Google's AI Search Gives Sites Dire Choice: Share Data or Die (bloomberg.com) 64
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google now displays convenient AI-based answers at the top of its search pages -- meaning users may never click through to the websites whose data is being used to power those results. But many site owners say they can't afford to block Google's AI from summarizing their content. That's because the Google tool that sifts through web content to come up with its AI answers is the same one that keeps track of web pages for search results, according to publishers. Blocking Alphabet's Google the way sites have blocked some of its AI competitors would also hamper a site's ability to be discovered online.
Google's dominance in search -- which a federal court ruled last week is an illegal monopoly -- is giving it a decisive advantage in the brewing AI wars, which search startups and publishers say is unfair as the industry takes shape. The dilemma is particularly acute for publishers, which face a choice between offering up their content for use by AI models that could make their sites obsolete and disappearing from Google search, a top source of traffic.
Google's dominance in search -- which a federal court ruled last week is an illegal monopoly -- is giving it a decisive advantage in the brewing AI wars, which search startups and publishers say is unfair as the industry takes shape. The dilemma is particularly acute for publishers, which face a choice between offering up their content for use by AI models that could make their sites obsolete and disappearing from Google search, a top source of traffic.
Worship at tech's altar, or perish, mortals. (Score:2, Insightful)
I love the phrasing of the title. So flamey. So fiery. So crunchy and satisfying.
But the truth is this is just another step down the slippery slope we started sliding down once we decided that computers were absolutely essential to life. Why we decided that I'm still trying to sort out, but this is the world we've created for ourselves. We either bow to the tech gods, or we can get left behind and thought of as outcasts and weirdos.
Choose: Train your replacements, so you can disappear later, or disappear no
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
I was addicted until I broke mine accidentally. (Score:2)
Sorta like a smack addict losing his kit, smack and all. Instead of crying about it or robbing a 7-11 to buy another, I pretended I was dignified. I pretended it didn't bother me - until it didn't.
I quit cigarettes last December. That was harder; but not considerably so. I don't miss the old Android toy apps, but I do still miss cigarettes.
Re: (Score:2)
We can all see that YOU'RE special. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> Oh well, get your feet planted and bend over.
You could learn a trade instead of engaging in rape fantasy.
Kurzweil called it in the 90's. Is anybody surprised?
Re: Worship at tech's altar, or perish, mortals. (Score:1)
You could learn a trade so you can get fucked over differently. For example, wage theft.
Re: (Score:2)
Argue for your limitations, and they are yours...
Re: (Score:3)
Not yet modded, but I think it deserves "Interesting with possible embedded insight, but rather unclear." The main thing I like is that, unusually for Slashdot, you at least mentioned solutions, though only in Slashdot's typically negative and dismissive way.
So how about creating choice? What if there were multiple search engines and you could pick the ones that don't "rape" your data the most? Done properly (ROFLMAO) that would create competition to offer better search engines considering various perspecti
Re: (Score:3)
... this is just another step down the slippery slope we started sliding down once we decided that computers were absolutely essential to life. Why we decided that I'm still trying to sort out, but this is the world we've created for ourselves.
Why? For gods sake man - wake up! In my own lifetime the world's population has risen from 3 billion to 8 billion people. The current logistics for the production, transportation, and sale of food is an enormous technical challenge by itself. Never mind the need for other services such as communications, banking, etc. If you are arguing that these systems are not needed to sustain a population of 8 billion people, or that they could be run without extensive computerization, then you are deluding yourself.
Re: (Score:2)
... this is just another step down the slippery slope we started sliding down once we decided that computers were absolutely essential to life. Why we decided that I'm still trying to sort out, but this is the world we've created for ourselves.
Why? For gods sake man - wake up! In my own lifetime the world's population has risen from 3 billion to 8 billion people. The current logistics for the production, transportation, and sale of food is an enormous technical challenge by itself. Never mind the need for other services such as communications, banking, etc. If you are arguing that these systems are not needed to sustain a population of 8 billion people, or that they could be run without extensive computerization, then you are deluding yourself.
I'm far more upset with humans than computers. We've chosen to use computers to enforce old-world ideologies of kings/kings and peasants. And we seem to insist that those separations need to exist. To quote an old boss who was wiser than most, "You can't take a broken process, just throw computers at it and expect it to right itself." Society is currently locked in the "just throw computers at it" phase, and it's doing exactly as you'd expect. Leaving most of us scratching our heads wondering WTF? while a f
information wants to be free (Score:2)
Sorta like telling the US Gov't to FOAD. (Score:1)
Yup (Score:4, Insightful)
Websites pandering to the wide public are indeed in dire trouble. However, hobbyist, specialized and technical sites will survive, because their audiences won't be satisfied by the regurgitated soup served by the Google "AI". And if the excrement really hits the fan, these audiences will rather find a replacement for Google than lose their favorite sites. Internet is reshaping itself right now, with one small, unpopular, but highly informative and entertaining part, and one huge blob of boring, mostly useless content where one can't easily distinguish which part is written by humans and which by "AI"s, and which is struggling to survive on diminishing ad money. The latter of these two parts will be festering for years to come, becoming more and more insufferable to its hapless consumers, while the former will resemble the early Web in many ways. That's why I prefer to call what's happening in the Web these days "the end of the Web's eternal September".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
However, hobbyist, specialized and technical sites will survive, because their audiences won't be satisfied by the regurgitated soup served by the Google "AI"
I'm no fan of AI, but youre *vastly* underselling the utility of LLM even in the current state of the art. They're *very good* at fetching and summerizing information quickly in response to specific questions and would absolutely negate my need to dive into a website to retrieve information. On the one hand, from a utility perspective, that's a good th
Re: (Score:1)
edit: robbing the site that hosts the information of potential revenue generating traffic ..
Re: (Score:3)
I ran a for-profit website for 18 years. For 15 of those it was my primary source of income. Although I eventually benefited a great deal from search engine traffic, in the early days I resigned myself to the fat that getting high search engine rankings was something I could not realistically expect to achieve, just due to the sheer amount of competition. I also realized that even if I could achieve it, I would be putting all of my eggs in Google's one and only basket. Sure enough, in 2018 they switched to
Re: (Score:1)
Websites pandering to the wide public are indeed in dire trouble. However, hobbyist, specialized and technical sites will survive, because their audiences won't be satisfied by the regurgitated soup served by the Google "AI".
Nobody will ever know those sites exist; there will be no way to find them.
Re: (Score:3)
Of course there would. In the early days of the Internet we had several ways to find interesting sites, while search engines as we know them today didn't even exist yet. Today we also have social networks and link aggregator/discussion sites (like the one you're reading right now!) that make sharing links to good quality content with other interested people a common and instantaneous act. If search engines became unreliable, the content creators would just start using inline links to other interesting sites
Re: (Score:2)
Today we also have social networks and link aggregator/discussion sites (like the one you're reading right now!) that make sharing links to good quality content with other interested people a common and instantaneous act.
Social network services' spam classification heuristics also tend to heavily demote posts containing outbound links.
Re: (Score:2)
In some cases, sure, but many social media sites function as a hybrid link aggregator and discussion forum. There would still be plenty of places designed and intended to share (with moderation/voting of some kind) links with other people who might be interested in them, even without any help from Google and friends.
Monopolies doing what they do best (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
The point of a free market is that competition benefits consumers, so at some point government does have a role to step in; the market does fail sometimes. I'm a free market guy because 99% of the time I think government steps in too early.
I think the right thing to do here
I don't think the aritcle is correct. (Score:3)
'Google-Extended' can be blocked in robots.txt to prevent the content being used for AI training.
If the block is present that then the contents will only be used to build the search index and not train Gemini.
Is it just Google-Extended? (Score:2)
For the last 3-4 months our US and UK sites have been hammered by a "GoogleOther" bot (that is one of the legit Google IP ranges) at a rate that exceeds 100 requests per second per site! We are paying hundreds of $$ on extra server capacity to serve this and I've been trying but still have no clear answer on why it is doing that or whether excluding it might affect our ranking.
From the start my suspicion has been it's some AI corpus gathering thing (it seems to create searches using even keys that we don't
Re: (Score:2)
You can block GoogleOther, GoogleOther-Image, GoogleOther-Video. They are all for Google research tools doesn't block your site from being indexed for the search engine.
Re: (Score:3)
The thing is, we blocked it inadvertently at first and we noticed when we were going through everything to figure out why our ranking had fallen and the timeline sort of matched... Our boss doesn't want to risk blocking it again....
Google is a monopoly (Score:2)
News at 11.
Re: (Score:2)
Going for Funny? It's not like you see much going for solutions on Slashdot these years...
But what if "the (business) game" didn't favor monopolies quite so much?
Re: (Score:2)
None of what's going on in the tech world for the past 20 years is funny anymore. And I personally believe we're well pass being in a position to do anything about it: Big Tech has made itself so ubiquitous and so entrenched you can't even break the monopolies without breaking the very fabric of society anymore.
I'm not going for funny. This is just a passive-aggressive comment borne out of desperation.
Re: (Score:2)
I wish I could disagree with you more strenuously. My version of the problem is that I can sort of imagine solution approaches, but "You can't get there from here."
The google cancer is an especially virulent variety. There is a kind of natural monopoly underlying the situation, sort of like the shortest distance between two points. People want the quickest search to the best answer, even when the distance to the answer is not physical and even when "best" is not clearly defined. It's relatively easy for me
If you are old enough (Score:5, Informative)
Remember phone books? Sure, a listing in the commercial section cost you, but imagine the phone company telling a business "If you want to be listed, you have to give us unlimited rights to all your corporate IP".
If Google's trying the equivalent here, they're going to have a bad time if even one moderately competent lawyer is up against them in a courtroom.
Nice... (Score:3)
... But many site owners say they can't afford to block Google's AI from summarizing their content. That's because the Google tool that sifts through web content to come up with its AI answers is the same one that keeps track of web pages for search results ...
I suppose we'll get to see Google receive another kick-in-the-nuts'agram over this from the EU and, if miracles happen maybe even the US government, closely followed by a every corporate fanboy on Slashdot crying rivers over it on Google's behalf.
Move to DuckDuckGo? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
It's not even based on a search engine. (Score:2)
It's suicide for google (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no point in being found if nobody comes (Score:3, Interesting)
Might as well drop out of the index, because you're only feeding Google content and not getting any visitors in return.
Re:There is no point in being found if nobody come (Score:5, Informative)
In our experience Google traffic is vastly overrated anyway. You can get volume through them but despite visitors theoretically being pre-qualified by already expressing some related interest, practically it's always been low-quality traffic for us, with conversion rates a small fraction of the rates for visitors who reach us via other channels. We therefore don't play the Google SEO game. We follow reasonable practices to make a good site that works well and our users actually like, but we totally ignore whatever whims Google is trying to impose upon the Web this week. And we have neither regrets nor any evidence to suggest that we're actually losing money this way.
So you chose profit over subservience. (Score:2)
See? Greed is good.
Google does hide that simple truth pretty well, don't they?
Re: (Score:2)
We didn't see any point in being subservient. The profit is a nice bonus, though. :-)
Web Page Design (Score:3)
Why not serve up to Google a different home page than the one you send other users. Summarize your site, its purpose and content. Include search key words to maintain its rank. But only the users that click on your link and navigate to your site can see deeper content.
Blocking sites doesn't have to be all or nothing. The technology already exists to serve up different pages based on geographic location, browser type, presence (or absence) of various cookies, etc. You could have one page built for SEO, one with low prices for budget conscious users and another custom tailored for the wealthy.
Re: (Score:2)
Blocking Google outright has the same effect. Showing crawlers different content for the same URL is a big no-no.
What's the point of robots.txt? (Score:2)
Who are you, Google?
Re: (Score:2)
The applicable law is private property law. If Google catches you cloaking for reasons other than a handful (such as Flexible Sampling), it has the right under private property law not to list your website in the result pages that its servers generate in response to user queries.
Those info panels for common questions. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I'll bet Google's TOS already has this very well-covered in a "we are not responsible for our search results" kinda way.
Regardless, unless you now take a screenshot every time you do a search, it's going to be a bitch proving in court what their dynamically created results told you at the time.
At least with a regular search you can still find the link, possibly via the wayback machine.
Re: (Score:2)
You're saying the Google would lie to us?
Not sure whose side I'm on here (Score:2)
Google is a monopolist, and this is a clear power grab.
On the other hand, websites everywhere have long hidden their content behind paywalls, while letting the web crawlers see all the information. This leads to endless search results that look interesting, until you click on one and can't get to the content because of the paywall.
So on balance, I'm kind of siding with Google on this one.
Penny subscriptions (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
If only there were an actual way to process a subscription on the order of 0.01 USD. Credit card companies in Slashdot's home country tend to take a 0.30 USD swipe fee plus 3 percent of the transaction total.
What the world needs now is... (Score:2)
What the world needs now is a class of "AI Training Garbage Injectors", part of a larger "Tainting Big Data" play book.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
False equivalence (Score:2)
HTML5 (Score:2, Interesting)
HTML5, which we all should be familiar with given how Slashdot comments work, introduced tags like article, nav, etc. to make it easier for content scrapers and web crawlers to find the correct content on your website. Google had a huge hand in the creation of HTML5 and that's partly why they developed the Google Chrome browser to be an early adopter of the te