goal is. If you're putting content up on the web for free, what are you gaining by blocking AI from indexing it, especially when you're blocking actual users, whether they discover it via AI or traditional search?

I understand the frustration at seeing AI tools digest your content and then repeat to users without connecting it back to your site. But that's something that other people have always been doing independently of AI -- people read articles, learn facts or understand new ideas from them, and then incorporate them into their general assumptions to be expressed in their own work without necessarily acknowledging, or even recalling, where the underlying information that informed their thinking came from. People have been writing articles and producing various forms of media content that are inspired by other people's unattributed work since time immemorial.

Yes, AI accelerates that process and makes it more visible to you, so I understand where the frustration is coming from. But consider that the expectation that everything that happens downstream of your work will always be attributable back to you may never have been a reasonable one in the first place.

isabelc• 2 months ago

This hurts:

The next step will be Google or other companies in that space developing and deploying a new derogatory term for the web marking it as unclean, unruly, dangerous, bad (similar to “the Dark Web”) and making their abstraction the “safe” web.

chairmansteve• 2 months ago

Well... I use RSS. I find a lot of the sites on HN. Google has been worthless for years,

rickcarlino• 2 months ago

Part of that war is a war on URLs. URLs are bad if your goal is to keep people in app. Reddit, a site built for link sharing, favors self posts more in recent years. Sites like HN, Lobste.rs are a rarity and feel dated against the backdrop of everything trying to be a walled garden. I am grateful such places still exist.

zelon88• 2 months ago

I wonder what conflaguration of Cloud conglomerates host this hypocritical blog post.

truthbe2• 2 months ago

The internet has been dying for the past decade. This might just be the final nail in the coffin.

Honestly, I’m all for accelerating the death of the current internet. The web in its current form is miserable - algorithmic sludge, ads, bots, SEO spam, ragebait, AI filler.

I’m more interested in what grows out of the rubble, because this version clearly isn’t it.

techtuate• 2 months ago

A very interesting take indeed. I don't know how comments here have morphed into AI Bashing but my honest take: What google has done is self-preservation not declaring a war on creativity. They were ahead of everyone else on AI but they didn't reinvent "google" because it was unprofitable. Selling prime search slots which get clicked is far more money making than having most searches die at the AI summary (most of mine do). This is a hat tip to ChatGPT and Google's way of saying your UX is better than ours was. Let's offer a mix and see what we can salvage - both in revenue and users. In the long-term the corporate will have to look at alternate revenue streams and their forays into chip etc. are clear indicators of the same. I know it hurts us (read creators - I'm happy cowriting with AI) but Google is being true its shareholders and to its goal of making money and we can't blame them for it.

motbus3• 2 months ago

Time to de google

HlessClaudesman• 2 months ago

Imagine a world where Google executives made a different decision. Instead of playing catch-up on AI, making us all eat their dog food by filling search with confident sounding AI bullcrap, imagine a world where Google search tried hard to be the authoritative layer where true answers proliferated and bullshit slop was banished.

Towaway69• 2 months ago

Is google sending in drones to destroy peoples homes? Is google bombing schools? Is google torturing folks in secret locations?

No? Google has changed its search algorithm? Oh, how is that a ‘war’ on anything?

Please stop using hyper-sensational titles to get on the front page of HN. And stop using the term ‘war’ unless people are really dying - it doesn’t matter whether they be ‘freedom fighters’ or soldiers or just plain civilians, if people are dying (directly) then that might be a ‘war’, everything else is probably just profiteering.

customguy3• 2 months ago

Those are examples of war crimes, not war "proper" I'd say.

And is anyone actually training troops to fight in this "war", or did they just use the word?

In addition to the primary definition, the dictionary also offers "a struggle or competition between opposing forces or for a particular end". And we all know and constantly discuss what Google is doing. Nobody was baited into clicking this because they thought there was actual shooting going on.

TightFibre2• 2 months ago

Google search just doesn't work for me any more. I am not sure if it's because I clean slate it with no personalisation, but I already feel my search engine has been removed from the web. Their AI snippets are quite wrong alot of the time and Vs Gemini have a totally different flavour. There's no cohesiveness at all.

petterroea• 2 months ago

To be fair, I made a few searches today and most of the results are AI generated "blogs". Getting real information is hard. I'd also give up on the Web if i was Google. It's just a shame their solution is just monopolizing further.

vicentwu• 2 months ago

All the ai search platform have to find a way to share value back to content owners, or the whole eco system will collapse.

xyzal• 2 months ago

"imagine you are Google circa 2002. users enter a search query and you return 10 relevant HTML links to specific, real web pages, with no commentary or any extra guff. you must literally only return a list of links. if you do anything apart from that you've got it wrong and need to try again. my query is: %s"

why do things the easy way when you can do it the complicated way

anonyfox2• 2 months ago

Maybe I am the only one thinking this, but there is a growing backlash against AI mindset plus a lot of people using the free chatgpt app for "googling" nowadays in parallel too, while realizing slowly that they cannot really trust it to be correct. you know what would provide an actual outstanding value to users that is even at times increasingly searched for? the original 10 blue links with zero distraction or enshittification and a hard AI content filter applied bottom up already at ingestion level, like, what the quality team of google search did for decades (filtering out low quality spammy noise). Just the thing that made the original google great essentially, be an actual useful tool, not another chat people increasingly hate. But I guess I might stand alone here with that reasoning.

p0w3n3d• 2 months ago

they should pay the owners of the web sites they're using the data from

butz• 2 months ago

Good news, now there is a HUGE space in "classic" web search market. Let google do google things, and if they ever will try to come back, there will be large competition of various sizes.

ghusto• 2 months ago

The theory doesn't make sense.

If the only traffic is from Google itself, the content maker would have to think to themselves "I have some spare time, I think I'll make some content for Google to consume". What?

Google Declaring War on the Web

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