The whole argument hinges on one claim: We were censored not because of content but because of who we are.
Strongest evidence in support: Drop in traffic coincided with google algorithm update.
Biggest lack of evidence: Nothing that shows it's because of who they are and not their content. Author defended their content by pointing out the cost and labor that goes into making their content.
Was the content really authentic and useful? This is hard to prove (and I suspect hard even for an algorithm to discern), and so I had a look:
- Each article did have that human feel to it with photos of the author in the locations they were talking about. Articles also included small personalized evaluations about topics.
So, yes, I did think it was authentic and useful. But how did it compare to the 1000s of other sites who can replicate this? Human writers aren't rare, and travel isn't a small interest to our species.
And that's the crux of it: Even if you're useful and authentic, search engines have to rank you among other sites that are useful and authentic.
You could be amazing and still end up on page 30 because you're not alone in being amazing on the internet.
I don't know what a fair algorithm looks like, and if a fair algorithm would make everyone equally happy.
For now, someone has the power to direct how the algorithm chooses. Who should have that power is a fair question, but I don't think anything will mitigate the problem of being ranked low even with quality content. It's a ranking against the rest of the internet, not just an evaluation of quality.
At the moment, if two sites are somewhat equally useful, being profitable to Google probably gets you a bump.
renegat0x0 · 15h ago
The web isn't what it was 10 or 15 years ago. Back then, you could stumble across countless useful and unique websites on just about any topic—travel included.
Today, it's different. I do think Google played a major role in shrinking the visibility of the independent web. If Google only shows 300 links per search (30 pages x 10 results), anything beyond that effectively doesn't exist for most users.
Some might argue that only the top few results matter, but I disagree. For broad topics like "video games," "war," or "love," you'd expect there to be thousands of worthwhile links—not just the same recycled content from YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, or SEO-heavy content farms.
As a side project, I run a hobby web crawler to explore what's still out there. That's where my perspective comes from regarding the current state of the open web:
It doesn't hinge entirely on that. There's a lot of ambient background context here too.
The idea Google is hostile to long tail indie content isn't exactly a groundbreaking claim, it's been obvious and widely discussed for years. They've been losing the original culture for a long time. Google circa 2000-2010 was very libertarian. It believed in a large decentralized web in which Google helped all users with all queries, without passing judgement. If it was obscure and you wanted it, Google would reliably surface it in the first page of results every single time. This was the Google that believed in the indie web so much it purchased Blogger.
Starting around 2010-2012 the rate at which they hired new grads went up quite sharply (I was there and saw it). The average level of experience dropped sharply. These recruits brought with them the new authoritarian politics of the university campus. Around 2015-2016 you start to see Google start to just openly engage in political activism, tossing the hard-won reputation for neutrality in the trash. Unfortunately, this new worldview was incompatible with the prior commitment to the indie web. Whereas the Google of Matt Cutts cared a lot about surfacing tiny sites, the new Google became highly suspicious of any content that wasn't from sources they deemed "reliable", "authoritative" etc [1]. They defined these terms to mean basically any large left-leaning source, without reference to objective metrics. Put simply: if it's on .gov, .edu or one hop removed then it's reliable, if it's not then it isn't.
This shows up in how easy it now is to find queries where Google gives you the exact opposite of what you're asking for, no matter how clearly you specify the search terms. This would have once been considered a high severity code yellow, now it's by design. The open web won out over AOL partly because old Google fostered it, but one gets the feeling that Google now views its child with disgust. Can you imagine Google purchasing Substack, as they once did with Blogger? It's unthinkable. They'd undoubtably view it as a hive of villainy and scum. In the event they did buy it the first thing they'd do is delete most of its content.
Unfortunately, you can't be both anti-misinformation and pro-open-web. These two things are irreconcilable. Either the world is complex and anyone might have insight to contribute, or it's simple and the right answer is always found via traversing a shallow hierarchy of trusted sources.
So: does your random indie travel blog "demonstrate expertise" or "authoritativeness" as defined by someone who has been through the Ivy League universities? No. Are these the sorts of sites that can eventually become big and a recognized source of authoritative expertise, given enough nourishment from the watering can of unbiased search? Yes! That's how the web grew to start with. But Google doesn't care anymore and with the loss of its primary patron the open web is in its twilight years. As the author says: he was invited to Google HQ to hear an apology, and also to be told nothing will change. The new web is no different to AOL except in minor technical details, because that's how the woke generation like it.
> Google plans to use AI to consume and replace the open web.
They've been boiling the frog here for a long time. The "open web" is a euphemism for the Google Chrome monoculture walled-garden-in-waiting. Google exert so much influence there that building on the web is in practice barely different than building on say iOS. You can do what you want if you don't want to make money, but if you do then you will have to play along with the big G.
My hunch is Google never psychologically recovered from Facebook absolutely wiping out G+, and they have been on a mission to ensure nothing like that ever happens again.
SecretDreams · 19h ago
> My hunch is Google never psychologically recovered from Facebook absolutely wiping out G+, and they have been on a mission to ensure nothing like that ever happens again.
Same for Microsoft with phones.
That's why Google and Microsoft are trying to use AI to crush us while Apple is like "I'm pretty content with how much money I make".
blinding-streak · 19h ago
> Apple is like "I'm pretty content with how much money I make".
What a laughably silly depiction of a multi-trillion dollar company.
Their predatory app store policies, defended (and lost) in court, paint a completely different picture. Just one of dozens of examples.
I mostly meant it in the context of why they are so behind in AI... Sorry for the nuance.
blinding-streak · 19h ago
Ahh, acknowledged. However, please understand, they also have a massive AI division. It was led for years by John G. He just got ousted from the position. They're just not very good at AI in their own walled garden. It's not for a lack of trying.
slowmovintarget · 18h ago
Ironically, they're not "good" at it because they're fighting their own privacy and security features in IOS and MacOS. Siri can't do everything because there isn't a full pants-down mode for OS features.
"Siri, adjust my schedule to work in a 30 minute walk this afternoon."
"Siri, find a photo of a Koala, turn it into a cartoon, and make a logo for my Github project."
Coordinated actions are what we're looking for, but they blow through all of the app security walls. Even if Apple's software could act like this, I don't think I'd use it. If it could do these things, it could also do things like broadcast my private files to everyone in my contact list... etc.
We have to get dramatically more sophisticated about security with agents than we are now.
mbirth · 5h ago
You might be interested in Sky, which is supposedly coming later this year:
(Check the link to the MacStories article at the bottom to get a great overview of the capabilities.)
Also, Siri / Apple Intelligence is bound to the local processing power as everything is handled on-device - compared to other AIs that can use the computing power of a whole datacentre.
amaccuish · 19h ago
Ye, Apple just doesn't support PWAs fully because they're "pretty content with the money they may from the app store".
fidotron · 19h ago
Apple web app support for home screen apps is better than Android PWA today.
Prime example being push notification support, where Android has random 10 minute latencies added because they don't want to fix the service worker startup problem.
flenserboy · 19h ago
the funniest part here is that if G+ is part of the reason, they still don't understand why people didn't want to use it, making any decisions which follow wrong &/or misguided. while I'm not terribly in favor of breaking up companies, there is far too much incentive for Google, given its ad business (which is really what the company now is), to have any voice in the future of the Web. Chrome must be spun off, & firewalls put in place between the ad side & the search side of things (unless, of course, they really are just a govt subsidiary & this has been the plan all along, but there would have to be tangible proof of that).
philistine · 18h ago
> they still don't understand why people didn't want to use it
That's what OP is saying. Google knows it doesn't understand, knows it cannot compete on even ground, so it is pulling every lever of its monopoly so that no other entrant can ever rise from the web. Only serfs, no lords.
BobaFloutist · 13h ago
Only serfing, no surfing
FirmwareBurner · 20h ago
>My hunch is Google never psychologically recovered from Facebook absolutely wiping out G+, and they have been on a mission to ensure nothing like that ever happens again.
That's an orthogonal issue to me. IMHO, modern Google never really cared about social media platforms because it never really understood them. Otherwise it would have bought Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitter, early on before they became industry titans, the same way they bought Youtube, Maps, etc in the early days.
They've been coasting for so long on the search ad revenue money printer, that they're blind to everything else going on around them, so they're always reacting instead of proactive, but always too late.
masklinn · 19h ago
> That's an orthogonal issue to me. IMHO, modern Google never really cared about social media platforms because it never really understood them.
Caring (or at least wanting in) and not understanding are perfectly compatible.
I know for a fact that a number of old googlers are still frustrated over Google Video got stomped, and Google having to buy Youtube in the end.
> Otherwise it would have bought Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitter, early on before they became industry titans
That only works if:
1. they see it coming
2. the in-house competition effort does not remain politically unassailable
3. until the competitor is too big for google to realistically acquire it
FirmwareBurner · 19h ago
>That only works if:
1. they see it coming
Zuckerberg saw them coming though. That's why he owns a social media empire now, and wants to either own or destroy Tiktok as well. Musk saw it coming with Twatter, hell, even Bezos saw it coming, that why Amazon bought Twitch.
Google leadership just doesn't understand social media, otherwise they would have bought a rising platform instead of building one from scratch that flopped with zero user base. Social media platforms are all about the existing user base, not about the tech behind it. That's why G+ failed despite being technically superior in some aspects.
>I know for a fact that a number of old googlers are still frustrated over Google Video got stomped, and Google having to buy Youtube in the end
It's irrelevant what old googlers think. Google has a responsibility to their shareholders to make line go up, not make some of their programmers feel good by keeping them working on dying platforms with no user base wile their competitors steam ahead. Buying youtube was the right business decision because it was the more popular platform, instead of trying to make Google Video happen, as it would have had the same faith as G+, and those old googlers would have probably been laid off instead of being moved to work on Youtube. Programmers don't always make good business decisions.
masklinn · 19h ago
> Zuckerberg saw them coming though [...] even Bezos saw it coming, that why Amazon bought Twitch.
Which pertains to my reply... how?
> Musk saw it coming with Twatter
Musk saw nothing coming. He bought twitter in 2022 after getting baited into making a binding offer. Twitter was a household name at least a decade before that: news networks had direct twitter interactions and mentions at least as far back as the 2012 election.
And although it's been turned private and delisted, it's estimated to be worth just a fraction of what he paid for it.
> Google leadership just doesn't understand social media
Have you considered actually reading replies instead of going off with whatever your pet assertions are?
> That's irrelevant what old googlers think.
It's very relevant to your assertion that "google never really cared".
> Google has a responsibility to their shareholders to make line go up, not make some of their programmers feel good by keeping them working on platforms with no user base wile their competitors steam ahead.
That has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm replying to.
lesuorac · 18h ago
> > Musk saw it coming with Twatter
> And although it's been turned private and delisted, it's estimated to be worth just a fraction of what he paid for it.
I'd just stick with "he tried to back out of it and had to be sued to buy it" as evidence that musk didn't forsee anything. It is a bit (darkly) amusing that the document required him to buy the company buy not pay the severance listed in it when firing people.
Although if Grok was a standalone company I think it's hard to argue it'd valued less than 44 billion so Musk really lucked into a great deal. He also really lucked into Biden not stepping down earlier so the Democrats would run an actual competitive primary.
dieortin · 7h ago
Grok is from xAI, a company he separately funded. It wasn’t part of the acquisition of Twitter.
lesuorac · 6h ago
> [1] xAI was founded by Musk on March 9, 2023
> [2] Elon Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter in October 2022
xAI would've just been an AI division of Twitter if Musk wasn't worried that Twitter was going to go bankrupt and take the company (xAI) with it (Twitter). It's extremely suspicious that Grok was available to paying X subscribers and not some other arrangement.
"Separately" funded is pretty thin. It's the same group of people funding xAI [3] as Twitter acquisition [4].
> As one Google executive recently explained: “Organizing information is clearly a trillion-dollar opportunity, but a trillion dollars is not cool anymore. What’s cool is a quadrillion dollars.”
This uncited, anonymous quote sounds very made up. Cursory search couldn't find anything like this.
Regardless, while the article makes some good points, it is also dripping with entitlement. Google gave you incredible monetizable traffic for two+ decades. At some point you need to capture your audience and make a real connection with them so they don't need Google to interact with you. Give them a value prop.
helsinkiandrew · 19h ago
> This uncited, anonymous quote sounds very made up. Cursory search couldn't find anything like this.
Two minutes in a search engine that is Not Google:
> Shazeer says he’s excited about Google expanding its focus to include helping users create new AI-generated content. “Organizing information is clearly a trillion-dollar opportunity, but a trillion dollars is not cool anymore,” he said recently on a podcast[2]. “What's cool is a quadrillion dollars.”
It was the giddy techbro optimism that struck me most with a "Hey, if all this quadrillion dollar value comes to Google it surely will greatly benefit all of society". While we are talking here effectively about a near-monopolistic advertisement moloch that is the epitomy of surveillance capitalism.
toss1 · 17h ago
Small quibble: Google is at the top of the food chain of surveillance capitalism, but Palantir, quietly aggregating every bit of available info to profile and make predictions about every person, is truly the apex predator of that food chain
eviks · 16h ago
Cursory google search quadrillion dollars "Organizing information" brings up multiple sources on the first page
benterix · 18h ago
> Google gave you incredible monetizable traffic for two+ decades.
You forgot to add "for free" /s
(I mean, really? Google made billions on being a better browser than Yahoo!, AltaVista, AOL Search and whatever was there. They build up people's trust only to abuse it to the limits in practically every area they could get away with.)
gorjusborg · 19h ago
I can't get past the sloppy and inflammatory use of English here.
This is not 'censorship'. It probably isn't banning, nor is it 'shadowbanning'. Google tunes its algorithms and lets the chips fall. Some win, some lose.
While I understand how Google's dominance in search can have outsized effects on Internet commerce, the writer has near-zero credibility with me based on their writing. Honest people making honest statements don't need to exaggerate to make the point.
JimDabell · 19h ago
It’s appallingly bad faith.
Google have a page where they give advice on “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content”:
Things like “Provide a great page experience”, “Focus on people-first content”, and “Avoid creating search engine-first content”.
This article reframes it as an unfulfilled obligation and betrayal because ‘Google Promised to Reward Publishers Who Invest Resources Into Content Created “By People, For People”’
maeil · 19h ago
Advice, which, as evidenced by this post, is at this point utter nonsense which may at some point in the past have been true.
eviks · 19h ago
> Google tunes its algorithms and lets the chips fall
This is even more sloppy and could be easily applied to any real censorship, where some (censored) lose and some (not censored) win
If you're "tuning" your algorithm with the goal of blocking all small independent websites, then yeah, you're doing the shadow (if you don't tell the sites about it) banning.
By ignoring the intent of the policy and replacing it with a truism you don't really have a terminology counter argument
gorjusborg · 17h ago
Censorship is about filtering out messages that are somehow 'undesirable'.
That is not what is happening here. What's happening here is that someone has built a business that relies heavily on search hits from Google, Google made changes that negatively impact the number of hits.
I'm not trying to minimize what is clearly a significant problem for the author, I'm just saying that misusing words like 'censorship' can water it down to the point that it has no impact.
I abhor censorship. This isn't it.
eviks · 16h ago
Censorship is also about filtering out the messengers. But I wasn't talking about that, even my example was about banning, not censorship. And it wasn't about you minimizing it either, just that the argument which you've repeated here doesn't hold - if you ignore why Google changes negatively impacted the number of hits you can make no counter re. censorship.
By the way, if they made changes to filter out travel advice messages (from small travel sites) because they think such messages are undesirable since they hurt their ability to earn money from AI models, than the same negative impact would meet your definition of censorship, no?
ipaddr · 19h ago
It's a literal shadow ban and Google writes the new algorithms, talks about it internally and decides what type of sites it wants to down rank and replace with AI Answers.
The algorithm isn't some mystery formula it is literally what Google decides. There is no someone wins someone loses. Google wants to provide the answers and is taking market share from smaller publisher today and larger publishers tomorrow.
lesuorac · 18h ago
It's not a shadow ban if people can read what you wrote.
Just like if I stab you it's not a mugging. Words have meaning.
const_cast · 12h ago
It's a soft shadow ban if you don't show up in searches, and that goes for every platform.
lesuorac · 6h ago
They do show up in searches [1].
They're upset because they show up in a search _below_ the "AI Overview" which means people do not click through to their site. The search result still occurs; nobody wants to read it in addition to the AI Overview.
Feel how you want about a company making revenue from not intended to be free labor but it's not a shadow ban.
He says that when he was invited to Google to discuss the matter, they said:
And Google gave us a clear and unequivocal apology. Google said our sites didn’t deserve our shadowbans, and that it wasn’t our fault.
Whether Google itself used the term "shadowban" or not, they clearly acknowledged the drastic effect of their algorithms that favor "AI". So we know what he means.
croemer · 8h ago
Would be good to see the receipts of the apology.
nialv7 · 19h ago
if using algorithm to promote some information and suppress some other isn't censorship to you, then honestly your definition of censorship is narrow to the point of being useless.
wanderingbort · 19h ago
Not promoting something is different than suppressing it.
Censorship is active suppression.
If Google was using AI to prevent independent people from accessing independent websites that would be censorship.
Censorship is something that is done not simply the lack of something being done.
ipaddr · 13h ago
They literally change the algo to exclude smaller sites. That's active suppression. Promoting would be putting them on top of the "neutral" search results like they do for ads.
TiredOfLife · 9h ago
>Honest people making honest statements don't need to exaggerate to make the point.
First i want to congratulate you on waking up from your 10 year coma.
That statement is no longe true. Nowadays you have to lie and exaggerate to make a point. That's just how things work
maeil · 19h ago
And I'm tired of this sort of sloppy and inflammatory discrediting.
It fits 'shadowbanning' to an absolute tee. Without any kind of notification, or any recourse, a switch is flicked to "off" in a single moment, putting a domain on the shitlist. This is now very well documented, including by this post, and incredibly obvious from the graph.
sceptic123 · 18h ago
Certainly not what I understand as shadowbanning.
> the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user
(from Wikipedia)
I'm not saying what they are doing is good, just agreeing that it doesn't seem like shadowbanning, it just looks like downranking.
gorjusborg · 17h ago
I doubt it is even a ban. It definitely isn't a shadowban.
A ban is when you are preventing from participating in something. Google is a service that indexes the internet and provides references to relevant information. Website providers aren't the users here, web searchers are. I guess you could argue that the site was 'banned' from search results, but I doubt that the author would care enough to search 100 pages of search results to see if they were still there, they just care that they aren't a first page hit.
A shadowban is when a participant has been banned, but has no idea it has happened. This came about on certain link aggregation/social media sites as a solution to people being banned and creating new accounts and resuming their behavior.
thedevilslawyer · 20h ago
The article treats as axiom that organic traffic is a right. It's not.
Most people don't want to read an article on travel advice when AI gives us much better and specific advice, with references, when we want it.
bgwalter · 19h ago
Stealing other people's output and then cutting them off from discovery isn't a right either.
Since politicians do not protect us from these criminals, we are fortunate that no one except for CEOs under the influence of cocaine wants "AI".
thedevilslawyer · 19h ago
You (and others) keep using "stealing" and "robbing".
I get emotions are high because of the impact of AI, but in no meaningful/legal sense is this true. Is there space for nuanced/critical discussion?
bgwalter · 19h ago
I do have a reply, but I'll save it for an article that stays on the front page so people will see it. This interesting article has dropped to page 3 within minutes.
camel_Snake · 14h ago
Would you describe this new, lower ranking as censorship?
ipaddr · 13h ago
Yes.
toss1 · 17h ago
One organization has already monopolistic power. It encourages, with monetary rewards thousands to change careers to build properties "written by people for people", with a clear exchange: "you build good human content, we'll promote it".
Then they unilaterally change the deal to basically, "you create the content, we will take it and without attribution, slice & dice it into our automated output".
It is straight-up bait and switch, and absolutely unethical. Just because it was not planned a decade in advance and was just opportunistic does not make it any more ethical (that'd be like arguing it was more ethical for you to steal a car because the keys were dropped next to it vs planning to hotwire the car).
And yes, I'm 100% in agreement with the caveats that building a business based on someone else's platform is like building a house on sand — a definitely risky idea. But the risk that the big player will change their platform is one thing, the risk they'll actively steal from you is another risk people weren't taking.
ipaddr · 13h ago
They come to your site record all your content and show it at the top of the page like they wrote it.
When someone does that with a book, a movie or science paper it's called stealing. What would you call it?
ZeroTalent · 11h ago
that's not how AI results work.
Aldipower · 19h ago
And where the training data for your AI advice comes from?
jasode · 19h ago
>And where the training data for your AI advice comes from?
It seems like the unstated assumption in that question assumes that the world totally depends on the information from small independent blogs like this thread's article. I.e. all other information sources would be derivatives of the independent blogs.
There are many other sources of organic info to feed AI training. Examples:
- transcripts of Youtube videos. E.g. somebody (maybe a travel agent or a well-traveled vacationer) records a video giving advice and uploads it to Youtube. Google auto-transcribes the audio and feeds the text to the training algorithm.
- AI assistants used by normal people to "analyze/summarize information" can feed that same data to the AI cloud. E.g. a travel agent types out an email giving advice to a customer. That customer then submits that same email content (or the AI autoscans the customer's email inbox) to enable the customer to ask the AI assistant, "Is this travel advice good? Is there anything this travel agent overlooked?"
Of course, the travel advisor would want to limit his "proprietary and valuable travel knowledge" to only his direct clients in that private email but they stop the customer from exposing it to AI assistants.
The common theme is that AI engines can insert themselves in between many types of communication between people. Those are the scenarios where you can think creatively about where all the new training data will come from. If AI assistants are used as mediators in private communication, information (including "travel advice") can "leak out" into the public. Independent blogs are a good source -- but they're not the only source.
Aldipower · 19h ago
Thanks, that wants me to use AI even less.
Both examples has nothing to do with an open and free internet. Meaning I cannot trust AI at all. All those examples of data source here, also in the other replies, using mainly highly biased sources. Wikipedia (biased by a small group of mods), YouTube filtered by Google itself, pasting customer travel advice email heavily violates GDPR, social forums also funneled.
If we loose organic sites, we loose freedom.
Fair enough, organic sites does mean the information there is correct, but still it is open and free, so organic sites can be treated as Gaussian distributed.
Not seeing how pasting text with no personal identity information would violate GDPR.
E.g. someone sends an email saying "For your career prospects, I think you should learn Rust instead of COBOL."
Copy&pasting that into AI or an AI scanning that sentence with no identity information isn't going to violate GDPR. There's no personal data to violate. (If the AI companies deliberately want to ignore privacy laws and want to secretly attach personal data to that "Rust/COBOL" sentence, then yes, that violates GDPR.)
EDIT reply to : >or the AI autoscans the customer's email inbox
That auto-scan scenario still doesn't require the AI to save the personal identifiers attached to text fragments. Many ways to do that without violating GDPR. Consider how today's global spam filters "auto scan" customers' incoming emails to automatically categorize some of them for the customers' "Junk folder" without any intervention or violation of GDPR.
Aldipower · 19h ago
> or the AI autoscans the customer's email inbox
HamsterDan · 19h ago
That cat is out of the bag, don't you think? Even if the US passes a strict law protecting copyright owners from having their works used to train AI, China is not going to obey that law, so US companies will just fall behind.
throw10920 · 19h ago
That's not actually a bad thing.
Separate from the morality of the issue (which is clearly that you can't take things you didn't pay for), if such a law is passed, then either the US will actually develop a model that allows AI companies to properly buy training data from people, or China will excel in AI specifically, which doesn't guarantee much of anything at this point. If and when AI turns out to have meaningful geopolitical implications, then the US will revisit that situation, if needed (which is unlikely - companies will push for there to be a way for them to buy data).
Kon-Peki · 19h ago
That’s not at all how it would work.
The cat is out of the bag in terms of people passing around models that are “illegal” in your scenario, though such models would disappear from places like Huggingface. Running a commercial service that touches one of those models is off the table and will be blocked, at the IP level if need be, in essentially all the countries that matter economically to Chinese “exporters”.
throw10920 · 19h ago
Correct, the main problem is companies stealing people's content and then monetizing it, not people passing around "illegal" models and using them directly.
floppyd · 19h ago
This is becoming tangential, but to me someone at this point saying "ban AI company from accessing content without explicit agreement" screams virtue signaling to me, because it directly translates to "I refuse to acknowledge the reality of the situation and will just continue saying that we need to do the 'right' thing".
ipaddr · 13h ago
They didn't drop copyright on music because of napster they sued everyone and anyone. Why give up now?
const_cast · 12h ago
The difference between you and those other people is those other people don't care if AI fails. They have the opinion that if you do something illegal or morally wrong, you should fail. That's not a side-effect to them, that's the whole point.
So when you, and other's, stroll up and say "but but if we do this then AI companies won't be able to make money!!1! And also China!" that doesn't mean anything. Because then the response is, "well yeah, illegal actions shouldn't make you money."
throw10920 · 19h ago
This is emotionally manipulative and fallacious. That's an invalid use of "virtue signaling" that also fails to refute the argument, and intentionally conflates the positive and the normative to push an agenda.
Saying "I refuse to acknowledge the reality of the situation and will just continue saying that we need to do the 'right' thing" like it's a bad thing is also implying that morals don't matter.
People who don't have morals don't belong in society.
thedevilslawyer · 19h ago
Factual data mostly came from sources like wikipedia, news and social forums. I see these as continuing.
Opinion data - from all other SEO sites. These were low signal mostly, and AI seems to have got the general gist of how to structure content for consumption. So rather information reaching our mind through a SEO writer, it's now being AI written, which is atleast more standardized, and can be grounded more easily, and personalized to boot.
Aldipower · 19h ago
No SEO writer reaches my mind. You're leaving some things out. I am able to collect my information wisely. But if Google suppresses organic sites, they are not all SEO, then I just won't use Google anymore. My training data question is still valid. Social forums are also organic btw..
pmontra · 19h ago
But if nobody write SEO content anymore because questions to AI remove all human traffic to those sites, where will AI find up to date opinions? Facebook ? Instagram? Meta will block Google from scraping them or ask money. Booking? Same for Microsoft. Tripadvisor? They better have to buy it soon.
Or AI will invent opinions based on the better bid. That would be an extension of the ad business and sponsored contents too.
FirmwareBurner · 19h ago
From Reddit and user forums of course.
fidotron · 20h ago
> The article treats as axiom that organic traffic is a right. It's not.
Agreed, but traffic has been the substitute for monetary rewards so far. If they aren't sending the traffic then someone is going to start to need to pay for surfacing and verifying information directly.
thedevilslawyer · 19h ago
It's an open market that will step up to meet the need. IMO, we can't hold back innovation for web-1.0 based text articles + text search model.
fidotron · 19h ago
That would be believable if copyright was enforced appropriately on existing AI training data.
The big problem with this is it means anything really interesting will no longer be published in the open.
debesyla · 19h ago
As a decade long blogger I am actually thinking about writing more to paper magazines now - a 1000 paper magazine readers are more than 100 from rare Google traffic (:
fidotron · 19h ago
I'm going there: I think the same is becoming true here.
A couple of days ago one of the web games in my profile frontpaged here, and while it generated a lot of traffic it was nothing like previous times. I have had much more trouble with large private mailing lists linking to things, which also leads to a more condensed rush when everyone looks at once.
Organic traffic generally appears dead, Google or not.
throw10920 · 19h ago
I hope that's true. The appropriate response to Google and OpenAI committing mass content/effort theft via AI training should be the disappearance of things that they can steal.
Unfortunately, there's enough slop that the average user will probably just continue using the AI, because it's so much easier that the quality floor they're willing to hit is very low.
const_cast · 12h ago
> Most people don't want to read an article on travel advice when AI gives us much better and specific advice, with references, when we want it.
Yes, because as we all know Google search's AI has been nothing but a hit. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go eat my designated 3 small rocks for today.
sampullman · 20h ago
I haven't been able to get much practical travel advice from AI yet, any tips?
For stuff like hiking routes, permitting, local cuisine, etc. I don't think it can replace a good blog from an experienced person at this point.
FinnLobsien · 19h ago
It depends. I've found o3 exceptional at finding things off the beaten path. I told it "I will be in city A, B and C in [month]" and would love to find out what to do. I have a car, am willing to drive and generally care most about gastronomy, food and culture. There's also flexibility in terms of timing and stays."
It read things like websites of municipalities of surrounding towns and found local food festivals in towns I never would've found out about otherwise. It's exactly the kind of stuff I'd previously read the experienced person's blog for.
arrowsmith · 19h ago
It's a trade-off. AI gives you speed but lower quality. Blog posts are higher quality but take longer to find/curate.
For hiking routes, I ask AI for a list of suggested hiking routes in [area] based on my criteria (e.g. dog friendly, accessible by public transport, whatever) Then I google the specific suggested routes to fact-check the AI and get more detailed/reliable info.
sampullman · 18h ago
That's true. I'm not anti AI or anything, I use it for plenty of things where search falls short or has decayed due to SEO spam
I guess it comes down to knowing where to find valuable information. If you already have known quality sources, AI is currently inferior.
Where I live I'm lucky to have tons of trails that have been meticulously mapped out and the made available (with images, directions, gear recommendations, etc.) on various blogs. I don't see AI being able to totally replace that in its current state, especially due to the semi-dynamic nature of the data.
thedevilslawyer · 19h ago
I'd like to engage. Can you give a specific example?
We can make an honest attempt to see what the old vs AI options for it looks like. Both of us will walk away a bit more informed, and share here with others as well.
sampullman · 18h ago
What do you mean? I use AI plenty and am aware of the capabilities.
AI will give good surface level advice and sometimes point to decent sources. If I'm looking for e.g. a good hike in a specific area near me, I know the blogs that will have directions, pics, and GPX data for all the routes. These are found via word of mouth, search, and local forums.
ezst · 13h ago
I wouldn't expect them to. Large language models compress the information at a high-level. If you need specifics, you need a search engine and a data set. LLMs specifically aren't that, despite all the fuss and hype.
wslh · 19h ago
My experience with AI is that prompting LLMs tends to fail when the task involves returning a long list of alternatives and/or selecting niche options unless the user explicitly names them.
arrowsmith · 19h ago
Do it iteratively. Ask the LLM for a long list of alternatives but without detail, only the names. Then start a new chat, paste in the list of names, and ask for more detail.
wslh · 17h ago
I've done this several times when benchmarking lesser-known companies, and manual compilation using a search engine consistently outperformed LLMs even when those companies are part of the model's training data.
My intuition (could be completely wrong) is that lesser-known companies have much less density around them that popular brands, except if you are very specific. It would be great if this could be tweaked somehow.
eviks · 19h ago
What's your reference re. what most people want? Or at least a reference that AI advice is better, more specific, and its references aren't fake?
AndrewStephens · 19h ago
I think the days of Google driving traffic to sites then splitting the advertising revenue (or missing out entirely) are largely over. From Google's point of view, they are just closing the loop.
It is a shame because the mutually beneficial relationship between Google and sites has driven a huge amount of the tech economy. Sometimes this has been bad (and advertising is a scourge for many reasons, I can't believe I am defending it) but in general the web would be a lot less useful if people couldn't make money of advertising.
I think long-term sites will stop relying on advertising and go with payments or memberships for information. This will hurt everyone but be disastrous for Google if they cannot spider up-to-date information. It will also hurt the free flow of information that we now enjoy.
What is really galling is that with all the impressive AI summaries, the search results themselves seem to be getting a lot worse[0]. Many times I have used Google and the AI summary is pretty good but the actual page the summary is from is buried well down in the search results. Is this something they are doing deliberately to make the AI summary seem more useful?
Yeah, on the end-user side (so, discounting the chatbots, the dark patterns and the always-on features shoved down our throats), AI hasn't even seen as much mass adoption as crypto has. But even if it had, once the venture capital propping all this has dried out, nobody will be willing to foot the exorbitant costs of running inference.
NitpickLawyer · 19h ago
> don't want to read an article on travel advice when AI gives us
A bit of a tangential anecdote, on the subject of "human written" stuff pre AI.
Circa 99-2000 I knew a US company that would hire students from CEE to write travel content for their many .com properties. The students were instructed to write "as if they'd travelled there", or "as if you're living there", or "in an official tour-guide style", and so on. Judging by how spread the content of my friend's writing was, and how "stereotypical" the other pieces were on those properties (that we found after searching for known content), it was pretty clear that nothing on those sites was genuine. Everything was fake! Since then I take everything with a bit of cynicism, knowing how much of the "natural, organic content" is in fact faked with low-paid contributors. But hey, during those times the gig was pretty good for my friend doing it.
arp242 · 19h ago
It is impossible for any intelligence, artificial or otherwise, to deduce travel advice based on any prior knowledge. You need to actually go to these places and see what it's like.
I don't know of any more clear and obvious example of "AI uses your content, robs you of your income, and gives nothing in return" than this.
Whether AI (currently) gives "better" answers or not is rather besides the point.
thedevilslawyer · 19h ago
We will disagree on whether content on travel on the internet is such richly experiential.
We will also disagree if displacement of work due to new technology qualifies as "robbing", as any advancement is then "robbing".
arp242 · 19h ago
AI is trained on this content and content like it. It is literally and directly used. You can't just handwave and then say the content wasn't worth it in the first place when it's directly the input, or use some semantic sleight of hand as if it's just some $newer_thing replacing $older_thing with no direction connection to it.
emushack · 12h ago
That's a helluva based take right there. Organic traffic is NOT a right? What are your personal opinions on the first amendment?
ezst · 19h ago
Reading this comment is depressing.
How can you be so naive as to think that Google has your best interests in mind (and not their pockets')? They will absolutely serve you the content that has you stick on their walled garden for the longest, misdirecting you along the way, and serving you nonsense and fake content if that's what it takes. And you don't have to take my word for it, that's what Google search has been doing for the best part of a decade: deteriorating search results and placing partner's/own links/SEO slop more and more prominently on their first results page. Monopolies encourage that.
Also you seem to be believing that LLMs are somehow a source of truth. Here I've got bad news for you: LLMs are political machines "aligned" (biased by design) by slave labourers who are in no way competent nor neutral. They are opinion producing/repeating pieces that you shouldn't take at face value, with a knowledge cutoff in the past and no ability to adapt to real world events. How do you expect LLMs to fare (and the state of the world to be bettered) once all your travel recommendations are AI generated, subsequently digested and repeated by other AIs? Depressing.
hulitu · 19h ago
> when AI gives us much better and specific advice
When. At the moment, not.
Krasnol · 20h ago
> Most people don't want to read an article on travel advice when AI gives us much better and specific advice, with references, when we want it.
They may not want that now, they might want it back if they get used to the google AI experience for a bit longer.
The amount of false information I got from this thing in the short time it's been forced upon me is staggering. My brain already started to filter out this part of the search results.
flenserboy · 19h ago
it's not a right, but it shouldn't be impeded. google does everything it can not to give actual search results — the terrible AI slop at the top, page after page of ads, & the elimination of the long tail, where reality was once allowed to surface. now we get hallucinations & paid content. treating this as if it is an improvement sounds crazed.
6stringmerc · 19h ago
Citation needed. Who are these “most people” and do they actually have money to spend?
AI frequently cites references based on human generated content. Often it does a terrible job of it in my experience. I searched for a very specific name and the Google AI returned a “profile” and the link to the person’s social media account was displayed the name that I’d searched for but the AI directed me to a completely different person WITH A DIFFERENT NAME as the link destination. Why the hell would I trust it with travel plans if it get such basic, easily validated challenges so very wrong?
So unless you have a citation for your claim, and even then one that meets some basic credentials of rigor, then you’re flat out wrong.
The purpose of a search engine is to direct organic traffic, not function as fucking bait.
kayo_20211030 · 19h ago
I do sympathize with OP's situation, but there's a dissonance also.
As a site owner they seemed to have been happy to play the SEO game under the old rules, winning a little bit, but unhappy to play the SEO game under the new rules, losing a little bit. Depressingly, it's Google's ball, so it Google's rules.
At the end of the post, OP's suggests some remedies for web users, but they seem either impractical or ineffective. The recommendations for the commission also tacitly assume that Google is either a) a monopoly, to be regulated as such, or b) a utility, to be regulated as such. Maybe a) will be proven, but b) seems like a real stretch goal. They're a private enterprise and without congressional action or administrative action to change the laws and regulations, they have wide latitude in how they behave for commercial reasons. I don't believe they can be forced to do anything they don't want to do without statutory or regulatory action.
I do sympathize, but what's lost for a consumer?
0x000xca0xfe · 18h ago
> Our creators actually visit the places we write about.
> Our creators take and publish thousands of original photos.
Not defending the site, but I guess tons of human created content will be lost? Have fun with LLM hallucinated travel guides and AI generated travel photos.
At least we'll soon get tour guides for our next moon vacation!
xnx · 19h ago
Isn't the business model of "travellemming.com" to get free/cheap user generated content and profit from it? This type of aggregation is very low value add and Google does not owe them any amount of free traffic.
supriyo-biswas · 19h ago
I'd like to look at this from a different angle.
Since Google is an established search player, and that the company has made many public statements on the symbiotic relationship between them and publishers, this means the FTC complaint is likely to go through. Given the current US admin, I also assume they'd pursue some action, either combined with the antitrust efforts, or through a separate legal action as it nicely dovetails with the various accusations of "censorship" that they have.
This means Google would be forced to reduce their AI offerings, and the website publishers in question get the thing that they were looking for. Meanwhile, new search entrants such as OpenAI/Perplexity, etc. are "allowed" to implement the same things that said publishers are opposed to, because of their smaller size and different perceptions, and the lack of similar statements.
Now, because LLMs are rapidly replacing most search engine uses (I've seen this firsthand while travelling on public transport that users in my country first default to ChatGPT etc.), this would mean Google is slowly replaced in an indirect way, not because they could not innovate but because they were not allowed to.
The implications of this are very interesting to me; it means that a corporation should rarely make any statements that have the tiniest chance of creating obligations (which is somewhat similar to Everything is Securities Fraud[1]) and corporate displacement happens not because companies out-innovate each other because the incumbent can do so too, but because legal obligations constrain their actions which ultimately lead to their death (somewhat similar to Planck's principle[2]).
The current administration uses bad faith claims of censorship to bully companies into advantaging speech they like (anti-science, anti-trans, anti-democracy, etc). They haven’t shown any interest in actual freedom of speech.
And OP’s use of “censorship” is pretty disingenuous; there is no claim that any free speech topic is in the table. No viewpoint is suppressed because no viewpoint is asserted.
It’s simple commercial lead gen. Google might be engaging in anticompetitive behavior, but this administration is very much a “might makes right” operation, and it’s hard to imagine them siding with a small player with no conservative bona fides and presumably no money to pay to play.
The only way I could imagine OP getting any relief would be to go full MAGA, list a bunch of travel options for hunting gays or whatever, donate at least a million dollars to Trump’s personal coffers, and then tell and scream about oppression of conservatives.
A simple “Walmart thanks suppliers for the market information but will only sell store brand products” case seems incredibly unlikely to get any traction at all.
redwood · 19h ago
It seems inevitable that Google would do this or else they themselves to be killed by someone else.
What concerns me about this general shift is that it leads to groupthink. How do you ensure that new ideas, new innovation, new perspectives are being bootstrapped into the hive mind.
vladyslavfox · 19h ago
> Sorry, your request has been blocked
We have to fight bots so hard now that it often prevents real people from accessing websites.
I suggest the author to check out Anubis. It's much better for fighting off bots while not blocking humans.
basilgohar · 19h ago
Each step and subsequent revelation makes a stronger and stronger case that companies like Alphabet (nee Google) wield too much power across their products and should be broken up to ensure competitiveness and user choice remain. Otherwise, we'll face a monopolistic monoculture that caters to the powers that be and cements existing power structures more firmly.
You'd think Google would see this, but instead they're doubling down instead of eking out a sustainable evolution of their technology.
tndibona · 19h ago
My personal opinion. Google sees the writing on the wall with the rise of perplexity. People want trustable summaries of long winding content to make decisions. It’s business of sending people to the relevant content and serving ads has to change to compete. It is simply redefining how it serves up information. The fact that small information servers like us get wiped out is the unfortunate consequence.
I’m not saying we all have to innovate or perish but how did our rules based order allow Google to get to this point.
sumtechguy · 19h ago
Basically if you serve information or content. AI or even just some smart coding google can do that too. If you do something with that information Google has not been doing so good at that.
Microsoft in the early 2000s did that very well. They would let you have the data but would gobble up any company that could transform data and make it their own.
But data without applications is useless. Applications without data is also useless.
The applications let us make decisions with our data. Now can AI replace that? Probably in many cases. If it ican then google can just spit out the answer you want.
However, by doing that google may be eating its own lunch. As that ad empire depends on thousands of websites serving up their ad's. If those sites do not exist then what are the ads worth? It was this serving of information/content that drew everyone in. With that scrape of getting ad revenue. Google now can scrape your content and show it above the fold. What reason do you have to make a content farm? But then where does google get the data? They are killing the chicken and the egg at the same time.
tndibona · 18h ago
I see your point, data is no good without actions and vice versa. Initially, I thought google couldn't possibly compete with perplexity because they are building a company from the ground up sans the surveillance ad-network.
If you skim the article this thread is about, It seems google is basically headed to create a monopoly on the answers being dished out to search queries. I.e, if they know the answer they'll generate & serve it up, but if they know the product that fulfills your answer, they will serve that up too. They will probably still continue to monitor you across the web to run their predictions for relevant ads. It will just be formatted and blended with the answer being doled out.
I think we are in the middle of this transformation.
sumtechguy · 17h ago
> I think we are in the middle of this transformation.
Totally. Had a bit to think on my second point. Lets say I used to do something like 'who was the king of england in 1732'. That would in the past may lead me thru at least 3 websites. All serving ads. Now google can have that above the fold. They will have some ad's on the side like they always did. But I have the thing I want. I am probably not going to drill onto those other sites. Seeing those ad's too. Ads more than likely being served by google. In effect it will be showing me something like 80% less ad's. I am pretty cool with that. But the ecosphere around it is going to collapse or at least be substantially curtailed. This will also subtract on what they can charge for ad's. As they will be serving less of them.
tndibona · 15h ago
So if I take both your points -
1. Google will have to eat it's own lunch in order to force this change.
2. They will also have to skim down their Ad space as there will just be less content real estate to place ads when the way forward is an AI style Q&A type search.
Google will have pivot, and trim its bloat to effectuate this change. This will be at the expense of "Maximising shareholder value"?
FinnLobsien · 19h ago
> I’m not saying we all have to innovate or perish but how did our rules based order allow Google to get to this point.
Well millions of people learned how to game the Google Search algorithm and created long-winded, hollow content that would rank on the first page to the point that people no longer trusted Google's results.
Then the perfect technology to solve that exact problem came along—one that let Google cease its dependency on the pesky people it was sending traffic to.
tndibona · 18h ago
Yes, this is true that all the click bait and unoriginal content deserves to perish. But, what about the carve outs for people putting money on original content. Like perhaps a local news gazette with paid journalists. They need google to be found, they also can't afford to get scraped and be AI-regurgitated up.
Let's take a practical example, if you searched for let's say "Whats the latest research on intermittent fasting and its effect on weight loss?". Google could easily AI-summarise a DOAC podcast on this topic and serve it up. How is this fair to Steven Bartlett who put the money and time on an interview podcast? He is deprived of a potential subscriber, lost out potential ad revenue, cant recover his cost. The youtube network he depends on is owned by Google. Seems a bit unfair to genuine people.
FinnLobsien · 17h ago
Yeah I totally agree! But I think it's a reaction on Google's part to the SEO industry. I mourn the loss of independent media, blogosphere etc. and the trend to everything being either more generic or more outrageous.
tndibona · 17h ago
Yep. This SEO industry is a result of "Lets hack the pagerank algorithm". Maybe a sensible use of AI for google would be to use it to differentiate between genuine and derivative content. Drop the page rank based search.
storus · 17h ago
How is Google going to survive? Their search quality tanked, the AI is too expensive to run for every single query and they cut off people that made their advertisement model possible. Are the advertisers themselves going to form a consortium to buy Google at some point? What is the end game? I only see them bleeding money in the medium term.
FinnLobsien · 19h ago
Welcome to the era of massively mediocre online content. It started with mediocre SEO content that just amalgamated 5 other page 1 results until Google results became basically inbred content that meant nothing to anyone.
Now we have LLMs which amalgamate that type of content and spit out a personalized, but still mediocre response.
On the visual side, TikTok and Reels are doing their part to make everyone run to the same picture spot, go to the same mediocre (but cool-looking) restaurants and so on.
jorvi · 19h ago
You should read 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' by Neal Postman. It's painful how apt it is for current times.
For what it's worth, I've started to reintroduce friction in my life where it makes sense. My phone defaults to a "dumbphone" profile that only has messaging, music, maps, etc. and specifically no browser or YouTube.
I only turn on my smart lights with wall buttons and use the smart function purely to tune the white point.
I try to pay by physical card instead of Apple / Google Wallet. Although I do store membership cards that I use once in a blue moon there.
eReader is fine IMO. Weekend newspaper subscription is really nice but can feel expensive if you have limited income.
Another good one is familiarizing yourself in the neighborhood. Get a regular coffee spot or pub or lunch place.
These are only examples of course. I basically feel like hitting the late 1990s - early 2000s 'level' of ease and socialization in your life is the optimal point.
Your brain will fight it every step of the way, but one can tear oneself out of their bubble of surplus comfort. Good luck.
FinnLobsien · 19h ago
> You should read 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' by Neal Stephenson. It's painful how apt it is for current times.
Assuming you mean Neil Postman?
And yeah, I am also wanting to get print magazine subscriptions. Luckily I already live in a neighborhood with a very 1950s vibe where I know the baker, the coffee guy, the butcher, sandwich shop guy etc.
I just want to remove my compulsive internet usage. Even if I'm reading The New Yorker, it's still because I've defaulted to consuming media on the internet in an empty moment.
jorvi · 18h ago
> Assuming you mean Neil Postman?
Yes, my bad. Edited!
> I just want to remove my compulsive internet usage. Even if I'm reading The New Yorker, it's still because I've defaulted to consuming media on the internet in an empty moment.
That's the skill of allowing yourself to be bored. Another thing you can learn, with enough effort.
Making your browser much less accessible on your phone helps a lot. Either lock the use to 30m per day with digital wellbeing settings, or just make it a chore to get to it (always force close, put it a screen away / in a folder / in another profile).
FinnLobsien · 17h ago
I think I'm too compulsive for any of that to work lol. But what's worked in the past is not bringing my phone at all. I should get back to that.
wilde · 19h ago
> It was hurtful to hear Google thought our site was of “little value” to the web.
I read some of the guides. Google is right that there’s little unique content here.
Perhaps this is the right tone for a letter to the FTC. I find it hard to sympathize with the author with this style (even though they are likely right that Google is killing the web)
0x000xca0xfe · 19h ago
Is it just me or has search become even worse in the past couple months?
I've used Google and Bing to look up my Geocaches because the Geocaching interface is clunky. Except I can't find them anymore. Exact ASCII matches in the <title> tag, even with a unique identifier, but now it's become impossible to find them via search.
Just blank results, ads or SEO spam no matter what I try. site:xxx, inurl:, exact quotes, similar words, repetition, nothing works anymore. What is going on?!
And geocaching.com is a pretty big site. I wonder what is happening to small blogs...
tasuki · 19h ago
I wonder what "independent" means in the title?
Aldipower · 20h ago
I see it in a positive light. For me it means back to the roots. People will visit your website by typing in your URL directly into the address bar. Direct marketing and mouth-to-mouth will be a thing again.
krapp · 19h ago
No one ever discovered websites through "mouth to mouth" or direct marketing (whatever that's supposed to mean.. flyers? Junk mail?) Web portals and link aggregators and bookmarks and other means of discovery were a thing from the very beginning of the web, well before Google even came along.
Aldipower · 19h ago
That's exactly what I mean with "back to the roots". Search became already so bad, if it continues, aggregators and bookmarks will be maybe a thing again.
krapp · 19h ago
They still are a thing to be fair. Every social media platform is also a link aggregator and your browser still supports bookmarks.
Typing a URL into the bar directly is always going to be a lousy way of doing things, however, especially since they no longer map to remote directories and files as they're meant to. URLs are like telephone numbers but worse (and no one memorizes phone numbers anymore.)
roryirvine · 17h ago
Sure they did. Search engines and hierarchical directories didn't take off until late 1994, and the first link aggregators like WebRing didn't come along along for at least another year after that.
Before then, website discovery was almost entirely word of mouth, supplemented by a little bit of self-promotion on various mailing lists and newsgroups.
The only other routes were asking your local sysadmin, taking a trip to your local bookstore to browse the few web-related pages in the Whole Internet Guide and Catalogue, or a handful of links in magazines like Mondo 2000 and Wired - but they were very minor, and tended only to be used by true neophytes.
dragonwriter · 16h ago
> Search engines and hierarchical directories didn't take off until late 1994, and the first link aggregators like WebRing didn't come along along for at least another year after that.
> Before then, website discovery was almost entirely word of mouth
Yeah, but before that there were almost no websites to discover, and no one discovering them; even by the end of 1994—generally held out as the first year websites aimed at the general public were available at all, and, as you note, also the year search engines and directories took off, displacing any word of mouth as the main discovery route, there were still only a little over two thousand websites in total.
palmfacehn · 19h ago
People have been sharing URLs since the days of email and Usenet.
eviks · 19h ago
How can living in a dark cave be seen in a positive light?
Aldipower · 18h ago
I depends on the angle you are looking from. The current situation with Google _search_ is looking very dark too me, so looking away from Google makes the world a little bit brighter.
eviks · 17h ago
But if you're looking from a very dark place into an even darker place (which manual typing links is), no angle will make it look brighter?
M1ch431 · 19h ago
I'd be happy to find a website like OP's. Google's output is trash, it is unreliable, and it is an inferior product compared to the Google of the past - hopefully competition will push them to improve/remove the AI slop dominating their results.
> You’re always going to have areas where people are robustly debating value exchanges, etc., like app developers and platforms. That’s not on the web, etc. There’s always going to be — when you’re running a platform — these debates. I would challenge, I think more than any other company, we prioritize sending traffic to the web. No one sends traffic to the web in the way we do. I look at other companies, newer emerging companies, where they openly talk about it as something they’re not going to do. We are the only ones who make it a high priority, agonize, and so on. We’ll engage, and we’ve always engaged.
> There are going to be debates through it all, but we are committed to, I’ve said this before, everything we do across all... You will see us five years from now sending a lot of traffic out to the web. I think that’s the product direction we are committed to. I think it’s what users look for when they come to Google, and the nature of it will evolve. But I am confident that that’s the direction we’ll continue taking.
Sounds like he wants to be nice with publishers and direct traffic to them like "for over 25 years" (a phrase he used many times in the interview), but it remains to be see what their action is.
Sloowms · 19h ago
Google and all the other algorithm related content platforms have had this power before AI and have been using it as well. I think AI is a new layer to the SEO war.
I don't care for the grand conspiracy claims though. It's pretty obvious Google will optimize their search engine and the question answering to benefit their bottom line.
Maybe there are people actively working towards evil within Google. I think it's more likely some people recognize the implications of changes, some people don't but no one is working against those changes and ultimately the system will be capable to be used for very bad things and will do bad things naturally.
Anyway a better title would have been: Google's AI is the newest website killing feature
Barrin92 · 19h ago
The alleged economic incentive suggested in the article, that Google wants to deal with "established big players" is literally nonsensical, something that the article itself arrives at, weirdly enough.
"But we later realized the shadowban really was about the type of website we are (i.e., small and independent). While Google gives large publishers an appeal and recovery process, small and independent publishers have no path to appeal our shadowbans.[...]"
That's not an indication of Google liking big players, it's the opposite. Big players have leverage against Google, you the small publisher do not, as you correctly identified in the case of reddit:
"[...]Unlike independent publishers, though, Reddit actually had leverage over Google. Reddit was the owner of a trove of historical user generated content that Google wanted for its grand AI plans. If Google could secure a deal for Reddit’s content, maybe that would spare Google the expense of negotiating licensing deals with the web’s many disparate publishers and rightsholders."
Google doesn't need to negotiate with you, they can kill independent publishers, which is why you're writing this blogpost. That's the entire logic of the internet platform economy. Kill traditional distributors, abuse atomized content creators. Youtube and Google hate publishers as much as Uber hates taxi companies and unions.
Which is why the literal reason given by Google is much more likely, they just don't think your content is good.
ancillary · 17h ago
Yeah, the world in which human-generated indie content is noticeably better (in terms of clicks) than blogspam or AI content seems better for Google. Each of those indie players is happy for some traffic, and they're unlikely to muscle together and negotiate hard. Why would Google want to destroy that world to negotiate against players more comparable to its size?
My guess is that differentiating human- and AI-generated content at anything approaching Google scale has become hard, and Google's best option is to prioritize known information sources, which are necessarily large firms with some amount of reputational proof (though I'd also say that Forbes is not my go-to example of a good actor in this space).
seaourfreed · 19h ago
Replacing Google with open source. Imaging this:
1) An open-source competitor to Google Search exists
2) It exists in "Front-end nodes". This is the website user interface. Search query entered here. It then searches cached indexes.
3) Searches fall in two patterns.
a) Frequent searches (top 20m search query phrases),
b) long-tail rare (beyond top 20m)
4) Here is how "Frequent Searches" results are built.
* They are built before. Updated once a month
* There are LLM prompts on how to assess web pages against a search query. This is about taking the top 5,000 website contenders, and ranking those exactly
* There can be contention on these LLM. This is how that is solved.
* Stake holders. Each is a company or an owner of a website with human content. They have the ability to vote. This is towards "fair" LLMs to reason on finding the best match for a term.
* They vote away LLM prompts that skew or overly focused on one area.
5) Long-tail searches may be redirected to a DuckDuckGo like solution. Bing / Google / DuckDuckGo compete to be fair to win the traffic
6) The search front-end gets add revenue for Frequent searches. Their job is to do advertising to get customers to switch from Google search
7) The Frequent Search final results of voting are saved in the blockchain. From the once a month LLM compute.
8) LLM compute may happen with different LLM vendors, to weed out bias.
9) The LLM prompt runs (once a month), may happen at ~200 (or 2,000) different open source servers. Run by different people. What wins, is consensus on what most matches. This weeds out bad actors and bias.
10) Big non-tech companies may pay for this, in order to get SEO to work again, for their revevnue. Organic traffic. Ford, GM, Home Depot, AT&T, SalesForce, Oracle, J&J, P&E, GE, Colgate-Palmolive, General Mills, Kraft, etc.
fsflover · 18h ago
> Imaging this: 1) An open-source competitor to Google Search exists 2) It exists in "Front-end nodes".
Penalising small websites is a natural consequence of Google's shift towards becoming more and more of a political actor. Google actively tries to suppress content that doesn't support the Silicon Valley narrative, and this best way to achieve this is prioritising a smaller number of large websites and organisations that share the same political values.
p3rls · 13h ago
Bro I don't want to sound mean but you've got a blog.
I built a customized wiki cms, it's the best, most info-dense site in my niche by a mile and I've still been getting fucked by google for a decade.
Literally, please, check right now and look at kpopping.com and then search for some kpop results on google. Things like "Jimin". The top results are always websites like the hindustantimes .com, and sportskeeda.
This has been going on for literally a decade in my niche, a decade!Every quality website we've had in our scene is long dead and has been replaced by indian and ai garbage besides me, it's pathetic. No one builds anything but wordpress copy paste slop these days.
moresea · 20h ago
.
camillomiller · 20h ago
I am finding it really hard to not reply with expletives to people that suck it up the way you do to trillion dollar corporations.
palmfacehn · 19h ago
Google's growth is directly attributable to the opportunities they created for consumers and entrepreneurs/publishers. Recognizing that the landscape has changed and needs to be adapted to isn't excusing the opportunities which have been taken off the table.
It is a tall order, but these changes create new opportunities for other publishers to capitalize on.
If you're seething over the valuation of Google rather than the content of their actions, that's something to reflect upon. Most of us here would find issues with their policies and evolution over the past two decades. I would love to see a better search experience. I hope the company that delivers it earns as much as they can, by serving consumers and creating opportunities for publishers.
Drunkfoowl · 19h ago
They are not wrong. This person is complaining because they WANT traffic, and cant get it, yet refuse to modify their output.
You can either have a business or a hobby, you can't have both.
sebstefan · 19h ago
>Google will just source information from a handful of sources and partner websites that it controls and selects – effectively creating an information cartel.
And risk providing worse results for "control"..?
citation needed
ZephyrBlu · 19h ago
> As one Google executive recently explained: "Organizing information is clearly a trillion-dollar opportunity, but a trillion dollars is not cool anymore. What’s cool is a quadrillion dollars."
Strongest evidence in support: Drop in traffic coincided with google algorithm update.
Biggest lack of evidence: Nothing that shows it's because of who they are and not their content. Author defended their content by pointing out the cost and labor that goes into making their content.
Was the content really authentic and useful? This is hard to prove (and I suspect hard even for an algorithm to discern), and so I had a look:
- Each article did have that human feel to it with photos of the author in the locations they were talking about. Articles also included small personalized evaluations about topics.
So, yes, I did think it was authentic and useful. But how did it compare to the 1000s of other sites who can replicate this? Human writers aren't rare, and travel isn't a small interest to our species.
And that's the crux of it: Even if you're useful and authentic, search engines have to rank you among other sites that are useful and authentic.
You could be amazing and still end up on page 30 because you're not alone in being amazing on the internet.
I don't know what a fair algorithm looks like, and if a fair algorithm would make everyone equally happy.
For now, someone has the power to direct how the algorithm chooses. Who should have that power is a fair question, but I don't think anything will mitigate the problem of being ranked low even with quality content. It's a ranking against the rest of the internet, not just an evaluation of quality.
At the moment, if two sites are somewhat equally useful, being profitable to Google probably gets you a bump.
Today, it's different. I do think Google played a major role in shrinking the visibility of the independent web. If Google only shows 300 links per search (30 pages x 10 results), anything beyond that effectively doesn't exist for most users.
Some might argue that only the top few results matter, but I disagree. For broad topics like "video games," "war," or "love," you'd expect there to be thousands of worthwhile links—not just the same recycled content from YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, or SEO-heavy content farms.
As a side project, I run a hobby web crawler to explore what's still out there. That's where my perspective comes from regarding the current state of the open web:
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
The idea Google is hostile to long tail indie content isn't exactly a groundbreaking claim, it's been obvious and widely discussed for years. They've been losing the original culture for a long time. Google circa 2000-2010 was very libertarian. It believed in a large decentralized web in which Google helped all users with all queries, without passing judgement. If it was obscure and you wanted it, Google would reliably surface it in the first page of results every single time. This was the Google that believed in the indie web so much it purchased Blogger.
Starting around 2010-2012 the rate at which they hired new grads went up quite sharply (I was there and saw it). The average level of experience dropped sharply. These recruits brought with them the new authoritarian politics of the university campus. Around 2015-2016 you start to see Google start to just openly engage in political activism, tossing the hard-won reputation for neutrality in the trash. Unfortunately, this new worldview was incompatible with the prior commitment to the indie web. Whereas the Google of Matt Cutts cared a lot about surfacing tiny sites, the new Google became highly suspicious of any content that wasn't from sources they deemed "reliable", "authoritative" etc [1]. They defined these terms to mean basically any large left-leaning source, without reference to objective metrics. Put simply: if it's on .gov, .edu or one hop removed then it's reliable, if it's not then it isn't.
This shows up in how easy it now is to find queries where Google gives you the exact opposite of what you're asking for, no matter how clearly you specify the search terms. This would have once been considered a high severity code yellow, now it's by design. The open web won out over AOL partly because old Google fostered it, but one gets the feeling that Google now views its child with disgust. Can you imagine Google purchasing Substack, as they once did with Blogger? It's unthinkable. They'd undoubtably view it as a hive of villainy and scum. In the event they did buy it the first thing they'd do is delete most of its content.
Unfortunately, you can't be both anti-misinformation and pro-open-web. These two things are irreconcilable. Either the world is complex and anyone might have insight to contribute, or it's simple and the right answer is always found via traversing a shallow hierarchy of trusted sources.
So: does your random indie travel blog "demonstrate expertise" or "authoritativeness" as defined by someone who has been through the Ivy League universities? No. Are these the sorts of sites that can eventually become big and a recognized source of authoritative expertise, given enough nourishment from the watering can of unbiased search? Yes! That's how the web grew to start with. But Google doesn't care anymore and with the loss of its primary patron the open web is in its twilight years. As the author says: he was invited to Google HQ to hear an apology, and also to be told nothing will change. The new web is no different to AOL except in minor technical details, because that's how the woke generation like it.
[1] e.g. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/12395529?hl=en
They've been boiling the frog here for a long time. The "open web" is a euphemism for the Google Chrome monoculture walled-garden-in-waiting. Google exert so much influence there that building on the web is in practice barely different than building on say iOS. You can do what you want if you don't want to make money, but if you do then you will have to play along with the big G.
My hunch is Google never psychologically recovered from Facebook absolutely wiping out G+, and they have been on a mission to ensure nothing like that ever happens again.
Same for Microsoft with phones.
That's why Google and Microsoft are trying to use AI to crush us while Apple is like "I'm pretty content with how much money I make".
What a laughably silly depiction of a multi-trillion dollar company.
Their predatory app store policies, defended (and lost) in court, paint a completely different picture. Just one of dozens of examples.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-executive-outright-lied...
"Siri, adjust my schedule to work in a 30 minute walk this afternoon."
"Siri, find a photo of a Koala, turn it into a cartoon, and make a logo for my Github project."
Coordinated actions are what we're looking for, but they blow through all of the app security walls. Even if Apple's software could act like this, I don't think I'd use it. If it could do these things, it could also do things like broadcast my private files to everyone in my contact list... etc.
We have to get dramatically more sophisticated about security with agents than we are now.
https://sky.app/
(Check the link to the MacStories article at the bottom to get a great overview of the capabilities.)
Also, Siri / Apple Intelligence is bound to the local processing power as everything is handled on-device - compared to other AIs that can use the computing power of a whole datacentre.
Prime example being push notification support, where Android has random 10 minute latencies added because they don't want to fix the service worker startup problem.
That's what OP is saying. Google knows it doesn't understand, knows it cannot compete on even ground, so it is pulling every lever of its monopoly so that no other entrant can ever rise from the web. Only serfs, no lords.
That's an orthogonal issue to me. IMHO, modern Google never really cared about social media platforms because it never really understood them. Otherwise it would have bought Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitter, early on before they became industry titans, the same way they bought Youtube, Maps, etc in the early days.
They've been coasting for so long on the search ad revenue money printer, that they're blind to everything else going on around them, so they're always reacting instead of proactive, but always too late.
Caring (or at least wanting in) and not understanding are perfectly compatible.
I know for a fact that a number of old googlers are still frustrated over Google Video got stomped, and Google having to buy Youtube in the end.
> Otherwise it would have bought Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitter, early on before they became industry titans
That only works if:
1. they see it coming
2. the in-house competition effort does not remain politically unassailable
3. until the competitor is too big for google to realistically acquire it
Zuckerberg saw them coming though. That's why he owns a social media empire now, and wants to either own or destroy Tiktok as well. Musk saw it coming with Twatter, hell, even Bezos saw it coming, that why Amazon bought Twitch.
Google leadership just doesn't understand social media, otherwise they would have bought a rising platform instead of building one from scratch that flopped with zero user base. Social media platforms are all about the existing user base, not about the tech behind it. That's why G+ failed despite being technically superior in some aspects.
>I know for a fact that a number of old googlers are still frustrated over Google Video got stomped, and Google having to buy Youtube in the end
It's irrelevant what old googlers think. Google has a responsibility to their shareholders to make line go up, not make some of their programmers feel good by keeping them working on dying platforms with no user base wile their competitors steam ahead. Buying youtube was the right business decision because it was the more popular platform, instead of trying to make Google Video happen, as it would have had the same faith as G+, and those old googlers would have probably been laid off instead of being moved to work on Youtube. Programmers don't always make good business decisions.
Which pertains to my reply... how?
> Musk saw it coming with Twatter
Musk saw nothing coming. He bought twitter in 2022 after getting baited into making a binding offer. Twitter was a household name at least a decade before that: news networks had direct twitter interactions and mentions at least as far back as the 2012 election.
And although it's been turned private and delisted, it's estimated to be worth just a fraction of what he paid for it.
> Google leadership just doesn't understand social media
Have you considered actually reading replies instead of going off with whatever your pet assertions are?
> That's irrelevant what old googlers think.
It's very relevant to your assertion that "google never really cared".
> Google has a responsibility to their shareholders to make line go up, not make some of their programmers feel good by keeping them working on platforms with no user base wile their competitors steam ahead.
That has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm replying to.
> And although it's been turned private and delisted, it's estimated to be worth just a fraction of what he paid for it.
I'd just stick with "he tried to back out of it and had to be sued to buy it" as evidence that musk didn't forsee anything. It is a bit (darkly) amusing that the document required him to buy the company buy not pay the severance listed in it when firing people.
Although if Grok was a standalone company I think it's hard to argue it'd valued less than 44 billion so Musk really lucked into a great deal. He also really lucked into Biden not stepping down earlier so the Democrats would run an actual competitive primary.
> [2] Elon Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter in October 2022
xAI would've just been an AI division of Twitter if Musk wasn't worried that Twitter was going to go bankrupt and take the company (xAI) with it (Twitter). It's extremely suspicious that Grok was available to paying X subscribers and not some other arrangement.
"Separately" funded is pretty thin. It's the same group of people funding xAI [3] as Twitter acquisition [4].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XAI_(company)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#2022%E2%80%93present
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XAI_(company)#Financial_histor...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
This uncited, anonymous quote sounds very made up. Cursory search couldn't find anything like this.
Regardless, while the article makes some good points, it is also dripping with entitlement. Google gave you incredible monetizable traffic for two+ decades. At some point you need to capture your audience and make a real connection with them so they don't need Google to interact with you. Give them a value prop.
Quote is from Noam Shazeer (of transformer fame) in the Dwarkesh Podcast: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jeff-dean-and-noam-shazeer
The paperclip optimizers are already here - they were always with us.
> Shazeer says he’s excited about Google expanding its focus to include helping users create new AI-generated content. “Organizing information is clearly a trillion-dollar opportunity, but a trillion dollars is not cool anymore,” he said recently on a podcast[2]. “What's cool is a quadrillion dollars.”
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/google-openai-gemini-chatgpt-art...
[2] at minute 29:18 , https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jeff-dean-and-noam-shazeer
Edit : Saw multiple people comment by the time I hit sent. Was it also memorable for you guys? I think it was just the way he said it or something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0gjI__RyCY
You forgot to add "for free" /s
(I mean, really? Google made billions on being a better browser than Yahoo!, AltaVista, AOL Search and whatever was there. They build up people's trust only to abuse it to the limits in practically every area they could get away with.)
This is not 'censorship'. It probably isn't banning, nor is it 'shadowbanning'. Google tunes its algorithms and lets the chips fall. Some win, some lose.
While I understand how Google's dominance in search can have outsized effects on Internet commerce, the writer has near-zero credibility with me based on their writing. Honest people making honest statements don't need to exaggerate to make the point.
Google have a page where they give advice on “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content”:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creat...
Things like “Provide a great page experience”, “Focus on people-first content”, and “Avoid creating search engine-first content”.
This article reframes it as an unfulfilled obligation and betrayal because ‘Google Promised to Reward Publishers Who Invest Resources Into Content Created “By People, For People”’
This is even more sloppy and could be easily applied to any real censorship, where some (censored) lose and some (not censored) win
If you're "tuning" your algorithm with the goal of blocking all small independent websites, then yeah, you're doing the shadow (if you don't tell the sites about it) banning. By ignoring the intent of the policy and replacing it with a truism you don't really have a terminology counter argument
That is not what is happening here. What's happening here is that someone has built a business that relies heavily on search hits from Google, Google made changes that negatively impact the number of hits.
I'm not trying to minimize what is clearly a significant problem for the author, I'm just saying that misusing words like 'censorship' can water it down to the point that it has no impact.
I abhor censorship. This isn't it.
By the way, if they made changes to filter out travel advice messages (from small travel sites) because they think such messages are undesirable since they hurt their ability to earn money from AI models, than the same negative impact would meet your definition of censorship, no?
The algorithm isn't some mystery formula it is literally what Google decides. There is no someone wins someone loses. Google wants to provide the answers and is taking market share from smaller publisher today and larger publishers tomorrow.
Just like if I stab you it's not a mugging. Words have meaning.
They're upset because they show up in a search _below_ the "AI Overview" which means people do not click through to their site. The search result still occurs; nobody wants to read it in addition to the AI Overview.
Feel how you want about a company making revenue from not intended to be free labor but it's not a shadow ban.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=travel+lemming+visit+peru
And Google gave us a clear and unequivocal apology. Google said our sites didn’t deserve our shadowbans, and that it wasn’t our fault.
Whether Google itself used the term "shadowban" or not, they clearly acknowledged the drastic effect of their algorithms that favor "AI". So we know what he means.
Censorship is active suppression.
If Google was using AI to prevent independent people from accessing independent websites that would be censorship.
Censorship is something that is done not simply the lack of something being done.
First i want to congratulate you on waking up from your 10 year coma.
That statement is no longe true. Nowadays you have to lie and exaggerate to make a point. That's just how things work
It fits 'shadowbanning' to an absolute tee. Without any kind of notification, or any recourse, a switch is flicked to "off" in a single moment, putting a domain on the shitlist. This is now very well documented, including by this post, and incredibly obvious from the graph.
> the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user
(from Wikipedia)
I'm not saying what they are doing is good, just agreeing that it doesn't seem like shadowbanning, it just looks like downranking.
A ban is when you are preventing from participating in something. Google is a service that indexes the internet and provides references to relevant information. Website providers aren't the users here, web searchers are. I guess you could argue that the site was 'banned' from search results, but I doubt that the author would care enough to search 100 pages of search results to see if they were still there, they just care that they aren't a first page hit.
A shadowban is when a participant has been banned, but has no idea it has happened. This came about on certain link aggregation/social media sites as a solution to people being banned and creating new accounts and resuming their behavior.
Most people don't want to read an article on travel advice when AI gives us much better and specific advice, with references, when we want it.
Since politicians do not protect us from these criminals, we are fortunate that no one except for CEOs under the influence of cocaine wants "AI".
I get emotions are high because of the impact of AI, but in no meaningful/legal sense is this true. Is there space for nuanced/critical discussion?
Then they unilaterally change the deal to basically, "you create the content, we will take it and without attribution, slice & dice it into our automated output".
It is straight-up bait and switch, and absolutely unethical. Just because it was not planned a decade in advance and was just opportunistic does not make it any more ethical (that'd be like arguing it was more ethical for you to steal a car because the keys were dropped next to it vs planning to hotwire the car).
And yes, I'm 100% in agreement with the caveats that building a business based on someone else's platform is like building a house on sand — a definitely risky idea. But the risk that the big player will change their platform is one thing, the risk they'll actively steal from you is another risk people weren't taking.
When someone does that with a book, a movie or science paper it's called stealing. What would you call it?
It seems like the unstated assumption in that question assumes that the world totally depends on the information from small independent blogs like this thread's article. I.e. all other information sources would be derivatives of the independent blogs.
There are many other sources of organic info to feed AI training. Examples:
- transcripts of Youtube videos. E.g. somebody (maybe a travel agent or a well-traveled vacationer) records a video giving advice and uploads it to Youtube. Google auto-transcribes the audio and feeds the text to the training algorithm.
- AI assistants used by normal people to "analyze/summarize information" can feed that same data to the AI cloud. E.g. a travel agent types out an email giving advice to a customer. That customer then submits that same email content (or the AI autoscans the customer's email inbox) to enable the customer to ask the AI assistant, "Is this travel advice good? Is there anything this travel agent overlooked?"
Of course, the travel advisor would want to limit his "proprietary and valuable travel knowledge" to only his direct clients in that private email but they stop the customer from exposing it to AI assistants.
The common theme is that AI engines can insert themselves in between many types of communication between people. Those are the scenarios where you can think creatively about where all the new training data will come from. If AI assistants are used as mediators in private communication, information (including "travel advice") can "leak out" into the public. Independent blogs are a good source -- but they're not the only source.
Both examples has nothing to do with an open and free internet. Meaning I cannot trust AI at all. All those examples of data source here, also in the other replies, using mainly highly biased sources. Wikipedia (biased by a small group of mods), YouTube filtered by Google itself, pasting customer travel advice email heavily violates GDPR, social forums also funneled.
If we loose organic sites, we loose freedom. Fair enough, organic sites does mean the information there is correct, but still it is open and free, so organic sites can be treated as Gaussian distributed.
Not seeing how pasting text with no personal identity information would violate GDPR.
E.g. someone sends an email saying "For your career prospects, I think you should learn Rust instead of COBOL."
Copy&pasting that into AI or an AI scanning that sentence with no identity information isn't going to violate GDPR. There's no personal data to violate. (If the AI companies deliberately want to ignore privacy laws and want to secretly attach personal data to that "Rust/COBOL" sentence, then yes, that violates GDPR.)
EDIT reply to : >or the AI autoscans the customer's email inbox
That auto-scan scenario still doesn't require the AI to save the personal identifiers attached to text fragments. Many ways to do that without violating GDPR. Consider how today's global spam filters "auto scan" customers' incoming emails to automatically categorize some of them for the customers' "Junk folder" without any intervention or violation of GDPR.
Separate from the morality of the issue (which is clearly that you can't take things you didn't pay for), if such a law is passed, then either the US will actually develop a model that allows AI companies to properly buy training data from people, or China will excel in AI specifically, which doesn't guarantee much of anything at this point. If and when AI turns out to have meaningful geopolitical implications, then the US will revisit that situation, if needed (which is unlikely - companies will push for there to be a way for them to buy data).
The cat is out of the bag in terms of people passing around models that are “illegal” in your scenario, though such models would disappear from places like Huggingface. Running a commercial service that touches one of those models is off the table and will be blocked, at the IP level if need be, in essentially all the countries that matter economically to Chinese “exporters”.
So when you, and other's, stroll up and say "but but if we do this then AI companies won't be able to make money!!1! And also China!" that doesn't mean anything. Because then the response is, "well yeah, illegal actions shouldn't make you money."
Saying "I refuse to acknowledge the reality of the situation and will just continue saying that we need to do the 'right' thing" like it's a bad thing is also implying that morals don't matter.
People who don't have morals don't belong in society.
Opinion data - from all other SEO sites. These were low signal mostly, and AI seems to have got the general gist of how to structure content for consumption. So rather information reaching our mind through a SEO writer, it's now being AI written, which is atleast more standardized, and can be grounded more easily, and personalized to boot.
Or AI will invent opinions based on the better bid. That would be an extension of the ad business and sponsored contents too.
Agreed, but traffic has been the substitute for monetary rewards so far. If they aren't sending the traffic then someone is going to start to need to pay for surfacing and verifying information directly.
The big problem with this is it means anything really interesting will no longer be published in the open.
A couple of days ago one of the web games in my profile frontpaged here, and while it generated a lot of traffic it was nothing like previous times. I have had much more trouble with large private mailing lists linking to things, which also leads to a more condensed rush when everyone looks at once.
Organic traffic generally appears dead, Google or not.
Unfortunately, there's enough slop that the average user will probably just continue using the AI, because it's so much easier that the quality floor they're willing to hit is very low.
Yes, because as we all know Google search's AI has been nothing but a hit. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go eat my designated 3 small rocks for today.
For stuff like hiking routes, permitting, local cuisine, etc. I don't think it can replace a good blog from an experienced person at this point.
It read things like websites of municipalities of surrounding towns and found local food festivals in towns I never would've found out about otherwise. It's exactly the kind of stuff I'd previously read the experienced person's blog for.
For hiking routes, I ask AI for a list of suggested hiking routes in [area] based on my criteria (e.g. dog friendly, accessible by public transport, whatever) Then I google the specific suggested routes to fact-check the AI and get more detailed/reliable info.
I guess it comes down to knowing where to find valuable information. If you already have known quality sources, AI is currently inferior.
Where I live I'm lucky to have tons of trails that have been meticulously mapped out and the made available (with images, directions, gear recommendations, etc.) on various blogs. I don't see AI being able to totally replace that in its current state, especially due to the semi-dynamic nature of the data.
We can make an honest attempt to see what the old vs AI options for it looks like. Both of us will walk away a bit more informed, and share here with others as well.
AI will give good surface level advice and sometimes point to decent sources. If I'm looking for e.g. a good hike in a specific area near me, I know the blogs that will have directions, pics, and GPX data for all the routes. These are found via word of mouth, search, and local forums.
My intuition (could be completely wrong) is that lesser-known companies have much less density around them that popular brands, except if you are very specific. It would be great if this could be tweaked somehow.
It is a shame because the mutually beneficial relationship between Google and sites has driven a huge amount of the tech economy. Sometimes this has been bad (and advertising is a scourge for many reasons, I can't believe I am defending it) but in general the web would be a lot less useful if people couldn't make money of advertising.
I think long-term sites will stop relying on advertising and go with payments or memberships for information. This will hurt everyone but be disastrous for Google if they cannot spider up-to-date information. It will also hurt the free flow of information that we now enjoy.
What is really galling is that with all the impressive AI summaries, the search results themselves seem to be getting a lot worse[0]. Many times I have used Google and the AI summary is pretty good but the actual page the summary is from is buried well down in the search results. Is this something they are doing deliberately to make the AI summary seem more useful?
[0] An example I blogged about: https://sheep.horse/2025/4/yo_google%2C_thanks_for_the_ai_ov...
AI has seen mass adoption, but trust is still low and many are aware of how it can make errors. https://kpmg.com/xx/en/our-insights/ai-and-technology/trust-...
Yeah, on the end-user side (so, discounting the chatbots, the dark patterns and the always-on features shoved down our throats), AI hasn't even seen as much mass adoption as crypto has. But even if it had, once the venture capital propping all this has dried out, nobody will be willing to foot the exorbitant costs of running inference.
A bit of a tangential anecdote, on the subject of "human written" stuff pre AI.
Circa 99-2000 I knew a US company that would hire students from CEE to write travel content for their many .com properties. The students were instructed to write "as if they'd travelled there", or "as if you're living there", or "in an official tour-guide style", and so on. Judging by how spread the content of my friend's writing was, and how "stereotypical" the other pieces were on those properties (that we found after searching for known content), it was pretty clear that nothing on those sites was genuine. Everything was fake! Since then I take everything with a bit of cynicism, knowing how much of the "natural, organic content" is in fact faked with low-paid contributors. But hey, during those times the gig was pretty good for my friend doing it.
I don't know of any more clear and obvious example of "AI uses your content, robs you of your income, and gives nothing in return" than this.
Whether AI (currently) gives "better" answers or not is rather besides the point.
We will also disagree if displacement of work due to new technology qualifies as "robbing", as any advancement is then "robbing".
How can you be so naive as to think that Google has your best interests in mind (and not their pockets')? They will absolutely serve you the content that has you stick on their walled garden for the longest, misdirecting you along the way, and serving you nonsense and fake content if that's what it takes. And you don't have to take my word for it, that's what Google search has been doing for the best part of a decade: deteriorating search results and placing partner's/own links/SEO slop more and more prominently on their first results page. Monopolies encourage that.
Also you seem to be believing that LLMs are somehow a source of truth. Here I've got bad news for you: LLMs are political machines "aligned" (biased by design) by slave labourers who are in no way competent nor neutral. They are opinion producing/repeating pieces that you shouldn't take at face value, with a knowledge cutoff in the past and no ability to adapt to real world events. How do you expect LLMs to fare (and the state of the world to be bettered) once all your travel recommendations are AI generated, subsequently digested and repeated by other AIs? Depressing.
When. At the moment, not.
They may not want that now, they might want it back if they get used to the google AI experience for a bit longer.
The amount of false information I got from this thing in the short time it's been forced upon me is staggering. My brain already started to filter out this part of the search results.
AI frequently cites references based on human generated content. Often it does a terrible job of it in my experience. I searched for a very specific name and the Google AI returned a “profile” and the link to the person’s social media account was displayed the name that I’d searched for but the AI directed me to a completely different person WITH A DIFFERENT NAME as the link destination. Why the hell would I trust it with travel plans if it get such basic, easily validated challenges so very wrong?
So unless you have a citation for your claim, and even then one that meets some basic credentials of rigor, then you’re flat out wrong.
The purpose of a search engine is to direct organic traffic, not function as fucking bait.
As a site owner they seemed to have been happy to play the SEO game under the old rules, winning a little bit, but unhappy to play the SEO game under the new rules, losing a little bit. Depressingly, it's Google's ball, so it Google's rules.
At the end of the post, OP's suggests some remedies for web users, but they seem either impractical or ineffective. The recommendations for the commission also tacitly assume that Google is either a) a monopoly, to be regulated as such, or b) a utility, to be regulated as such. Maybe a) will be proven, but b) seems like a real stretch goal. They're a private enterprise and without congressional action or administrative action to change the laws and regulations, they have wide latitude in how they behave for commercial reasons. I don't believe they can be forced to do anything they don't want to do without statutory or regulatory action.
I do sympathize, but what's lost for a consumer?
> Our creators take and publish thousands of original photos.
Not defending the site, but I guess tons of human created content will be lost? Have fun with LLM hallucinated travel guides and AI generated travel photos.
At least we'll soon get tour guides for our next moon vacation!
Since Google is an established search player, and that the company has made many public statements on the symbiotic relationship between them and publishers, this means the FTC complaint is likely to go through. Given the current US admin, I also assume they'd pursue some action, either combined with the antitrust efforts, or through a separate legal action as it nicely dovetails with the various accusations of "censorship" that they have.
This means Google would be forced to reduce their AI offerings, and the website publishers in question get the thing that they were looking for. Meanwhile, new search entrants such as OpenAI/Perplexity, etc. are "allowed" to implement the same things that said publishers are opposed to, because of their smaller size and different perceptions, and the lack of similar statements.
Now, because LLMs are rapidly replacing most search engine uses (I've seen this firsthand while travelling on public transport that users in my country first default to ChatGPT etc.), this would mean Google is slowly replaced in an indirect way, not because they could not innovate but because they were not allowed to.
The implications of this are very interesting to me; it means that a corporation should rarely make any statements that have the tiniest chance of creating obligations (which is somewhat similar to Everything is Securities Fraud[1]) and corporate displacement happens not because companies out-innovate each other because the incumbent can do so too, but because legal obligations constrain their actions which ultimately lead to their death (somewhat similar to Planck's principle[2]).
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
The current administration uses bad faith claims of censorship to bully companies into advantaging speech they like (anti-science, anti-trans, anti-democracy, etc). They haven’t shown any interest in actual freedom of speech.
And OP’s use of “censorship” is pretty disingenuous; there is no claim that any free speech topic is in the table. No viewpoint is suppressed because no viewpoint is asserted.
It’s simple commercial lead gen. Google might be engaging in anticompetitive behavior, but this administration is very much a “might makes right” operation, and it’s hard to imagine them siding with a small player with no conservative bona fides and presumably no money to pay to play.
The only way I could imagine OP getting any relief would be to go full MAGA, list a bunch of travel options for hunting gays or whatever, donate at least a million dollars to Trump’s personal coffers, and then tell and scream about oppression of conservatives.
A simple “Walmart thanks suppliers for the market information but will only sell store brand products” case seems incredibly unlikely to get any traction at all.
What concerns me about this general shift is that it leads to groupthink. How do you ensure that new ideas, new innovation, new perspectives are being bootstrapped into the hive mind.
We have to fight bots so hard now that it often prevents real people from accessing websites.
I suggest the author to check out Anubis. It's much better for fighting off bots while not blocking humans.
You'd think Google would see this, but instead they're doubling down instead of eking out a sustainable evolution of their technology.
I’m not saying we all have to innovate or perish but how did our rules based order allow Google to get to this point.
Microsoft in the early 2000s did that very well. They would let you have the data but would gobble up any company that could transform data and make it their own.
But data without applications is useless. Applications without data is also useless.
The applications let us make decisions with our data. Now can AI replace that? Probably in many cases. If it ican then google can just spit out the answer you want.
However, by doing that google may be eating its own lunch. As that ad empire depends on thousands of websites serving up their ad's. If those sites do not exist then what are the ads worth? It was this serving of information/content that drew everyone in. With that scrape of getting ad revenue. Google now can scrape your content and show it above the fold. What reason do you have to make a content farm? But then where does google get the data? They are killing the chicken and the egg at the same time.
If you skim the article this thread is about, It seems google is basically headed to create a monopoly on the answers being dished out to search queries. I.e, if they know the answer they'll generate & serve it up, but if they know the product that fulfills your answer, they will serve that up too. They will probably still continue to monitor you across the web to run their predictions for relevant ads. It will just be formatted and blended with the answer being doled out.
I think we are in the middle of this transformation.
Totally. Had a bit to think on my second point. Lets say I used to do something like 'who was the king of england in 1732'. That would in the past may lead me thru at least 3 websites. All serving ads. Now google can have that above the fold. They will have some ad's on the side like they always did. But I have the thing I want. I am probably not going to drill onto those other sites. Seeing those ad's too. Ads more than likely being served by google. In effect it will be showing me something like 80% less ad's. I am pretty cool with that. But the ecosphere around it is going to collapse or at least be substantially curtailed. This will also subtract on what they can charge for ad's. As they will be serving less of them.
Google will have pivot, and trim its bloat to effectuate this change. This will be at the expense of "Maximising shareholder value"?
Well millions of people learned how to game the Google Search algorithm and created long-winded, hollow content that would rank on the first page to the point that people no longer trusted Google's results.
Then the perfect technology to solve that exact problem came along—one that let Google cease its dependency on the pesky people it was sending traffic to.
Let's take a practical example, if you searched for let's say "Whats the latest research on intermittent fasting and its effect on weight loss?". Google could easily AI-summarise a DOAC podcast on this topic and serve it up. How is this fair to Steven Bartlett who put the money and time on an interview podcast? He is deprived of a potential subscriber, lost out potential ad revenue, cant recover his cost. The youtube network he depends on is owned by Google. Seems a bit unfair to genuine people.
Now we have LLMs which amalgamate that type of content and spit out a personalized, but still mediocre response.
On the visual side, TikTok and Reels are doing their part to make everyone run to the same picture spot, go to the same mediocre (but cool-looking) restaurants and so on.
For what it's worth, I've started to reintroduce friction in my life where it makes sense. My phone defaults to a "dumbphone" profile that only has messaging, music, maps, etc. and specifically no browser or YouTube.
I only turn on my smart lights with wall buttons and use the smart function purely to tune the white point.
I try to pay by physical card instead of Apple / Google Wallet. Although I do store membership cards that I use once in a blue moon there.
eReader is fine IMO. Weekend newspaper subscription is really nice but can feel expensive if you have limited income.
Another good one is familiarizing yourself in the neighborhood. Get a regular coffee spot or pub or lunch place.
These are only examples of course. I basically feel like hitting the late 1990s - early 2000s 'level' of ease and socialization in your life is the optimal point.
Your brain will fight it every step of the way, but one can tear oneself out of their bubble of surplus comfort. Good luck.
Assuming you mean Neil Postman?
And yeah, I am also wanting to get print magazine subscriptions. Luckily I already live in a neighborhood with a very 1950s vibe where I know the baker, the coffee guy, the butcher, sandwich shop guy etc.
I just want to remove my compulsive internet usage. Even if I'm reading The New Yorker, it's still because I've defaulted to consuming media on the internet in an empty moment.
Yes, my bad. Edited!
> I just want to remove my compulsive internet usage. Even if I'm reading The New Yorker, it's still because I've defaulted to consuming media on the internet in an empty moment.
That's the skill of allowing yourself to be bored. Another thing you can learn, with enough effort.
Making your browser much less accessible on your phone helps a lot. Either lock the use to 30m per day with digital wellbeing settings, or just make it a chore to get to it (always force close, put it a screen away / in a folder / in another profile).
I read some of the guides. Google is right that there’s little unique content here.
Perhaps this is the right tone for a letter to the FTC. I find it hard to sympathize with the author with this style (even though they are likely right that Google is killing the web)
I've used Google and Bing to look up my Geocaches because the Geocaching interface is clunky. Except I can't find them anymore. Exact ASCII matches in the <title> tag, even with a unique identifier, but now it's become impossible to find them via search.
Just blank results, ads or SEO spam no matter what I try. site:xxx, inurl:, exact quotes, similar words, repetition, nothing works anymore. What is going on?!
And geocaching.com is a pretty big site. I wonder what is happening to small blogs...
Typing a URL into the bar directly is always going to be a lousy way of doing things, however, especially since they no longer map to remote directories and files as they're meant to. URLs are like telephone numbers but worse (and no one memorizes phone numbers anymore.)
Before then, website discovery was almost entirely word of mouth, supplemented by a little bit of self-promotion on various mailing lists and newsgroups.
The only other routes were asking your local sysadmin, taking a trip to your local bookstore to browse the few web-related pages in the Whole Internet Guide and Catalogue, or a handful of links in magazines like Mondo 2000 and Wired - but they were very minor, and tended only to be used by true neophytes.
> Before then, website discovery was almost entirely word of mouth
Yeah, but before that there were almost no websites to discover, and no one discovering them; even by the end of 1994—generally held out as the first year websites aimed at the general public were available at all, and, as you note, also the year search engines and directories took off, displacing any word of mouth as the main discovery route, there were still only a little over two thousand websites in total.
> You’re always going to have areas where people are robustly debating value exchanges, etc., like app developers and platforms. That’s not on the web, etc. There’s always going to be — when you’re running a platform — these debates. I would challenge, I think more than any other company, we prioritize sending traffic to the web. No one sends traffic to the web in the way we do. I look at other companies, newer emerging companies, where they openly talk about it as something they’re not going to do. We are the only ones who make it a high priority, agonize, and so on. We’ll engage, and we’ve always engaged.
> There are going to be debates through it all, but we are committed to, I’ve said this before, everything we do across all... You will see us five years from now sending a lot of traffic out to the web. I think that’s the product direction we are committed to. I think it’s what users look for when they come to Google, and the nature of it will evolve. But I am confident that that’s the direction we’ll continue taking.
Sounds like he wants to be nice with publishers and direct traffic to them like "for over 25 years" (a phrase he used many times in the interview), but it remains to be see what their action is.
I don't care for the grand conspiracy claims though. It's pretty obvious Google will optimize their search engine and the question answering to benefit their bottom line.
Maybe there are people actively working towards evil within Google. I think it's more likely some people recognize the implications of changes, some people don't but no one is working against those changes and ultimately the system will be capable to be used for very bad things and will do bad things naturally.
Anyway a better title would have been: Google's AI is the newest website killing feature
"But we later realized the shadowban really was about the type of website we are (i.e., small and independent). While Google gives large publishers an appeal and recovery process, small and independent publishers have no path to appeal our shadowbans.[...]"
That's not an indication of Google liking big players, it's the opposite. Big players have leverage against Google, you the small publisher do not, as you correctly identified in the case of reddit:
"[...]Unlike independent publishers, though, Reddit actually had leverage over Google. Reddit was the owner of a trove of historical user generated content that Google wanted for its grand AI plans. If Google could secure a deal for Reddit’s content, maybe that would spare Google the expense of negotiating licensing deals with the web’s many disparate publishers and rightsholders."
Google doesn't need to negotiate with you, they can kill independent publishers, which is why you're writing this blogpost. That's the entire logic of the internet platform economy. Kill traditional distributors, abuse atomized content creators. Youtube and Google hate publishers as much as Uber hates taxi companies and unions.
Which is why the literal reason given by Google is much more likely, they just don't think your content is good.
My guess is that differentiating human- and AI-generated content at anything approaching Google scale has become hard, and Google's best option is to prioritize known information sources, which are necessarily large firms with some amount of reputational proof (though I'd also say that Forbes is not my go-to example of a good actor in this space).
https://yacy.net
I built a customized wiki cms, it's the best, most info-dense site in my niche by a mile and I've still been getting fucked by google for a decade.
Literally, please, check right now and look at kpopping.com and then search for some kpop results on google. Things like "Jimin". The top results are always websites like the hindustantimes .com, and sportskeeda.
This has been going on for literally a decade in my niche, a decade! Every quality website we've had in our scene is long dead and has been replaced by indian and ai garbage besides me, it's pathetic. No one builds anything but wordpress copy paste slop these days.
It is a tall order, but these changes create new opportunities for other publishers to capitalize on.
If you're seething over the valuation of Google rather than the content of their actions, that's something to reflect upon. Most of us here would find issues with their policies and evolution over the past two decades. I would love to see a better search experience. I hope the company that delivers it earns as much as they can, by serving consumers and creating opportunities for publishers.
You can either have a business or a hobby, you can't have both.
And risk providing worse results for "control"..?
citation needed
Holy based.