Reddit communities are still private in protest of new API rules. Twitter moved beyond a login wall and is rate-limiting users. Users are frustrated but still using these sites. But — what will happen to the Google Index? Millions of search results are effectively dead links. Users that refined Reddit search results via Google are now out of luck (Reddit’s search is inferior). Tweets in the search engine results page (SERP) now lead to a login wall for many users.
Google Search has been utterly useless for a long time ... It's semantically biased towards returning "ads" rathan than useful links. If you want to find something on the Internet, Google is not the first choice ... you're only going there out of habit or mental laziness.
I tend to agree: the move to being ad-heavy has been a really bad user experience. Ever since GPT 3.5, I stopped using google for almost all my searches outside of typing in the name of a sports team to quickly get scores or checking for a source for something news-related that I saw on twitter.
It's so interesting to imagine what the internet will be like when it isn't universally and easily accessible via search. If everything is behind walled gardens, we may be regressing to the early 2000s or even 90s, when you often had to know the exact addresses of the material you wanted to find. If everything is kept behind walled gardens, will we see decreases in productivity and research as the "world wide web" becomes more like the "global gated ghettos"?
This is such an incredibly disruptive period in our history. And, this is an excellent point: the stuff that makes Google Google is going away, at least to a degree. There are some really smart folks working on this problem, so it'll be cool to see what approach they try to use, but... the LLM revolution has and will continue to shake up the way we find things or figure things out. Or buy things.
Interesting thoughts. I wonder if this benefits the Web though? Being able to search it effectively for original sources is one of the things that makes it great. On the other hand I would definitely welcome some good alternatives to Google's Search monopoly. In reality, they haven't launched a GREAT product in years. They can use a kick in the butt with some competition.
Google Search has been utterly useless for a long time ... It's semantically biased towards returning "ads" rathan than useful links. If you want to find something on the Internet, Google is not the first choice ... you're only going there out of habit or mental laziness.
I tend to agree: the move to being ad-heavy has been a really bad user experience. Ever since GPT 3.5, I stopped using google for almost all my searches outside of typing in the name of a sports team to quickly get scores or checking for a source for something news-related that I saw on twitter.
It's so interesting to imagine what the internet will be like when it isn't universally and easily accessible via search. If everything is behind walled gardens, we may be regressing to the early 2000s or even 90s, when you often had to know the exact addresses of the material you wanted to find. If everything is kept behind walled gardens, will we see decreases in productivity and research as the "world wide web" becomes more like the "global gated ghettos"?
This is such an incredibly disruptive period in our history. And, this is an excellent point: the stuff that makes Google Google is going away, at least to a degree. There are some really smart folks working on this problem, so it'll be cool to see what approach they try to use, but... the LLM revolution has and will continue to shake up the way we find things or figure things out. Or buy things.
Interesting thoughts. I wonder if this benefits the Web though? Being able to search it effectively for original sources is one of the things that makes it great. On the other hand I would definitely welcome some good alternatives to Google's Search monopoly. In reality, they haven't launched a GREAT product in years. They can use a kick in the butt with some competition.
"Twitter moved beyond a login wall and is rate-limiting users." It's been claimed that this is an anti-"scrapping" measure.