Mastodawn

Imagine how much simpler the ongoing Google "MITM the whole web" exercise will be for them once they can just give you their own company-brand, uncanny-valley internet instead.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joetoscano1/2026/03/06/google-just-patented-the-end-of-your-website

An interesting implication of this, for me at least, is that it turns the whole dead internet theory on its head. The people who don't use the big G as an intermediary, they can see the place human creativity still thrives. It's only the people stuck on Google's defaults living among the zombies.

Google Just Patented The End Of Your Website

A newly granted Google patent could let the search giant replace your brand's landing page with an AI-generated version you have no control over and only your buyers see.

Forbes

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mhoye 17h ago

From the perspective of the creators of Gemini and WebMCP I bet this looks like quarterly bonus catnip. Finally we have some reason for using AI that ties it into a bottom line somewhere somehow! We can use it to justify AI usage _and_ show people more ads! Does anyone but us want or benefit from that? Well probably not but that's entirely beside the point.

Obviously the real money here isn't in ads, it's the arbitrage Google can do to tune all prices to your extremely personal tolerance.

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mhoye 17h ago

I assume (I hope) that we all know the "trick", by which I mean "the standard defensive practice" now, where you do any research you need to do for big-ticket purchases in a private window before logging into anything or adding stuff to a cart. I'm not sure how effective this is - I'm sure profiling has improved dramatically in a few years - but to my eye this patent means "everyone has to do that on every purchase in order for this thing we call a competitive free market to keep existing.

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Rachel Rawlings

@mhoye I'd even go so far as to run tails in a vm to do product research. Hopefully the pricing algorithms won't adjust your cart because "someone" showed interest in France or Moldova.