It’s hard to escape the dawning realization that part (or all) of the goal of Google’s AI Overview is to simply eradicate the concept of anyone else having any kind of website at all.
Why click on a link & explore when Google told you the answer & you didn’t know it was wrong?
Google’s long-con loss-leaders have been nothing but a ramp-up to replacing the entire internet with itself—& a single content creator they never have to pay.
Except in the energy of the whole planet.
@Catvalente pretty foolish if that's the case. At least three other companies better at that than Google are.
Does look like it though, they want to be an answer service instead of a web index now.
@Catvalente Yeah, this has been something they've been working towards for a while. It was really frustrating writing technical documentation for a website and you can specify content that you want search engines to use for the summary, and a few years ago Google stopped pulling from that and instead detected the steps of the procedure to display in the search results so you never have to leave Google.
Hugely frustrating! Not only do we not get the hits to know what pages people are visiting>
@Catvalente >but people viewing that don't get all the important info about prerequisites and warnings for what might go wrong.
And then people complain because they've not seen that and they just say, 'Well, that's not what it says on Google,' and it's like, no. You actually need to go to our help documentation to get reliable instructions about what to do. We are not responsible for what Google tells you.
@Catvalente Enclosure is about making sure you get all the money from the enclosed thing. It has nothing to do with the health and well being of the enclosed thing.
This trouble could be described as "enclosing intellectual cooperation" or similar; the web starts as a way to share science while doing science. Enclosing all intellectual cooperation is all human endeavour in some ways but for this purpose is more like the authority of facts.
(The big fight is mostly over who owns facts.)
Or do click on a link... and come back to Google
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