15 ms·

Google Declaring War on the Web

• dude250711 5mo ago
  Well, they are kind of desperate after missing both cloud and AI. I would blame trash like Discord more though. Alternative search engines are available, but the crappy little web chat hides info inside.
  • mschuster91 5mo ago
    > I would blame trash like Discord more though. Alternative search engines are available, but the crappy little web chat hides info inside. Well, we had the same problem with IRC. There's value to be had in not everything being discoverable in 5 seconds with a google search.
    • account42 5mo ago
      The problem id that Discord did not just replace IRC but but also forums and even documentation websites. Its unfortunately not just ephemeral chats locked in there even if the interface is horrid enough to make you question why someone would ever use it for anything else.
• Citizen_Lame 5mo ago
  Welcome to the third-party internet. Unless every micro-decision you make while browsing can be stripped down, packaged into neat data points, and sold, you're not welcome here.
• nate 5mo ago
  I've got a half thought about concept that maybe we need a concept like AMP back. I hated AMP. I'm glad it's dead. But you could use it to define things that you were at least advised that it would be shown in the google ui and carousel. I feel like we need a guarantee from the LLMs that if we provide some kind of meta data in our source material you'll honor stuff from it. Like show our advertisers so we get some revenue still from you showing our content on your LLM site. Totally vibed version of this: ``` { "version": "https://agent-source.org/v1 https://agent-source.org/v1", "canonical_url": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/the-cone https://ninjasandrobots.com/the-cone", "title": "The Real Reason Nobody Moved the Cone", "source_name": "Ninjas and Robots", "author": "Nathan Kontny", "summary": "An essay about embarrassment, public action, and why obvious fixes go undone.", "preferred_citation": "Ninjas and Robots", "source_card": { "headline": "The Real Reason Nobody Moved the Cone", "description": "People avoid obvious public actions not because they are lazy, but because being seen trying is embarrassing.", "image": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/images/cone-card.jpg https://ninjasandrobots.com/images/cone-card.jpg", "cta": "Read the full essay" }, "allowed_excerpt": { "max_chars": 500, "preferred_excerpt": "People often avoid obvious public action because embarrassment feels more immediate than danger." }, "commercial_terms": { "ads_allowed": true, "sponsor_card_url": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/.well-known/sponsor-card.json https://ninjasandrobots.com/.well-known/sponsor-card.json", "licensing_contact": "hello@ninjasandrobots.com" } } ``` But something to get our original source honored better in the LLM. Maybe if one of the LLMs do this, we'd give it more loyalty? Maybe the government needs to compel this kind of behavior? No idea. It does suck though our content is just turned into AI's own tokens and we're left with a tiny "source" link if we're lucky.
  • iamacyborg 5mo ago
    Given that these platforms are increasing intermediating experiences between websites/companies/etc and end-users, I suspect we’ll soon see a strong push back in that direction to adopt more things like schema markup to get more control back in some sense. Things are only going to get worse though.
• gjsman-1000 5mo ago
  This war was already declared a decade ago. By many interests. And victory followed. I think though a big part of this was YouTube replaced blogs. It's a generational thing.
  • Jblx2 5mo ago
    How far along the curve do you think TikTok is to replacing YouTube?
• aucisson_masque 5mo ago
  If it's so bad, people won't use it. If it's good, why be against it ? You don't write post to reach the biggest amount of people, you do because you're passionate and ultimately you get people following you. If average Joe doesn't go on your website, what's the big deal ? I think this feature will be very useful to fight back on the optimized SEO hell that we currently have.
  • Sharlin 5mo ago
    "If Nestle were so bad, people wouldn't buy their products."
    • timbit42 5mo ago
      There are a lot of uninformed consumers who are buying/using things they might not if they were informed.
  • Forgeties79 5mo ago
    Everyone goes through live nation/Ticketmaster. Would you say they provide a good experience?
  • konmok 5mo ago
    [dead]
• superkuh 5mo ago
  It is not just about replacing search results with text blurbs generated on Alphabet premise either. They're making it so that unless you have an Android certified (Or Apple) smartphone you will not be a human being, you will be assumed to be a bot and blocked by their captchas.
  • queenkjuul 5mo ago
    Honestly the bigger problem for me. I use SearXNG, but DDG is acceptable, or people like Kagi. But if ReCAPTCHA won't consider me human unless i have a certified phone, having search alternatives doesn't matter -- the websites themselves are just gonna block me
    • AndroTux 5mo ago
      You may use an alternative search engine, but 90% won’t. If people accept the new way of searching, meaning, no longer visiting websites, there will no longer be any websites that could show you captchas.
  • coldpie 5mo ago
    Passkeys are a big part of this future, too. The spec has device attestation built in, so if passkeys gain traction, they could lock it down so only approved software is allowed to log in to services. If that happens, it means your ability to log in to services will be mediated by one of 3 US big tech companies. "For security," of course.
• crazygringo 5mo ago
  The AI answers provide tons of source links. At the end of the day, is it really all that different to provide a list of links, versus an answer or overview of a few paragraphs with links to lots of different higher-quality sources? I follow those source links all the time. Not just to "check sources" but because they provide a ton more detail. And the links are usually much better than what I'll get with regular keyword search results. > It’s about monopolizing access to information. Not as long as there are competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. In fact, LLM's have provided Google with stronger competition than it's ever had before. ChatGPT and Claude are doing what Bing was never able to.
  • adjejmxbdjdn 5mo ago
    > I follow those source links all the time. The vast majority of people don’t. We’ve gone from Only links to the source -> Mostly links to the source, with a short summary picked almost verbatim from the source -> AI summary that mangles several sources’ information together and gets top billing -> Only the AI summary with some footnotes linking to the source. Google has been fairly slowly been turning up the temperature of the pot and we’re only a few degrees away from a full boil. Let’s not pretend or be naive enough to think that’s not what’s happening.
  • queenkjuul 5mo ago
    Most people don't look at the sources even though the sources often contradict the statements. I've stopped using Google and find I'm not missing anything
  • lacewing 5mo ago
    > The AI answers provide tons of source links. A lot of the time, the answer itself is good, but the links are spam blogs and Tiktok videos. I don't think there's a real connection between how the text is generated and what "references" are picked for it. I just searched for a math history topic and the reference was a literal TikTok video that's an advertisement for a sketchy mobile calculator app? So yeah, these references are boosting web content, but it has nothing to do with the high-quality sources used to train the LLMs in the first place.
  • 5mo ago
• newAccount2025 5mo ago
  I would feel more sad about this if the web wasn’t so rotten to begin with. On average, any random site is just trying to throw ads at you and harass you to subscribe and such.
  • adiabatichottub 5mo ago
    That rot was the direct result of the ad economy that made Google all of its money. Now maybe if they hadn't done it then somebody else would have, but they did do it, and poisoned the well we all drink from.
  • BuyMyBitcoins 5mo ago
    I have a particular disdain for “subscribe to our newsletter” modals. Especially when I’ve spent a sum total of less than 3 seconds looking at the webpage. How such modals aren’t considered pop-ups is beyond me.
    • AlienRobot 5mo ago
      So you want websites to rely on traffic from Google instead of building their own newsletter? Interesting.
      • lmm 5mo ago
        I want web pages to stand alone, not be part of a newsletter I'm meant to subscribe to. Maybe we could, shock horror, share links to individual good pages.
        • fc417fc802 5mo ago
          I don't mind newsletters but I'd prefer a public RSS feed and I absolutely detest unsolicited or otherwise unnecessary modals.
      • pacifika 5mo ago
        Adding a subscription form at the end of the article when the user is ready for the next task always made more sense to ne
• raincole 5mo ago
  I don't know if it's Google AB-testing something, but the summaries below usual search result entries (the non-AI ones) are unbelievably bad today. Sometimes the link is a Reddit or SO post, but the summary is from a reply/answer with no vote contradicting the highest-voted ones. It's conspiracy, but it feels like Google is actively making the usual search worse so everyone will use AI overview more.
  • Mistletoe 5mo ago
    Don’t worry when I track down most AI answers it is usually just some Redditor’s comment, which is quite scary when you think about it and Redditors in general.
    • raincole 5mo ago
      But I want redditor's comments. It's almost my only use case of google now. What I'm complaining about is that google search can't even summary the right reddit comments.
• LinuxAmbulance 5mo ago
  We abrogated getting traffic to our websites to Google long ago. Mostly because Google was so good at it that the alternatives became significantly less useful. Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation. Anyone miss StumbleUpon?
  • somewhereoutth 5mo ago
    (sorry, nit pick, but I don't your usage of 'abrogate' is quite correct here, you can't abrogate to something)
    • margalabargala 5mo ago
      > but I don't your usage If we're nitpicking, you don't what their usage?
      • firecall 5mo ago
        > If we're nitpicking, you don't what their usage? Abrogate their usage.
    • magpi3 5mo ago
      He may have meant abdicated
  • teamonkey 5mo ago
    It feels strange there’s no decentralised search. I know this is likely to do with the nature of the problem, but that hasn’t stopped us from getting some wildly-unsuitable decentralised nonsense in the past.
    • Bolwin 5mo ago
      I don't see how being decentralized helps search. Makes it quite harder if the fediverse is any indication
• hartator 5mo ago
  While they seem against being scraped themselves: https://serpapi.com/blog/google-v-serpapi-motion-to-dismiss-why-were-in-the-right/ https://serpapi.com/blog/google-v-serpapi-motion-to-dismiss-...
  • gabeidx 5mo ago
    "Ser Papi" is such a great name for a Mexican bling rap artist
• gmuslera 5mo ago
  It is not a war on the web, but on how it was traditionally used (and abused). And that "traditional" way was shaped by google too. As you want a cookie, i put you in a table, napking, serve you a bag of cookies and hope that you eat/find the cookie you want, while hearing my music, watching my ads, pushing you more foods that I sell and other services. And sometimes, that is the experience you are searching for. But also, many just want a cookie. That is what a conversational and maybe agentic interface can give you. Have someone a blueberry cookie? Then it gives it to you, and also give pointers to restaurants that give a more complete experience sometimes (while others may try to scam you). It is a shortcut, but also doesn't hide you the traditional way to access that. They are not saints, but neither are all the ones in the other side. But the new way to access the relevant information you want, in a way that you can use it, have its own value.
  • muxator 5mo ago
    Google pre 2010 was perfectly functional. No realtime search suggestions, advanced search parameters that were actually working, possibility of doing an exact string search if needed. The technology for indexing the web was mature enough by then, already then. I agree that much of the downward spiral was caused by google itself, tho.
  • LocalH 5mo ago
    Google isn't a search company, and hasn't been ever since they bought DoubleClick. Their core business is advertising. They're trying to pivot into AI because they have gobs of "evidence" that the vast majority of people have been typing natural language questions into Google instead of looking for specific terms
• coro_1 5mo ago
  > De-googlifying your mental apparatus becomes more urgent today. Find other search engines, don’t use the Chrome browser. Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment where your access to information is limited to what Google’s synthetic text extruders deem relevant. Everything is probably re-traceable fairly easily because Google Analytics is on nearly every web page. But I understand maintaining your own source of archives, videos, documents, etc. Sounds like a good vibe coding project actually.. to try and keep it all organized offline.
• mudil 5mo ago
  Google declared war on blogs and other content long time ago, when it used our websites to harvest data to target readers with ads accross the entire internet. We used to have (for twenty years!) medical technology website for MDs. How can we compete with short unrelated YouTube videos or other spam content that serve Google ads targeting doctors? How do you think the entire creative blogosphere of the early 2000s collapsed into nothingness?
• DeusExMachina 5mo ago
  I don't understand the endgame here. Websites let Google crawl their content in exchange of traffic. If Google cuts that out completely, what incentive do websites have to not block the Google crawlers? I understand that Google is feeling an existential threat from other AI products that provide answers directly. But they must also understand their symbiotic relationship with the web.
  • hotstickyballs 5mo ago
    The web is going to become China, which is a collection of walled gardens
  • jjulius 5mo ago
    The long-run doesn't matter as much as the short-term gains for those in power.
  • AndroTux 5mo ago
    The end game is the consumer no longer leaving Google and the web becoming synonymous to Google for them. Why shop on some random website when you can have Gemini buy it for you? Why look for information on Wikipedia when… you get the idea. I think the coming years will be pivotal for the web. Facebook attempted a similar strategy back when their apps got traction, but they ultimately failed. Let’s hope Google fails too.
    • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5mo ago
      We're going back to the CompuServe/AOL/Prodigy model
      • the_snooze 5mo ago
        We're going back to the mainframe model. Client-side general-purpose computing is an impediment to recurring subscription revenue and vendor lock-in.
        • 5mo ago
• jollymonATX 5mo ago
  As a website owner I have seen major upticks in viewership myself but really it hits hard when you see an Ai summary that is wrong and your sites there. The whole Ai for everything push unfortunatly will downskill the world I fear and nothing can be done about it.
  • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5mo ago
    > downskill the world I feel this. I asked a developer today a question about how our product is programmed to handle something, and he just sent me a summary from the internal AI assistant they've started using. He used to provide really good, thoughtful answers, but now it's just copy/paste from the AI.
    • ratio53 5mo ago
      > He used to provide really good, thoughtful answers This hits hard. There’s a senior engineer at my job who is known for well written proposals. Today he shared a doc that had the typical AI formatting, was hard to read, and clearly not his style. On the other hand, if others use AI to summerize stuff, does it matter anymore?
      • grogenaut 5mo ago
        it does, if that's all they're doing then why do you need them, you can do bad ai summaries of things yourself.
    • gatlin 5mo ago
      I have a co-worker who does this now. He's very smart, very capable, very experienced and it's clear that he's just a frontend for Claude now. It's tragic.
      • wahnfrieden 5mo ago
        Maybe organize to give these workers more equity or rev share instead of just a wage so they care more for quality results instead of the behaviors they’re evaluated on and you’ll find them more pleasant to work with.
• analogpixel 5mo ago
  I feel like AI has gotten to the point where the message is: If you want to make something (art/code/music/writing) you can do it for your own enjoyment, but you aren't allowed to make money from it anymore; only the large corporations can make money from content. If you do release something creative, it'll just be fed back into the machine to be copied over and over.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • Forgeties79 5mo ago
    A big corporation using LLM’s to pump out lazy “art” gets the exact same scrutiny from me.
  • barnabee 5mo ago
    Needs to be inverted. Tax excess tech profits that derive from the efforts of others and use the proceeds to fund living artists. Vaguely analogous to levies on blank cassettes that went to offset piracy. Give the money directly to actual artists, not labels/publishers, though.
    • wahnfrieden 5mo ago
      You’re describing a social revolution. Otherwise there is no way that leaders whose power over us corrupts them would want to put that into law. The cassette reference was a tax on consumers to send money upward. What you’re describing is the complete inverse.
      • lkrubner 5mo ago
        No, it is exactly the same thing. The tax on cassettes raised money that was given to artists.
        • wahnfrieden 5mo ago
          Thanks for correcting
• LocalH 5mo ago
  Good thing they took "Do no evil" out of their manifesto years ago
  • tim333 5mo ago
    It's kind of still there but at the end rather than the start https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of-conduct/ https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of... >Google Code of Conduct ... And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up! >Last updated January 17, 2024 (old version https://web.archive.org/web/20050204181615/http://investor.google.com/conduct.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050204181615/http://investor.g...)
• Barbing 5mo ago
  I thought this was going to be about having to use your corporate approved phone to scan reCATCHA QR codes. Was just able to opt out of my first one but obviously won’t be able to forever.
• jppope 5mo ago
  I'm confused how the strategy works in the long run. If fewer people are incentivized to build websites on novel topics, there will be less content in general and less training data... plus AI overview results see less ad conversions and therefor less ad revenue. Whats the long game? I get that the paradigm is changing but this seems like its not going to help them maintain their dominance.
  • kaoD 5mo ago
    Ah, that's where you're wrong. There is no long term. Investors want results now. "Later" is for the greater fools.
  • tom_ 5mo ago
    What if there is no long game? Just people at Google optimising for their current KPIs.
• beej71 5mo ago
  I'm not even sure this is bad anymore. The web is so overrun with SEO crap that it could probably use the cleansing that comes with Google's abandonment, Usenet-style.
  • tim333 5mo ago
    As a consumer I actually quite like the current Google search. The AI thing often tells you want straight away and usually links to sources if you want to fact check. The traditional link thing works too. The people who say it's unusable usually can't give an actual example of something specific it's been unable to find. I've come across a couple or areas where it struggles - old obscure stuff where I think most engines have limits, and piracy stuff for which you can use Yandex.
• munchler 5mo ago
  If Google stops driving traffic to websites, won't those websites stop allowing Google to crawl their pages? The pendulum might be in motion, but it seems like there should still be some natural equilibrium that it's heading to.
  • Gigachad 5mo ago
    We got to that point a while ago. Many of the major social media’s are essentially uncrawlable. Communities have moved from public forums to private discords. Most of the major social media’s are unviewable without an account.
  • yborg 5mo ago
    There won't be "websites" anymore, it will all just be Google. Other behemoths that generate original content (that aren't AI) like sports, news, entertainment will either be big enough to sign individual deals on pain of litigation or just force-scraped (as is happening now) by bots that are indistinguishable from human users.
  • xp84 5mo ago
    They don't think they really need any more content outside of a few deals they can cut directly with publishers. And they already have YouTube, which produces limitless free content for them to use as they see fit. My blog from 20 years ago, or indeed all of our blogs today, are not something Google feels will be any loss to their product. Someone will search for "Kylie Jenner" and they will get some kind of shopping opportunity (with Google getting a commission) and links to her profile on YouTube. And maybe some publisher content on the subject. In all cases they'll probably want to angle to get more of an "aGeNtIc" experience, where Google just reads you the story or buys the lipstick for you, without you leaving google.com.
• hungryhobbit 5mo ago
  To me it seems either ... A) Google will do a good job of this, people will find their summaries more useful, and the web will evolve into a more closed system that better serves its users or ... B) They're gated AI community will suck, and people will start using a different search engine that better serves its users. My money isn't on A), but they do have a lot of clout so I wouldn't rule it out.
  • vkou 5mo ago
    A) has plenty of dystopian followups.
  • fc417fc802 5mo ago
    Unfortunately A seems inevitable to me but leads to lots of bad things down the road. However I don't see how individual sites can hope to compete on this. LLMs quickly and efficiently deliver relevant information in a lightweight easy to consume textual format. For example they've almost completely replaced getting recipes from websites for me because they provide a comprehensive overview while omitting all the extraneous nonsense. They're just plain better for most of my usecases in practice.
• arjie 5mo ago
  These kinds of declarations rarely make sense to me because they don't seem to model the issues in the way that I see them. I have dual roles: one as a person who writes a blog (a "content producer" in our present parlance) and as a user. As a user, I want my browser user agent to act on my behalf to display web pages, and I want my search agent to extract information from numerous sources and synthesize them with appropriate sourcing. One could argue that my content production being a hobby lets me be pretty blasé about being intermediated by a platform. That is somewhat true. If I relied upon this as a living, I would probably also conclude that actions that harm my way of living are a war on "the web", though realistically any neutral party observing must conclude that if it is a war, it's one on my kind of participation in the web - content creation for the purpose of revenue / notoriety / some other reward. As a user, I don't actually care very much for each website and its creator. The information contained therein is useful to me, but the heterogeneity of these sites is mostly an obstacle to the information. I am much happier when my search and summarization agents are able to accurately synthesize what these websites say, in so much as such a synthesis allows me to model reality more accurately. So I could be convinced that this change from Google makes it less likely for accurate content to be created and that I'll be misled more often. But this is a tool, and my world-model will frequently be tested by reality. If the search-and-synthesis machine fails to produce useful outcomes, I will know. And I'll have to adjust the way I treat knowledge I obtain through it so that I don't get catastrophic outcomes. But that's the same already. I don't really know that Google's search results are not planted ones calibrated to change my opinion. And I don't know that they don't collude with the Internet Archive (with whom they have a pre-existing relationship) to make it look like their constructed consensus is real. As a user, I have to make a lot of decisions already, and having to painstakingly read search results to synthesize them myself is far less useful than using an agent. So if there is a war on the web, then I am glad to join it, on the side against the web.
  • alluro2 5mo ago
    I...have to agree about siding against the web...An optimistic part of me sees this as a move that pushes in the same direction that the "web" has already been going in for a long time - preventing users from getting the right information in an honest and efficient manner, preserving their attention budget, and choice. Until now, it was through increasing the noise to push monetary incentives, and now it's by cutting the noise to push monetary incentives. Why optimistic: up till now, there was no single enemy, and it was hard to fight a (somewhat) disjointed system; now, Google is positioning itself to push things further to the worse, with them (and small number of other companies) being the clear target. My hope is that this will help overflow the proverbial glass for an increasing amount of people and we'll start pushing back towards the "old" web before Google and ad networks have transformed it, or find new modalities of interacting more freely with each other, and the content. It's not going to be a small or easy fight, though...to a large extent, it's a fight against the current state of capitalism itself, and winning back our attention, critical thinking and choice.
• xmcp123 5mo ago
  Kind of curious how it would pan out, if there was a government enforced meta tag one could add to signal what the data could be used for - for example “no-ai”. That would allow people to still let Google to access their site, but restrict its usage. Similar for open source projects on GitHub, etc.
  • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5mo ago
    > government enforced The thing everyone needs to ask before advocating for something "government enforced" is "what would happen if this was in the hands of a hostile government?" And then remember that (a) just because it's not hostile to you today, doesn't mean it won't be tomorrow, and (b) one man's "hostile" is another man's "utopia."
    • xmcp123 5mo ago
      Well, when I said “I’m curious” it was true. I’m actually curious. So how do you think a meta noai tag would be used by a hostile government? It would be something the website owner set.
      • xp84 5mo ago
        Step 1: Be really lax in enforcing compliance with it so that nobody complies with it. Step 2: Abruptly switch to iron-fist enforcement where suddenly people get jail time for violations, but only for entities that have been critical of the government. This is by no means the only or most likely way, just what I could come up with in 30 seconds. There may be much better "evil government" strategies.
    • mjrpes 5mo ago
      The thing everyone needs to ask before advocating for laissez faire is "what does a hostile and monopolistic search engine giant like Google gain from us doing nothing?" And then remember that just because Google is not hostile to you today, doesn't mean it won't be tomorrow.
      • 5mo ago
• tamimio 5mo ago
  Glad I haven’t used anything google for more than a decade. For internet searches, you can host searxng instance and use it. Other services too are self-hostable, even far better than google.
  • jfengel 5mo ago
    You host your own global search engine? That's impressive.
• bdangubic 5mo ago
  the cool thing, google is much like meta, the kids see it as something boomers are using. my daughter is 12, whenever I say “google it” she says “that’s very, very funny Dad, you are fun guy.” it’ll take some time until boomers are off google as well (my usage of google is probably at 30% of where it used to be) but their days of “this is where you go to ‘search’” are numbered
  • customguy 5mo ago
    What would she use instead?
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• overgard 5mo ago
  I guess the extra insult is that the summaries still suck. I feel like every time I google a technical question, I get something wrong which references a youtube video watched by 30 people about an unrelated subject.
• DocTomoe 5mo ago
  Nobody is stopping you from publishing on the net. Nobody is stopping you from blocking bot traffic. You don't need search engines - you can just link between sites or have webrings. Like we used to, pre-2000. Nobody is stopping you from not using ads on the net. Nobody can force you to use non-essential cookies (and thus: a cookie-banner). Imagine there was a war going on, and no-one was showing up.
  • jfengel 5mo ago
    I don't think people much liked the pre-search-engine era. They used lousy search engines when they became available, and when a good one started they liked it so much that they verbed its name.
    • imp0cat 5mo ago
      It is definitely an opportunity for a lot of stuff (ie. curated RSS feeds and other forms of discovery) to come back.
• jumploops 5mo ago
  It looks like Google has taken a note out of Facebook's "lose trust" playbook. Facebook had a huge opportunity in the post-AI world: real humans. Instead of focusing on connections, they've been optimizing their properties for doomscrolling. Google, similarly, has lost the plot on what made them trustworthy in the first place: navigating to citable content. Both companies started on this trend well before AI, but this might be the final nail in their respective coffins[0]. [0]Yes they'll likely still be profitable for a long time, but the Bell Labs-esque downfall has begun (imo).
  • jfengel 5mo ago
    I don't think people cared all that much about whether or not the content was citable. You can't cite Wikipedia, and that's not going anywhere. Facebook may well fail when people don't enjoy it. But all Google ever promised was information, of variously dubious quality, and that's still their draw.
    • jumploops 5mo ago
      Fair, citable is probably the wrong term. This is a problem Google has been battling forever, with all the SEO click spam. In either case, Google was the tool that many people used to find "trustworthy" information (citable or not), compared to the other tools online.
• theendisney 5mo ago
  Out of my countless www experiments the website made for myself turned out most enjoyable. Technically it is a blog with links, quotes, categories, tags and search. Sometimes i download all pages it links to. (tens of thousands) Google dropped it from the index long ago. I had a fun discussion with some google folk where they kept arguing my website was designed wrong and that some pages had tomany links. Basically, if you write an article about the largest banana companies you have to chose which to link to! The 10 best movies article is better than the best 100. If you make a list of all the movies you've seen your page gradually turns into something really bad. Others will be punished for linking to it but only if you add the nth entry. As the website is just for me it is clearly their loss not mine. No way im ging to consider linking a sub set of patents or research papers.
  • StilesCrisis 5mo ago
    At one point the web was drowned in "listicles," low-effort sites made to match queries like "best movies from the 90s" or "new music in 2023". Google attempted to downrank these sorts of sites because they were in general very very low quality and were just designed to catch a lot of traffic and display ads alongside low-effort content. (Think one page per list entry, each page transition is a whole new set of ads.) Users disliked these. It sounds like your site was misclassified as a low-effort listicle site.
    • theendisney 5mo ago
      Im sure it is really hard to run a search engine that size. I have ideas how they could improve but it isnt my job. They chose to populate results with big websites which probably is good enough for most users. The problem is that there is now no point creating websites which is terrible for google. If it picks up the domain and (against all ods) deems it worthy of traffic it can be blacklisted at any time.
    • customguy 5mo ago
      If users dislike them, and only spam farms link to them, why wouldn't page rank alone solve that?
• AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
  > The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information. Google’s Vision since they were founded: Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful They told everyone what they were doing the whole time
  • xp84 5mo ago
    you're right, I think we didn't realize these implied parts: "make it universally accessible [to Google] and useful [to Google's financial interests].
• spankalee 5mo ago
  It is interesting to look at the past predictions on here of AI search/answer companies like Perplexity possibly dethroning Google search and comparing to the reactions of Google just doing the same thing themselves. Why would it be good if Perplexity does it, but bad if Google does it? What are the principles at play here?
  • nicbou 5mo ago
    Perplexity does not control who gets traffic on the internet. They don't own a significant percentage of the mobile OS, browse and online search market share. They can't force the industry in one way or the other, consequences be damned.
    • spankalee 5mo ago
      If Perplexity replaced Google as the way people searched for things, then they would, and sites would still take a hit to their traffic from Google losing users.
  • AlienRobot 5mo ago
    People don't like Google because it's bad. If competition wins, maybe they'll stop being so bad. But if they become badder themselves, that's not good.
• johnea 5mo ago
  A nice, terse, little rant. I agree completely. I surprised however, that it didn't describe phase 2 of the disaster, where in the models no longer have fresh www content to train on. It's hard to understand the long term vision of this strategy...
• deleted 5mo ago
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• aiisahik 5mo ago
  This is such a basic take that totally misses the bigger picture of why Google made this move. Google was forced to do this and it's a miracle of their slow organizational gears that they took so long to do it. So many people have already transitioned to using ChatGPT as a replacement for Google. All of this is driven by consumer behavior and the desire to "just get an answer" rather than having to wade through all the sources and try to figure out what is SEO slop vs what is actual reputable information. Google SERP results have been gamed by SEO slop for economically valuable search terms long before the rise of AI. ChatGPT simply solved a huge problem waiting for a solution. From the web content creator's POV, there are to paths: 1. If you are merely a publisher and rely on eyeballs on ads to drive your own revenue, you are screwed. AI is going to ignore all the ads and only extract the content. 2. If however you are serving helpful information out of the goodness of your heart or if the content itself references a product or service which from which you will derive economic benefit from, you are still good. I don't see this as a bad thing. Ads on websites were a necessary evil and will be seen as a relic of the first 30 years of the internet. Ads will not go away but they will just migrate to the application layer (youTube, LLM interfaces etc) that will provide a much more targeted experience. There will be winners and losers from this transition but that's normal and healthy.
  • krackers 5mo ago
    >Google SERP results have been gamed by SEO slop for economically valuable search terms So why not use AI to find the obvious spam and SEO? Sites like pinterest, "geeksforgeeks", stackoverflow clones were notorious for ranking highly on almost every technical search and you didn't even need AI to deal with those. Using AI to provide distilled summaries and making it harder to get the actual links is going to make things even worse for the user, because you have to cut through two layers of slop. And there's also not using the smartest model for the responses anyway.
    • aiisahik 5mo ago
      Even if you get rid of "obvious spam and SEO", it won't change the fact that nobody wants to even read the "good" results. They just want the answer. You can use AI to solve yesterday's problem or you can use AI to build the solution customers want today. SEO was yesterday's problem. Instant answer without the user having to worry about the sources is the solution the customers want.
• paol_taja 5mo ago
  [dead]
• nekzn 5mo ago
  Websites brought this on themselves. Have you tried visiting one? Popups upon popups upon ads upon cookie banners upon notification permission prompts. I’m not going to miss that. Nobody is going to miss that. Think of AI distillation as some kind of improved Reader Mode feature. People never wanted to visit your website; they just wanted the information that your website held. Now they can get to the meat without having to deal with the bones.
  • snicky 5mo ago
    > People never wanted to visit your website; they just wanted the information that your website held. Well, no. It is a boomer talk, but in the 90s the web was so fragmented and unpolished that websites usually looked very different from each other. People were writing their own HTML (and CSS came later). "Home pages" were some form of an art. Not the highest one to be frank, but the ecosystem was quite interesting. People did visit those websites not only to get the information, but to enjoy those quirky forms.
• xnx 5mo ago
  If Google is "declaring war" what do you call Meta hiding all "ugc" in their walled garden? Compare to YouTube which you can still use without logging in.
• da02 5mo ago
  > Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment where your access to information is limited to what Google’s synthetic text extruders deem relevant. They mentioned AOL. Remember back when AOL bought Time Warner in a "merger of equals", but it really wasn't. Then this fear AOL will become your telephone company because AOL Instant Messenger was so popular? Then, MSFT won the browser wars and disbanded the IE team and came up with a whole .Net strategy to takeover the Web. Then came Firefox, Google, Web 2.0, etc. I remember Dave Winer writing how Google was making real stuff while Netscape was doing mostly hacks. David is now Goliath. So I am all for Google taking over the Web. They will go bankrupt doing it. They couldn't even make Google+ a thing. What was that anyway? I lack a Ph.d to understand that thing. A few startups there, a bunch of open e-commerce standards here, and bunch of market value gone after the AI bubble... Google (and many others) are going against Artists who can Code. Who knows what delights will come.
• WarmWash 5mo ago
  Google made an egalitarian web, where money doesn't matter and attention does. A currency that everyone on Earth richest to poorest has a roughly equal amount of. I think almost everyone takes that for granted, and focuses purely on the negatives (you're not paying, therefore you are the product, kept in place by bait we call services) On the flip side, and I'm all for it, we can go to everything paywalled. The downside of course will be a whole class of people who cannot afford to participate on the internet. But these service providers will be working for you, the customer. Pick your poison.
  • Forgeties79 5mo ago
    > and attention does This is an understatement. They weaponized human psychology against us. It’s not remotely an even playing field.
    • WarmWash 5mo ago
      In an alternate universe Google is like the Apple of the internet, where it has a bunch of premium services with the customer at the center. The flip side is that having a Google account is a status symbol, and very few people on Earth can afford it.
      • Forgeties79 5mo ago
        There are many ways these services can take shape and that this isn’t simply about watching some ads or not. What Google and the big players engage in is a violent, gross violation of our privacy which they turn around and sell on the open market/hand to their friends/use against your psychology themselves. It’s not just a simple Coke ad during your favorite sport on cable tv anymore and every time you travel to a site you have no realistic way of knowing what is being vacuumed up. We can’t even make an informed decision. It’s a worthwhile exercise sitting down and thinking about alternatives to this data vacuum/attention economy nonsense that is so harmful for us personally and to our society as a whole.
  • truthbe 5mo ago
    > Google made an egalitarian web, where money doesn't matter and attention does. They did? Could have sworn their whole business model up until the other day was attention for whomever can pay the highest bid for their ad space.. I guess I've been doing it wrong
• ViktorRay 5mo ago
  I know a lot of people are unhappy with what Google is doing… But the honest truth is that lots of folks are using the free version of ChatGPT already and just asking it about stuff. If Google only had the 10 blue links then the simple truth is that folks would just stop using it and switch over the one of the free AI models like ChatGPT. Many are already doing this. So Google has no choice but to make their AI the default at the top of search. Anyway the 10 blue links are still there. And if you want to avoid AI then the option remains to select the “Web” option at the top of the search results. Doing so disables AI and all the other features and just gets you 10 links like in the old days…
  • wayeq 5mo ago
    > Doing so disables AI and all the other features and just gets you 10 links like in the old days… i expect that opt-out to become harder and harder to find on every re-design, until it is gone entirely. that's on like.. page 2 in the playbook for introducing some shitty new thing that is good for shareholders and not users.
• notepad0x90 5mo ago
  First, did Google really declare a war? The title makes it feel click-baitey because of this exaggerated hyperbole. I like what Google is doing, huge fan. I can't fathom why no one else is. When I search, I'm trying to find things. With what Google is doing, the AI overview gets me answers very fast. It includes links for its sources I can click on if I'm interested. I think people are just too used to wasting hours of their lives visiting random sites and scouring for answers. If you like that experience, I don't see why you can't still have that, is it really that hard to ignore the AI overview? Or better yet, use and support DDG. Google search's AI overview is by far my favorite AI application. The amount of tabs I don't have to open anymore to get a simple freaking answer is such a relief. > Your work, your writing or art do matter a bit still I'm really tired of this nonsense. If I want your art and Google doesn't show me, you have an excellent point. If I'm searching for a meme and Google just gives me that, instead of having me wander around clicking on deviantart and random sites simulating "visits" to your site, that's not me wanting your art, that's me wasting time and you mistaking that for a like. Google owes things to different parties. Their shareholders, their employees, their users, their paying customers, etc.. People with random site are not owed a thing by Google. I don't want Google to refrain from helping me acheive my goals with their product so that some random people's desire to feel important is prioritized. Your random site is an unrelated 3rd party in this interaction. I despise Google for so many things. They really are destroying the web with their monopoly of the browser markets. I hate what they're doing to Youtube. I think Android is total crap. I really despise them for ruining webextensions. The list goes on. I'm not their fan. But I am huge fan of Google search. I stopped using it for so many years, now I'm having to use them exclusively out of sheer necessity. I really wish people drop every single ideology they have. Publish quality work, and things that work well. Then pick back up their ideologies and complain about how their high quality work is not getting the attention it deserves. Honestly, I'm so weirded about this sort of stuff. Even Amazon, I hear people complain about it all the time, but I have nothing but praise for all their work (despite knowing what a villain Bezos is, and what horrible place to work both Amazon and AWS are). It's like I'm living in an alternate reality, or people are abandoning sincere and critical analysis for the sake of ideological goals. Like, I'm trying all the alternatives, I've put in lots of time and effort, and they just suck. Don't tell me to deny the evidence my eyes and ears are witnessing for your ideology. Instead tell me how I shouldn't use Google because of some ideological reason, instead of the quality being poor.
• xiaoluolyg 5mo ago
  cotent is dying
• zhxiaoliang 5mo ago
  The Web is dead anyway. It never became the movement we dreamed it would: the democratization of information, communication, and expression.
  • unleashhale 5mo ago
    It’s hostile trash. Cloudflare can eat me.
• rootsudo 5mo ago
  Declaring? A decade ago it was declaring war by introducing AMP pages.
  • theandrewbailey 5mo ago
    It's only a matter of time before that little irritation gets thrown into the Google Graveyard. Google was probably at war with the open web before introducing it.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• hmokiguess 5mo ago
  Don’t use Google? Web is not Google? I get that for average users isn’t like that but I mean change is inevitable, hopefully it sparks a new era, I wasn’t happy with the status quo either.
• hiroto_lemon 5mo ago
  Worth noting the same bot-blocking that hits humans also blocks the AI agents devs are building. Headed toward a web where only Google's agent has free access.
  • onyxxppp 5mo ago
    Google has the Vertex AI Search API and Programmable Search Engine already. If you want to access their data, you can pay for it like everyone else does.
• LZ_Khan 5mo ago
  Why haven't we seen more work on licensing and compensating authors? LLM's know when they get information from certain places, they should send a portion of revenue over to those sources.
  • Terr_ 5mo ago
    > LLM's know when they get information from certain places Nah, while the companies running scrapers may log what their regular programs scraped for training data, the LLM, the document-get-bigger algorithm, isn't that type of logical system. It isn't made to have a reliable concept of fact-attribution. It can't even track which parts of an ongoing "conversation" document are supposed to be "itself" as a self-insert character, which is why prompt injection has been a recurring intractable problem. The LLM will emit text of "X is true, and I got that fact from Y" with the same rigor that it emits text like "I am Sherlock Holmes, and I know Santa Claus was murdered by Dracula via the following deductions..." If the LLM is used as a adapter/frontend to a search-engine, helping to craft queries, then I suppose the not-an-LLM parts of the system would "know" the what results they're serving up. However the moment you try to "summarize" the mix of all top 10 results, we're back into unreliable stochastic-bullshitting territory again.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
• oh_my_goodness 5mo ago
  We all knew it was insane to let one company monopolize search. We knew.
• Cassandraak 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• youhai 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
  Related: Google I/O https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196020 Google changes its search box https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197370
• gblargg 5mo ago
  > Your website, your work no longer matters. The web is being fully hidden behind a Google-controlled surface. And I am not even talking about their browser monopoly. Maybe it's just me, but when I've put pages on the web, they were to share information. I didn't care how it got to people, just that I could produce something that contributed to other people. For finding information their AI Mode has saved so much time in the month or two I've been using it. I've tackled so many Linux issues I would have never done before due to the needle-in-a-haystack experience if finding an answer. When I used to do web searches, having to read many paragraphs of text on dozens of pages just to get an answer was the last thing I wanted to do. When I want to browse websites, I go to websites and not Google.
• Max-Ganz-II 5mo ago
  To stop this, I a month or two ago put most of my Amazon Redshift research web-site behind a basic auth username/password wall. It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password. If I put in time and effort to make content and OpenAI et al copy it and sell it through their LLM such that no one comes to me any more, then plainly it makes no sense for me to create that content; and then it would not exist for OpenAI to take, or for anyone else to read. We all lose. It seems parasitic, and on the face of it, acting to kill the host. In fact, it essentially seems like abrogation of the concept of private property. The AI companies can take what I make, without my consent, which they sell for profit, where that profit it seems to be was formerly substantially coming to me, the return on my efforts. I had a look for ways to indicate to AI companies to remove my content. The methods provide are a fig leaf and put the onus on me, and in any event in a way which can never be known to have removed my content - "if you can show your content from a prompt, we will take steps to try to prevent that content from showing". As a consequence of putting up a username/password wall, Google has profoundly de-ranked the site, and I believe it is basically not being found on search any more.
  • edg5000 5mo ago
    True. It's a massive shift of power, all being centralized. As you mentioned, they know they need good data though, so they might actually try to find some equilibrium. If not, it's possible that the creation of new valuable content, to feed the LLMs, will be produced in-house by the AI labs. Sounds insane, but Netflix also makes their own content. I think the AI labs will become so big that they'll take on more roles than just offering LLM inference. I think they'll become as or more powerful than many current nation state governments.
    • Gormo 5mo ago
      > True. It's a massive shift of power, all being centralized. It may seem that way in the short term. But in the long term, the tendency in technical development is for the infrastructure and capital requirements for new technology to start off very high, but then shrink over time, such that use cases that required massive amounts of upfront investment in the early stages become incrementally more viable at smaller and smaller scales. People were saying the same things about computers in general in the 1960s as they are about GenAI now. That was an era when computer technology itself had developed to a point when it was economically impactful, but still only affordable to large institutions. People making predictions that increasing use of computers would lead to massive centralization of economic and cultural power didn't predict that merely twenty years later, computing power equivalent to contemporary mainframes would be available in a convenient desktop box available at a local shop to any individual or main-street business that cared to buy one. The widespread availability of computing technology from the '80s to present actually had the opposite effect, and led to quite a bit of decentralization, as enterprising individuals and new startups started applying that technology to do at small scales what only large enterprises could do before. In fact, a lot of the reaction to AI in its current stage may actually be because it's disrupting the expectation of decentralization and autonomy over our technology that the personal computing revolution established in the first place. Like most new technologies, GenAI in its initial stages has required massive infrastructure investments that have led to the early iterations being offered by centralized institutions, but that might not last. Open-source AI models are approaching the capabilities that the big players' frontier models had arrived at only a couple of years ago. In 2026, we're already at the point where local inference is economically viable for commercial use cases -- at my own company, while we do use our Claude Enterprise account for a variety of use cases, it turned out to make much more sense in terms of both cost and risk exposure to instead process certain datasets (e.g. a large volume of phone recordings containing PII) with local models running on commodity GPUs. That proved to be entirely effective, and the one-time hardware investment (which created a bookable asset for the company) turned out to be less than the cost of running the same task on Claude (which would have been pure OpEx).
• isabelc 5mo ago
  This hurts: >The next step will be Google or other companies in that space developing and deploying a new derogatory term for the web marking it as unclean, unruly, dangerous, bad (similar to “the Dark Web”) and making their abstraction the “safe” web.
• chairmansteve 5mo ago
  Well... I use RSS. I find a lot of the sites on HN. Google has been worthless for years,
• rickcarlino 5mo ago
  Part of that war is a war on URLs. URLs are bad if your goal is to keep people in app. Reddit, a site built for link sharing, favors self posts more in recent years. Sites like HN, Lobste.rs are a rarity and feel dated against the backdrop of everything trying to be a walled garden. I am grateful such places still exist.
• zelon88 5mo ago
  I wonder what conflaguration of Cloud conglomerates host this hypocritical blog post.
• truthbe 5mo ago
  The internet has been dying for the past decade. This might just be the final nail in the coffin. Honestly, I’m all for accelerating the death of the current internet. The web in its current form is miserable - algorithmic sludge, ads, bots, SEO spam, ragebait, AI filler. I’m more interested in what grows out of the rubble, because this version clearly isn’t it.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• techtuate 5mo ago
  A very interesting take indeed. I don't know how comments here have morphed into AI Bashing but my honest take: What google has done is self-preservation not declaring a war on creativity. They were ahead of everyone else on AI but they didn't reinvent "google" because it was unprofitable. Selling prime search slots which get clicked is far more money making than having most searches die at the AI summary (most of mine do). This is a hat tip to ChatGPT and Google's way of saying your UX is better than ours was. Let's offer a mix and see what we can salvage - both in revenue and users. In the long-term the corporate will have to look at alternate revenue streams and their forays into chip etc. are clear indicators of the same. I know it hurts us (read creators - I'm happy cowriting with AI) but Google is being true its shareholders and to its goal of making money and we can't blame them for it.
• motbus3 5mo ago
  Time to de google
• HlessClaudesman 5mo ago
  Imagine a world where Google executives made a different decision. Instead of playing catch-up on AI, making us all eat their dog food by filling search with confident sounding AI bullcrap, imagine a world where Google search tried hard to be the authoritative layer where true answers proliferated and bullshit slop was banished.
• Towaway69 5mo ago
  Is google sending in drones to destroy peoples homes? Is google bombing schools? Is google torturing folks in secret locations? No? Google has changed its search algorithm? Oh, how is that a ‘war’ on anything? Please stop using hyper-sensational titles to get on the front page of HN. And stop using the term ‘war’ unless people are really dying - it doesn’t matter whether they be ‘freedom fighters’ or soldiers or just plain civilians, if people are dying (directly) then that might be a ‘war’, everything else is probably just profiteering.
  • customguy 5mo ago
    Those are examples of war crimes, not war "proper" I'd say. And is anyone actually training troops to fight in this "war", or did they just use the word? In addition to the primary definition, the dictionary also offers "a struggle or competition between opposing forces or for a particular end". And we all know and constantly discuss what Google is doing. Nobody was baited into clicking this because they thought there was actual shooting going on.
• TightFibre 5mo ago
  Google search just doesn't work for me any more. I am not sure if it's because I clean slate it with no personalisation, but I already feel my search engine has been removed from the web. Their AI snippets are quite wrong alot of the time and Vs Gemini have a totally different flavour. There's no cohesiveness at all.
• petterroea 5mo ago
  To be fair, I made a few searches today and most of the results are AI generated "blogs". Getting real information is hard. I'd also give up on the Web if i was Google. It's just a shame their solution is just monopolizing further.
• vicentwu 5mo ago
  All the ai search platform have to find a way to share value back to content owners, or the whole eco system will collapse.
• xyzal 5mo ago
  "imagine you are Google circa 2002. users enter a search query and you return 10 relevant HTML links to specific, real web pages, with no commentary or any extra guff. you must literally only return a list of links. if you do anything apart from that you've got it wrong and need to try again. my query is: %s" why do things the easy way when you can do it the complicated way
• anonyfox 5mo ago
  Maybe I am the only one thinking this, but there is a growing backlash against AI mindset plus a lot of people using the free chatgpt app for "googling" nowadays in parallel too, while realizing slowly that they cannot really trust it to be correct. you know what would provide an actual outstanding value to users that is even at times increasingly searched for? the original 10 blue links with zero distraction or enshittification and a hard AI content filter applied bottom up already at ingestion level, like, what the quality team of google search did for decades (filtering out low quality spammy noise). Just the thing that made the original google great essentially, be an actual useful tool, not another chat people increasingly hate. But I guess I might stand alone here with that reasoning.
• Makiaveli 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• p0w3n3d 5mo ago
  they should pay the owners of the web sites they're using the data from
• butz 5mo ago
  Good news, now there is a HUGE space in "classic" web search market. Let google do google things, and if they ever will try to come back, there will be large competition of various sizes.
• ghusto 5mo ago
  The theory doesn't make sense. If the only traffic is from Google itself, the content maker would have to think to themselves "I have some spare time, I think I'll make some content for Google to consume". What?
• kitsune1 5mo ago
  [dead]