87
Fuck google and the walled web. Time to help people join the fediverse.
If Google destroys the Internet, the furry community will just have to rise up and make Internet 2: Electric Boogaloo.
To be honest, most of the internet is dead anyway.
The good stuff is here in the Fediverse and there are a few havens out there where people can come together.
With any luck, it will kill google.
I don't see how they can even pretend that it will do anything other than steal website traffic, since the exact point is to provide you with the information you would have gotten if you had gone to the website, leaving no reason to actually go to the website.
So painfully obviously, Google intends to steal the websites' content in order to steal the websites' traffic.
Which would seem to me to be grounds for class action lawsuits on behalf of the entire internet, which, if judged fairly, should bankrupt even that foul beast of a corporation.
And ironically enough, that would almost certainly "rejuvenate the internet." As a matter of fact, I can't think of a single thing that would do more to "rejuvenate the internet" than killing Google.
I agree with the above but would like to add that the results are hilariously bad and error-prone. I got results for a simple query about public holidays that were so wrong it was unusable. Once people get to experience the abysmal AI search regularly, they will just stop using it. Whether Google quietly kills it quick enough before people start using alternatives is the billion dollar question.
Everyone knows that there are 88 bank holidays a year, starting with Chreaster on Octember 41st.
Google has been floundering since chatgpt came online. Their press releases all sound the same to me. "We haven't had real competition for so long that we got complacent, and now we're not really sure what to do"
Is there truly an audience for "I don't want any proof, just answer my question"?
As Elon said, let that sink in. Perhaps an unpopular position, but if that's all users want and it makes them more money, of course that's what Google will do.
I'm in no way suggesting this is a good direction, but it's unsurprising.
Is there truly an audience for "I don't want any proof, just answer my question"?
More people than I think we'd like to admit. Most people don't spend time verifying whether or not what they've seen is true, they just believe what they see first, especially if it conforms to their existing beliefs.
After all, these models are quite literally plausibility machines. Their entire goal is to generate text that sounds plausibly accurate, because that's how manual content reviewers fine-tune them. Their sole purpose is to generate whatever sounds plausible, not what's necessarily correct, so if there's one thing that will convince the masses that what it says is correct, it will be these "AI" models.
Today a friend told me about how, last night, a Google AI summary led to a huge fight between him and his partner. Turns out the AI summary was 100% wrong. I mean yeah, don't make important decisions based on an AI summary. But a lot of non-tech folks still have no idea how inaccurate those results can be, and even more just plain don't care.
Anti-intellectualism is he law of the land
Yeah, I'd say that audience is most people, sadly
Nothing is "an apocalypse" for anything.
JFC, people, stop pushing these extreme opinions on AI. It is not simultaneously the solution to everything and the end of the world. It's just a goddamn tool.
I think the argument in this context it’s more about how Google is acting as a company, and less about how the underlying technology is dangerous.
Like Google clearly intends to turn off the web traffic to anyone who isn’t them. They want to maximize the amount of time users are spending on their page, seeing ads served directly by them. With their ad monopoly liable to get broken up in court, they won’t be able to monopolize advertising on other websites, so they’re just going to prevent people from going to other websites.
The fall out for smaller websites, news, blogs, ect, will be that suddenly a lot of their traffic is going to disappear because Google is no longer sending people to them, instead Google will scrape their pages and then just give that information directly to users. It will be an apocalypse to those making information to put on the internet.
Search engines are already basically worthless, so I'm not surprised with the falling axe.
The shift from search engines actually indexing things to search through to trying to parse a question and find an answer has been the most irritating trend for me. I remember when you could just put in a series of words and be delivered unto every indexed page that had all of them.
Now I regularly get told that even common words don't exist if I insist that, no, google I do want only searches with the words I put in.
This is my old person rant, I guess. /s
This change is probably going to cause huge problems for a lot of existing sites, especially because it means Google will probably start changing their advertising model now that they can consolidate the views into a specific location and pocket the money. The article mentions this, but doesn't realize the implications.
"The internet will still be around," is only true if you hold that the super consolidated, commericalized nexus of doom is going to continue on just fine, while countless small, very useful websites made by actual people for actual reasons fade away into oblivion.
It sucks to watch something I have loved my whole life die, but it's going bit by bit because we can't convince our politicians to do anything about it.
I think Google is doing this specifically because of the anti trust trial against their ad monopoly/monopsony.
Like they’re clearly loosing the trial and that means they’re probably going to have to sell off parts of their advertising company, or at least massively alter how they operate to end the anti competitive practices.
It used to be that Google made money on every user, even if they left the site, because they served all the ads on every other site as well. Now that they won’t be making money that way, so they don’t want people going to other sites anymore.
Isn't this site proof that the internet doesn't have to die as a whole? I mean, I agree with your sentiment, but I feel that this will mostly hit the middle to high traffic sites. The community based ones with organic discovery will remain OK I think. This might even evolve back to an early internet age of smaller hobbyist sites because there no longer is big money in the internet (apart from what google captures as "their" internet)
Can someone please break this company up into pieces?
As hyperbolic as this title sounds... This will basically make Google into even more of a monopolistic power than it has been. It's the zero-click web: you Google a question, you read the Google AI result, then you remain on Google.
For the average boomer with a computer, this is basically 50% of the internet. The other 50% is Facebook and maybe ESPN. The most popular computers run like molasses, chugging at every click. And any website that doesn't fit within this tightly walled garden has either been choked out of existence or is so laden with advertisements that it forces the average user to run back to the relatively comfortable walled garden.
(I'm summarizing that last paragraph - using what's left of my human Intelligence - from a section of a much better Ed Zitron article.)
Why the fuck people still use Google? Seriously? Is it just lazyness and old habit of defaulting to Google or is it just "whatever is the default in browser" which is Google in 99% of times?
I've been on DuckDuckGo and recently Qwant for at least 8+ years now and I don't miss Google one single bit.
I have used Presearch for years, decentralized search engine, powered by blockchain technology.
Presearch is not fully decentralized.
All the services that manage advertising, staking/marketplace/rewards functionality, and unnamed "other critical Presearch services" are all "centrally managed by Presearch" according to their own documentation.
The nodes that actually help scrape and serve content are also reliant on Presearch's centralized servers. Every search must go through Presearch's "Node Gateway Server," which is centrally managed by them. That removes identifying metadata and IP info.
That central server then determines where your request goes. It could be going to open nodes run by volunteers, or it could be their own personal nodes. You cannot verify this due to how the structure of the network works.
Presearch's search index is not decentralized. It's a frontend for other indexes. (e.g. it outsources queries to other search engines, databases, and APIs for services it's configured to use) This means it does not actually have an index that is independent from these central services. I'll give it a pass for this since most search engines are like this today, but many of them are developing their own indexes that are much more robust than what Presearch seems to be doing.
This node can return results to the gateway. There doesn't seem to be any way that the gateway can verify that what it's being provided is actually what was available on the open web. For example, the node could just send back results with links that are all affiliate links to services it thinks are vaguely relevant to the query, and the gateway would assume that these queries are valid.
For the gateway to verify these are accurate, it would have to additionally scrape these services itself, which would render the entire purpose of the nodes pointless. The docs claim it can "ensure that each node is only running trusted Presearch software," but it does not control the root of trust, and thus it has the same pitfalls that games have had for years trying to enforce anticheat (that is to say, it's simply impossible to guarantee unless presearch could do all the processing within a TPM module that they entirely control, which they don't. Not to mention that it would cause a number of privacy issues)
A better model would be one where nodes are solely used for hosting to take the burden off a central server for storing the index, and chunks sent to nodes would be hashed, with the hash stored on the central server. When the central server needs a chunk of data based on a query, it sends a request, verifies the hash matches, then forwards it to the user, thus taking the storage burden off the main server and making the only cost bottleneck the bandwidth, but that's not what Presearch is doing here.
This doesn't make Presearch bad in itself, but it's most definitely not decentralized. All core search functionality relies on their servers alone, and it simply adds additional risk of bad actors being able to manipulate search results.
Yeah! I used DDG for quite a while and it's pretty okay. Kagi definitely isn't without fault but for me it's the best true alternative to Google and I happily pay for it. Allows me to save so much time (cumulatively) by just guiding me to the actual result in most cases (instead of sponsored and ad-infested garbage sites)
I've been using DDG for a bit, and honestly, it's kinda garbage. They are just borrowing data from Bing, and it shows.
I'd actually found them to be better than Google for a while, but coincidentally after the AI craze started really taking off, search quality significantly degraded. Maybe that's not so much of a coincidence after all.
Add Stract.com it is a little behind in web crawling of current info, but the results are like how google used to be around 2010. Just relevant content info, no ads (yet) and occasional randomness
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
87 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
39165 readers
175 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS