Google is Using AI to Censor Independent Websites
Google is Using AI to Censor Independent Websites
travellemming.com
Google is Using AI to Censor Independent Websites
3 comments
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Enclosure of the digital commons. An attempt to at least. I do think that it’s ultimately doomed.
Fundamentally, the internet is an open thing, by the very nature of how it works, thus it is difficult to enclose. Google is more likely to destroy its market share than to fully gate off its user base.
But when all is said and done, the average person will be left to pick up the pieces of the fractured web they leave behind.
I know this is about hating on AI, but this seems like a typical company relying on SEO tricks to drive traffic to their site so they can display ads hates when the SEO algorithm changes.
Good news: I'm already starting to see SEO experts giving advice on how to get cited by AI to drive traffic to your site, and for the first time the advice I'm seeing has more to do with providing quality content that answers the kinds of questions people tend to ask about your business domain.
I recognize the problems AI is bringing to search on both ends. AI generated content is making the already bad signal-to-noise ratio on the internet much worse. And now AI is going to grab the knowledge content of your website, summarize it to users perhaps wrongly with at most a reference link, and the person who invested the time and effort to create the content is cut out. That's a big problem.
But I think this begs the question of whether search was any good before. It wasn't. It isn't. And to a large degree, all of the SEO bullshit is the reason why, although also the fact that every single site has to make money on ads to justify it's existence is also ruining fucking everything. Journalism is all click-bait. Reviews are all advertising and referral links.
This is a nuanced issue, but it really doesn't matter whether AI wins or loses because the internet is going to continue to get worse. I miss the days of low-bandwidth forcing efficient website design. No bloated 500kb Javascript frameworks. No ad-sense tracking you everywhere you go. I'll grant you that the internet is prettier now, but that's really not going to matter if everything winds up presented by AI anyway.
I'm really hopeful that federation continues to grow and bandwidth and storage costs can allow a simple hobbyist to maintain a site/node for minimal cost while contributing to the greater ecosystem. Smaller communities where reputation actually matters instead of being gamified into upvotes and downvotes as some sort of facsimile of trustworthiness or quality. I think with a more personal internet, AI becomes less of a threat anyway.
Search WAS good when it was a simple search. Sites were indexed by the search engine and if you searched for the words you wanted to find, the results would be exactly that. In that context, it worked perfectly.
But the problem was that most people used search engines in a different way. They weren't searching for specific content, but searching for answers to questions. And for that, search engines would only show results that had that same question and then you'd need to hope that the question had been answered.
Over time, search engines kept shifting into trying to better support the questions and answers format, making the basic content search worse as a result. Where we are now, neither or them works too well. Google is now better at understanding what people are trying to search, but worse at finding it.
AI is just expanding this with yet another layer: it might make Google better at understanding what you search and maybe even might be better at finding it than the engine is now, but it'll add the ability to misinterpret the results too.
Honestly I'd be pretty happy if I had a simple indexed search again.