Google is no longer asking — feed the AI or you’re not in search results
Google is no longer asking — feed the AI or you’re not in search results
Webrings it is, lol:
Seriously, that’s what we have to do. We need a non-profit like Wikipedia that would have all the major links for certain topics. That would be a cool federation project. Something that couldn’t be SEO’d. The retail places would be hard to do, but I’m sure someone could figure it out.
It’s as if Google hasn’t merely stopped at prioritizing profit over providing a service that people actually value, but has set out with the deliberate goal of actively eliminating any and all possible value they might provide.
It’s almost like a dare - “Let’s see if we can arrange things so that we provide absolutely nothing of any value to anyone and still make billions.”
provide just enough service that you don’t go elsewhere.
It’s not even that, is it? As long as they can force you to use their stuff it doesn’t even have to provide any service.
If there was a way for Google to hold you at gunpoint via internet until you pay them $100 every day they’d have a fiduciary duty to do so.
It’s… it’s almost as if the law about shareholder value as intended as a metaphor for accountability, not a literal, reductive claim that results in ouroboros. Almost like, our economic system is supposed to be a means, not an end in of itself?
No. Definitely can’t be that.
But don’t worry! Google’s AI summaries will soon have ads!
dear fuck, pasting ads onto the part of Google search that’s already known to be unreliable and annoying at best seems like a terrible idea. for a laugh, let’s see if there’s any justification for this awful shit in the linked citation
Ads have always been an important part of consumers’ information journeys.
oh these people are on the expensive drugs huh
It’s going to be so much worse than pasting ads if it ever actually works.
Rewriting the search results with LLMs let’s you seamlessly mix the adverts into the text people are trying to read… That’s why I need to sip a refreshing glass of coke zero™ when I’m contemplating the collapse of the internet into pure advertising drivel.
dear fuck,
i saw this first and immediately guessed the poster correctly
me visually: morning meeting poker face, unfireably cheerful when called on
me internally: dear fuck,
Shout out to my senior teammate at Microsoft who sanitised my comments for external consumption.
We’d have a group chat with some folks from another team, they’d say something stupid, so I’d private message my teammate “jesus fucking christ what the fuck are they talking about I swear to god those fuckers don’t read any docs we send them I’m going to print them out and staple them to their bloody foreheads” and he’d laugh and then post “Hey, thanks for your comments, we discussed this previously here [attachment], but we can go over it again on our Wednesday meeting, cheers”.
I swear he was the only reason I wasn’t fired and forcefully escorted out of that building.
Wow
Also this:
is great. It should be taught in schools. When you have a problem, buy the first thing you see on your screen for a solution.
PS (O/T): anyone know of an easy tool to do screen recordings like that for non-evil purposes?
I think people will stop using AI if it has ads. People like LLMs because search engines return a bunch of Amazon affiliate link spam articles as the top hits under their own sponsored results which are also spam articles. Something that gives a straight answer is preferable even if it is often confidently wrong. If they put ads in the AI it removes basically the one thing it does better.
Ads have always been an important part of customers’ information journeys.
Yeah; the fucking hazards obstructing the path to the destination.
On the one hand, Google’s still the dominant search engine, having used every dirty trick in the book to reach that position and maintain it. If you aren’t on Google, you arguably might as well not exist.
On the other hand, Google’s already under heavy scrutiny since being officially declared an illegal monopoly, and the public is pissed with how Google’s declined in search quality - and deliberately so.
Part of me says we’re about to see some truly wild shit go down.
also they’re about to start squeezing even harder on the chrome-side control (along with some continuing sketch in android)
I’m an extremely cynical bastard but I also feel like there might be light in the tunnel. just hoping it’s not a train I can’t hear yet.
part of me would like to see it involve pitchforks. maybe some torches.
we can be really california about this. I might still know where my old childhood pitchfork I used to turn compost is, and I can make it an acetylene torch hanging off a drone, if you want.
for about twenty years
This all just makes me miss Jeeves.