Also, I'm pretty sure Microsoft and Meta hate me as well. Honestly, if every major tech company dislikes me at this point, I'm starting to suspect it's a 'me' problem.
Interesting point of view… People often say that employees are not at fault when criticizing company-wide initiatives that affect customers in a negative way, that it is the company (aka. the commercial entity) the one people want to attack, say for example, Microsoft or Google instead of Microsoft employees and Google employees.
While I sympathise and it's a well written article, writers engaging in SEO and clickbait (as they admitted) to drive traffic are just as responsible for the death of the internet. They're bemoaning the loss of traffic but that traffic may have already been stolen from a more appropriate search result that didn't have a team working on SEO.
Also, the irony isn't lost on me that I had a cookie dialogue fill 80% of the screen and this little snippet:
> Early Google didn’t even have ads; it was so clean and pure.
> Advertisement
> Article continues below this ad
They don't just want your eyeballs they want your data. They want to track you and give that data to advertisers.
Like I said I do sympathise and maybe it's a necessary evil, but in my opinion all of these sites are just a less successful side of the same coin.
i guess i don't blame a writer who's job is threatened by this technology to write a piece like this. but the perspective is ultimately one where they are complaining about how it affects them, without regard to the end user.
it's the same as toll booth operators complaining about fastpass
As a user I hate google's approach as well, not because of job related reasons, but the functionality keeps changing to no increased value to me. I don't see how you the end user would have a different opinion unless you did not use google before say 2016.
Yes, the churn they bring to products that were complete over a decade ago is ridiculous. So much change for change’s sake (or more likely in pursuit of promotions internally) and so little thought to quality, what makes a product good, and what would make users happy.
They try to offer some other perspectives as well:
> This isn’t just a me problem. You don’t have to be a writer to have your livelihood be dependent upon Google search results. Small-business owners need Google to reach potential new customers. Students, many of them working on school-issued Chromebooks made by Google, need it to research term papers and study for final exams. In its earliest form, Google dot-com was the perfect utility for all of these people and millions more.
But I agree with you (despite being predisposed to agreeing with the author) that the invective doesn't quite land because they don't do quite enough work to ensure we're on their side in understanding how we might be affected.
I'll just take this space to note that folks that feel similarly to the author should try Kagi, as they let you choose how much AI you want rather than forcing a chat interface onto you or directing you away from links.
> i guess i don't blame a writer who's job is threatened by this technology to write a piece like this
> it's the same as toll booth operators complaining about fastpass
I think your analogy would work better if toll booth operators built the roads, the cars, the toll booths themselves, and then were all replaced by fastpass.
sure, there is some bitching about how the ad funded web-site-news business model is getting distrupted. I'm not completely heartbroken about that.
but much of the article describes how Google is trying to deploy their final solution for intermediation. their attempts to 'googlify' things like grocery shopping and job searching pretty much failed. but now, they are promoting a model where, finally, all information they present has been googlified. they are not a phone book or card catalog, but now the entire library. there aren't original sources any more, just what Google has decided to tell you about something.
You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower.
It's important for everyone to have their own brand. Matt Levine won't be as impacted by this as this writer. You've got to focus on making it easy to find your content and having it delivered to my email is about as convenient as it gets.
It is probably worth noting Drew very much does have his own brand as a co-founder of Defector.com. While not as popular as Levine’s money stuff, Defector.com survives on user subscriptions alone and a lot of URL requests are direct. Drew freelances for SFGate, and with that said I think he’s writing from the perspective of his “freelancer hat” and lamenting the impact “Google Zero” will have on websites around the world dependent on Google’s traffic.
>Many people don’t; they’ll get a top-line answer from AI and deem it not worth the trouble to click or scroll any further.
sparing the user the usual experience of visiting some random ad-riddled clickbait mill and trying to extract useful information from ten paragraphs of SEO diarrhea.
>Sites like SFGATE need traffic to survive, and writers like me need those sites to stay alive if we hope to remain gainfully employed by them.
Maybe the computer world has been a distributed nightmare of mortgage-driven development for decades now for everyone. Maybe now that the people who were on the inside are not getting that sweet and foolish feeling of being on the inside while everyone else is on the outside, they start to see it's really a monstrous pseudo-intellectual stupidity closer to pop entertainment than science.
Visiting websites as a human is sooo 2025. We are entering a world where only bots actually fetch primary web content any more. Our gatekeeper overlords will filter, curate, and remix everything for us. This is the next step in the machines taking over.
>Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Its mission is not to give traffic to websites. If websites are a bad way for users to get information due to endless rambling or obnoxious ads then don't be surprised if that information is made more accessible. It's like if Google Maps didn't have things like business hours hosted within Maps instead of requiring the user to do extra work and find it on the business's website.
The youngest Google Search seems like it has a lot in common with the next-youngest Google Search.
Also, the irony isn't lost on me that I had a cookie dialogue fill 80% of the screen and this little snippet:
> Early Google didn’t even have ads; it was so clean and pure.
> Advertisement > Article continues below this ad
They don't just want your eyeballs they want your data. They want to track you and give that data to advertisers.
Like I said I do sympathise and maybe it's a necessary evil, but in my opinion all of these sites are just a less successful side of the same coin.
it's the same as toll booth operators complaining about fastpass
> This isn’t just a me problem. You don’t have to be a writer to have your livelihood be dependent upon Google search results. Small-business owners need Google to reach potential new customers. Students, many of them working on school-issued Chromebooks made by Google, need it to research term papers and study for final exams. In its earliest form, Google dot-com was the perfect utility for all of these people and millions more.
But I agree with you (despite being predisposed to agreeing with the author) that the invective doesn't quite land because they don't do quite enough work to ensure we're on their side in understanding how we might be affected.
I'll just take this space to note that folks that feel similarly to the author should try Kagi, as they let you choose how much AI you want rather than forcing a chat interface onto you or directing you away from links.
> it's the same as toll booth operators complaining about fastpass
I think your analogy would work better if toll booth operators built the roads, the cars, the toll booths themselves, and then were all replaced by fastpass.
but much of the article describes how Google is trying to deploy their final solution for intermediation. their attempts to 'googlify' things like grocery shopping and job searching pretty much failed. but now, they are promoting a model where, finally, all information they present has been googlified. they are not a phone book or card catalog, but now the entire library. there aren't original sources any more, just what Google has decided to tell you about something.
sparing the user the usual experience of visiting some random ad-riddled clickbait mill and trying to extract useful information from ten paragraphs of SEO diarrhea.
>Sites like SFGATE need traffic to survive, and writers like me need those sites to stay alive if we hope to remain gainfully employed by them.
~~learn to code~~ (oops, too late, lol).
Google changes its search box
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197370
Google Declaring War on the Web
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214449
DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296649
>Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Its mission is not to give traffic to websites. If websites are a bad way for users to get information due to endless rambling or obnoxious ads then don't be surprised if that information is made more accessible. It's like if Google Maps didn't have things like business hours hosted within Maps instead of requiring the user to do extra work and find it on the business's website.