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).
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.
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
>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.