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.

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

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

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

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

Probably not, but I don't like change.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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...

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.