I understand that Google is feeling an existential threat from other AI products that provide answers directly. But they must also understand their symbiotic relationship with the web.

Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation.

Anyone miss StumbleUpon?

One could argue that my content production being a hobby lets me be pretty blasé about being intermediated by a platform. That is somewhat true. If I relied upon this as a living, I would probably also conclude that actions that harm my way of living are a war on "the web", though realistically any neutral party observing must conclude that if it is a war, it's one on my kind of participation in the web - content creation for the purpose of revenue / notoriety / some other reward.

As a user, I don't actually care very much for each website and its creator. The information contained therein is useful to me, but the heterogeneity of these sites is mostly an obstacle to the information. I am much happier when my search and summarization agents are able to accurately synthesize what these websites say, in so much as such a synthesis allows me to model reality more accurately.

So I could be convinced that this change from Google makes it less likely for accurate content to be created and that I'll be misled more often. But this is a tool, and my world-model will frequently be tested by reality. If the search-and-synthesis machine fails to produce useful outcomes, I will know. And I'll have to adjust the way I treat knowledge I obtain through it so that I don't get catastrophic outcomes. But that's the same already. I don't really know that Google's search results are not planted ones calibrated to change my opinion. And I don't know that they don't collude with the Internet Archive (with whom they have a pre-existing relationship) to make it look like their constructed consensus is real.

As a user, I have to make a lot of decisions already, and having to painstakingly read search results to synthesize them myself is far less useful than using an agent. So if there is a war on the web, then I am glad to join it, on the side against the web.

Google dropped it from the index long ago. I had a fun discussion with some google folk where they kept arguing my website was designed wrong and that some pages had tomany links.

Basically, if you write an article about the largest banana companies you have to chose which to link to!

The 10 best movies article is better than the best 100. If you make a list of all the movies you've seen your page gradually turns into something really bad. Others will be punished for linking to it but only if you add the nth entry.

As the website is just for me it is clearly their loss not mine. No way im ging to consider linking a sub set of patents or research papers.

Everything is probably re-traceable fairly easily because Google Analytics is on nearly every web page.

But I understand maintaining your own source of archives, videos, documents, etc.

Sounds like a good vibe coding project actually.. to try and keep it all organized offline.

A) Google will do a good job of this, people will find their summaries more useful, and the web will evolve into a more closed system that better serves its users

or ...

B) They're gated AI community will suck, and people will start using a different search engine that better serves its users.

My money isn't on A), but they do have a lot of clout so I wouldn't rule it out.

Think of AI distillation as some kind of improved Reader Mode feature.

People never wanted to visit your website; they just wanted the information that your website held. Now they can get to the meat without having to deal with the bones.

Why would it be good if Perplexity does it, but bad if Google does it? What are the principles at play here?

Google was forced to do this and it's a miracle of their slow organizational gears that they took so long to do it. So many people have already transitioned to using ChatGPT as a replacement for Google. All of this is driven by consumer behavior and the desire to "just get an answer" rather than having to wade through all the sources and try to figure out what is SEO slop vs what is actual reputable information. Google SERP results have been gamed by SEO slop for economically valuable search terms long before the rise of AI. ChatGPT simply solved a huge problem waiting for a solution.

From the web content creator's POV, there are to paths:

1. If you are merely a publisher and rely on eyeballs on ads to drive your own revenue, you are screwed. AI is going to ignore all the ads and only extract the content.

2. If however you are serving helpful information out of the goodness of your heart or if the content itself references a product or service which from which you will derive economic benefit from, you are still good.

I don't see this as a bad thing. Ads on websites were a necessary evil and will be seen as a relic of the first 30 years of the internet. Ads will not go away but they will just migrate to the application layer (youTube, LLM interfaces etc) that will provide a much more targeted experience. There will be winners and losers from this transition but that's normal and healthy.

That would allow people to still let Google to access their site, but restrict its usage. Similar for open source projects on GitHub, etc.

Facebook had a huge opportunity in the post-AI world: real humans.

Instead of focusing on connections, they've been optimizing their properties for doomscrolling.

Google, similarly, has lost the plot on what made them trustworthy in the first place: navigating to citable content.

Both companies started on this trend well before AI, but this might be the final nail in their respective coffins[0].

[0]Yes they'll likely still be profitable for a long time, but the Bell Labs-esque downfall has begun (imo).

I surprised however, that it didn't describe phase 2 of the disaster, where in the models no longer have fresh www content to train on.

It's hard to understand the long term vision of this strategy...

You don't write post to reach the biggest amount of people, you do because you're passionate and ultimately you get people following you.

If average Joe doesn't go on your website, what's the big deal ?

I think this feature will be very useful to fight back on the optimized SEO hell that we currently have.

Google’s Vision since they were founded:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful

They told everyone what they were doing the whole time

Nobody is stopping you from blocking bot traffic.

You don't need search engines - you can just link between sites or have webrings. Like we used to, pre-2000.

Nobody is stopping you from not using ads on the net.

Nobody can force you to use non-essential cookies (and thus: a cookie-banner).

Imagine there was a war going on, and no-one was showing up.

I would blame trash like Discord more though. Alternative search engines are available, but the crappy little web chat hides info inside.

It's conspiracy, but it feels like Google is actively making the usual search worse so everyone will use AI overview more.

At the end of the day, is it really all that different to provide a list of links, versus an answer or overview of a few paragraphs with links to lots of different higher-quality sources?

I follow those source links all the time. Not just to "check sources" but because they provide a ton more detail. And the links are usually much better than what I'll get with regular keyword search results.

> It’s about monopolizing access to information.

Not as long as there are competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. In fact, LLM's have provided Google with stronger competition than it's ever had before. ChatGPT and Claude are doing what Bing was never able to.

I think though a big part of this was YouTube replaced blogs. It's a generational thing.

Totally vibed version of this:

``` { "version": "https://agent-source.org/v1", "canonical_url": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/the-cone", "title": "The Real Reason Nobody Moved the Cone", "source_name": "Ninjas and Robots", "author": "Nathan Kontny", "summary": "An essay about embarrassment, public action, and why obvious fixes go undone.", "preferred_citation": "Ninjas and Robots", "source_card": { "headline": "The Real Reason Nobody Moved the Cone", "description": "People avoid obvious public actions not because they are lazy, but because being seen trying is embarrassing.", "image": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/images/cone-card.jpg", "cta": "Read the full essay" }, "allowed_excerpt": { "max_chars": 500, "preferred_excerpt": "People often avoid obvious public action because embarrassment feels more immediate than danger." }, "commercial_terms": { "ads_allowed": true, "sponsor_card_url": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/.well-known/sponsor-card.json", "licensing_contact": "hello@ninjasandrobots.com" } } ```

But something to get our original source honored better in the LLM. Maybe if one of the LLMs do this, we'd give it more loyalty? Maybe the government needs to compel this kind of behavior? No idea. It does suck though our content is just turned into AI's own tokens and we're left with a tiny "source" link if we're lucky.

As you want a cookie, i put you in a table, napking, serve you a bag of cookies and hope that you eat/find the cookie you want, while hearing my music, watching my ads, pushing you more foods that I sell and other services. And sometimes, that is the experience you are searching for. But also, many just want a cookie.

That is what a conversational and maybe agentic interface can give you. Have someone a blueberry cookie? Then it gives it to you, and also give pointers to restaurants that give a more complete experience sometimes (while others may try to scam you). It is a shortcut, but also doesn't hide you the traditional way to access that.

They are not saints, but neither are all the ones in the other side. But the new way to access the relevant information you want, in a way that you can use it, have its own value.