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Is Google about to destroy the web?

⁨222⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Pro@programming.dev⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20250611-ai-mode-is-google-about-to-change-the-internet-forever

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Comments

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  • fodor@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    The article is also full of bullshit and it gets basic history wrong. The agreement was never made, but to the extent it exists anyway, it was never supposed to be about a monopoly that’s destroying shit. Once upon a time, not even very long ago, there were competing search engines.

    I know tech writers want to write stories that sound fancy, but if they don’t know the facts and the history then they need to find someone to proofread their work more carefully.

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  • jollyrogue@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Google is about to become AOL. 😂 The walled garden is going to get destroyed by the open web, again.

    Ads already destroyed the web. Developers wanting to make web apps instead of web pages already destroyed the web. Google is trying to prop up the corpse of its dead brand by capturing people in their chat bot.

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    • MITM0@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Correction: Intrusive ads

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  • thedruid@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Quit… Using… Google… Search

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    • makyo@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Just to reiterate - don’t use Google

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      • kami@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        To avoid misunderstandings: FUCK GOOGLE

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    • 52fighters@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      We have good options to replace Google Search. What good options exist to replace search on Google Maps?

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      • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Open Street Maps, or any fork from it. You can also purchase a modern road atlas for basically nothing. Alternatively, people do make navigation units for cars, that you can purchase. Life is completely possible, with relatively little inconvenience if you want to separate yourself from Big Tech. I write down the directions and just follow street signs. You don’t want to rely on things like GPS, because it destroys your ability to commit identifying markers to memory. You can glance at the screen and glance at the road in front of you. But that stops you from being able to commit the experience from memory. Smart Tech and the offloading of our mental faculties to technology has made all of us

        1. Way too overconfident in our ability to comprehend, review and parse information.

        2. Decimated our attention spans and will most likely see a whole new type of cognitive decline.

        Sorry for the tangent. But yeah, there’s options there. With or without the tech.

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      • Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        OsmAnd. There’s also a new fork of Organic Maps called CoMaps after Organic had some drama. A bunch of Organic devs left and forked it into CoMaps.

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      • insomniac@sh.itjust.works ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        What are good Google alternatives that don’t rely on Google or Bing?

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    • FinishingDutch@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      What’s the best alternative, in your opinion? I’ve tried Bing and DuckDuckGo, but both showed me worse results for my particular searches.

      I just want classic Google Search back, before everything got turned to shit. But I fear that doesn’t really exist since there’s such an economic incentive behind how search engines rank and show results.

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      • Maxxie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        If you can afford to spend 10 bucks a month for a search engine, Kagi is pretty sleek. No ads, you can block/prioritize websites, good bangs, convinient CSS field for easy modding.

        It does AI stuff too, but it’s optional as the other non-standard search output fields.

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      • Kr4u7@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Searxng - any of the instances hosted in Germany Brave search - but only search

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      • thedruid@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I’ve been using a combination of brave and ddg. Work with the filtering

        I was an SEO for 20+. Years. Google is dying as far as search relevancy. It’s trying to transition to a new paradigm that prioritizes payment surrounding data than ads. Much more money in the data angle, and ads as we know them will be dying soon, replaced with more insipid product placements.

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  • FinishingDutch@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That fucking AI thing absolutely sucks for anything factual. I’m a journalist and noticed that it gleefully listed all sorts of factual errors in that AI summary. Stuff that you can see correctly on the original pages, but it somehow manages to misinterpret everything and shows incorrect information.

    And knowing how lazy people are these days, most will happily accept Google’s incorrect information as fact. It’s making me very, very nervous for the future.

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    • ennuiparse@lemm.ee ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      My wife and I both googled the same question yesterday and it gave us both completely different answers.

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      • botanicangular@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Its a stochastic process

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    • misteloct@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Sounds like it’s perfectly accomplishing Google’s goal to disinform. I suspect it will get more clever at sounding correct over time too.

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  • phantomwise@lemmy.ml ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    “about to destroy the web” ???

    Where have you been these last 10 years? It’s been getting worse for a long time, even before AI. It’s just getting worse quicker now.

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    • AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      This is fundamentally worse than a lot of what we've seen already though, is it not?

      AI overviews are parasitic to traffic itself. If AI overviews are where people begin to go for information, websites get zero ad revenue, subscription revenue, or even traffic that can change their ranking in search.

      Previous changes just did things like pulling a little better context previews from sites, which only somewhat decreased traffic, and adding more ads, which just made the experience of browsing worse, but this eliminates the entire business model of every website completely if Google continues pushing down this path.

      It centralizes all actual traffic solely into Google, yet Google would still be relying on the sites it's eliminating the traffic of for its information. Those sites cut costs by replacing human writers with more and more AI models, search quality gets infinitely worse, sourcing from articles that themselves were sourced from nothing, then most websites which are no longer receiving enough traffic to be profitable collapse.

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  • nthavoc@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    This is Google’s attempt at staying relevant now that it’s search engine is far from being the best and people are getting their information from TikTok and other sources. Their AI is garbage at even finding factual data. No, this will not cause a “webpocalypse”. There’s already systems in place to send AI’s forcing their way into websites into mazes of infinite useless information to poison them.

    At the end of the day, every search engine’s purpose is automating the curating of websites. People can go right back to human curated lists if the worst of the “webpocalypse” happens. People also need to start relearning that the internet existed before Google and social media, and it will exist after.

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    • fuzzzerd@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The problem with human curated lists is that in order to block bots everything will require an account to access. That’s the real tragedy here.

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  • throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Here is your cupcake recipe:

    Ingredients:

    • 1 cup of water
    • 1 cup of flour
    • 1 American Freedom Edition Tariffed Egg
    • 12 oz of polonium
    1. Mix ingredients
    2. Place in oven at 1000° C
    3. Close all windows and disable any smoke or carbon monoxide alarms
    4. Leave the oven door open, place one (1) bottle of butane inside
    5. Enjoy! 😋
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    • altphoto@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I literally just tasted this at Costco…you know, with their polonium sampling Ladies… It was delicious! I only wish my backyard polonium trees grew faster. I know I’m gonna get a good polonium harvest next year for sure because this year I got a couple of polonium flowers that went to fruit but got dropped in a wind storm.

      Anyway I really recommend those cupcakes an your recipe. Its great!

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      • treadful@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I replaced the polonium with 1 cup of citrus juice. It was incredibly acidic and soggy. 3/5 because I still like cupcakes.

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  • aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Dead Internet theorists were right, just a half decade or so early.

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  • fubarx@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I have friends working on ways for content providers to charge AI training models. But I have a feeling that’s not enough.

    The future will have to be where creators have an incentive to consistently create, and consumers pay for what they like, or services to keep them informed and entertained without them having to do much.

    In between will sit middlemen and aggregators to enable a smooth flow. Who that will be and what they do in this next phase is the big question.

    Under the current method, Google’s search and ads groups are competing against each other. Don’t see that going well for anyone.

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    • dil@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I just want a platform for independent creators with no ai or clipping,wild how that doesn’t exist, or just a platform for creatives, will never happen, my feed will always be ppl yapping about nonsence division over race, gender, religion, never what I care about, which is entertainment, idc all I care about is art and entertainment not why ppl hate all men, women, black, indian , etc. ppl or why someone else saying that hurt them, it never ends.

      I don’t want it gone forever, Im not delusional enough to expect that, I just want it not to be pushed on my feed or allowed on the platform im on. Just one space for art/entertainment free from all that, or a return back to how the internet was when I was a kid, before social media and reddit killed everything.

      I just want to see original content made by people trying, some effort put in, time spent editing, creating, planning, etc. I don’t want to waste my time watching stuff where people don’t put any time in themselves. Clipping and Ai is so annoying, if ppl want to post their own content thats fine, but my feed on these platforms ends up being purely twitch streams, tv show clips, movie scenes, low effort ai video generation, etc.

      Ideal platform would require your content actually being original, ppl posting unoriginal low effort content would actually get banned, no direct prompt to video/image ai, fine if its used ethically (masking tools, etc.) and in an actually skilled way (very rarely do see that on ocassion by 3d artists combining their stuff with ai), but the vast majority are throwing out low effort garbage to spam content hoping it hits the algorithim and blows them up so they can automate and make money)

      Never happening tho.

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  • ViatorOmnium@piefed.social ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I'm betting on Google destroying Google instead.

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  • RagingSnarkasm@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Got a machine web It’s better than the rest Green to Red Machine web

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    • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’m gonna say it.

      Of the buttrock bands that followed Nirvana’s model,… Bush was the best one, for three albums anyway.

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    • boughtmysoul@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I understood that reference.

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  • LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    No it’ll just significantly lower traffic. The web will still exist.

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    • Libra@lemmy.ml ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      But the point is that significantly lower traffic will kill the business model of many websites, and thus kill many websites.

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      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I remember it when good websites didn’t have any business model at all because there weren’t anyone busy with inventing it, all people involved spent their effort on making the website valuable.

        The business models were in TV and radio outside of the web.

        I’m not old, I’m 29.

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      • LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Ydes but it will not “destroy the web”

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  • SplashJackson@lemmy.ca ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    About to?

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  • Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    How would an ai tool thats designed as a one stop shop reinvigorate the web? Stupid idiot marketer

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    • Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It will keep the normies out of the good websites 👍🏽

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      • Deceptichum@quokk.au ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        But it’s the normies we need to reach.

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  • nyan@lemmy.cafe ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    No, but not for want of trying.

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  • Subdivide6857@midwest.social ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Too late.

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  • RedditIsDeddit@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    duck so is probably better

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