Cloudflare wants Google to change its AI search crawling. Google likely won’t.

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• Pika@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I mean, with a company as large as cloudflare. I think they could /easily/ strong-arm this move by making blocking google crawlers a default setting on websites. The amount of traffic drop alone from that would make google think twice about the whole ordeal. And people who care about the google search indexers can turn them on again which will allow indexing again. but a default block would cause a lot of disruption google side and many people I don’t think would go in and fix the setting till later on down the road.

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  • sbv@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Cloudflare’s customers probably wouldn’t be on board with that. Google’s properties provide a tonne of traffic to businesses. Doing anything to put that in jeopardy would probably have many of Cloudflare’s customers looking for a new provider.

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    • Glitchvid@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Google used to provide a ton of traffic, they hoard it all themselves now through AI and summaries of content. Eventually the balance of cost/benefit will shift and Google will suddenly see itself rejected from scraping, furthering the product deathspiral.

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    • Pika@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      it would need to be advertised as a change and have it as a setting that had to be set yea, just have it default blocking abusive trackers, having Google bot or whatever it’s crawler name is as on there, with a toggle to allow it again

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  • 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I disagree. Searches are not googles main focus these days. Blocking their crawlers will just make the AI searches better - exactly what google want

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  • sugarfoot00@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Exactly. It’s not like google is the only indexer out there. And if this cuts into their search dominance, so much the better.

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• Outwit1294@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  If I had to choose my favourite corporation, it would be Cloudflare. They at least do something good.

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  • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    You may want to read: …substack.com/…/cloudflare-took-down-our-website

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    • Outwit1294@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I still think they are good. Isolated incidents like this are going to happen when you are doing business at such scales.

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• BaroqueInMind@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Additionally, Cloudflare's initiative faces criticism from those who "worry that academic research, security scans, and other types of benign web crawling will get elbowed out of websites as barriers are built around more sites" through Cloudflare's blocks and paywalls, the WSJ reported.

  The fuck? Since when is a bot designed to enumerate your network weaknesses to sell to Russian/Chinese/US hacking groups a bad thing to block? Fuck the WSJ for even putting that dumb as fuck take on the internet for other idiots to think about.

  NO , its not a good fucking idea to allow the equivalent of an incessant door-to-door salesman into your home to take notes of everything you own and sell to a random motherfucker somewhere else you don't know.

  That behavior is fucking weird and shouldn't be tolerated.

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• fubarx@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Totally understandable.

  If scanning to help send traffic to your website, that’s cool. If scanning to generate summaries that won’t send any traffic your way. No bueno.

  Ultimately, it should be whatever most benefits users.

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  • acosmichippo@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    but there also nbeeds to be an incentive for sites to host content. if it all gets hijacked by search engines that isn’t sustainable.

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  • Outwit1294@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    No, things should not benefit users, they should benefit the creator of the original content.

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• vxx@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Why did they copy the soundcloud logo?

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• Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Google has existed long enough now. The are allowed to disappear.

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• 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Google’s bot is fine in my book, their crawler doesn’t absolutely blast your server with web requests like other AI crawlers do. (Speaking of, I need to update my list of netblocks and UAs to get iocaine-holed.)

  That said, two evil megacorps potentially fighting? I hope they kill each other.

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