> De-googlifying your mental apparatus becomes more urgent today. Find other search engines, don’t use the Chrome browser. Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment where your access to information is limited to what Google’s synthetic text extruders deem relevant.

Everything is probably re-traceable fairly easily because Google Analytics is on nearly every web page.

But I understand maintaining your own source of archives, videos, documents, etc.

Sounds like a good vibe coding project actually.. to try and keep it all organized offline.

Google made an egalitarian web, where money doesn't matter and attention does. A currency that everyone on Earth richest to poorest has a roughly equal amount of. I think almost everyone takes that for granted, and focuses purely on the negatives (you're not paying, therefore you are the product, kept in place by bait we call services)

On the flip side, and I'm all for it, we can go to everything paywalled. The downside of course will be a whole class of people who cannot afford to participate on the internet. But these service providers will be working for you, the customer.

Pick your poison.

> The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information.

Google’s Vision since they were founded:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful

They told everyone what they were doing the whole time

If it's so bad, people won't use it. If it's good, why be against it ?

You don't write post to reach the biggest amount of people, you do because you're passionate and ultimately you get people following you.

If average Joe doesn't go on your website, what's the big deal ?

I think this feature will be very useful to fight back on the optimized SEO hell that we currently have.

Websites brought this on themselves. Have you tried visiting one? Popups upon popups upon ads upon cookie banners upon notification permission prompts. I’m not going to miss that. Nobody is going to miss that.

Think of AI distillation as some kind of improved Reader Mode feature.

People never wanted to visit your website; they just wanted the information that your website held. Now they can get to the meat without having to deal with the bones.

A nice, terse, little rant. I agree completely.

I surprised however, that it didn't describe phase 2 of the disaster, where in the models no longer have fresh www content to train on.

It's hard to understand the long term vision of this strategy...

Google declared war on blogs and other content long time ago, when it used our websites to harvest data to target readers with ads accross the entire internet. We used to have (for twenty years!) medical technology website for MDs. How can we compete with short unrelated YouTube videos or other spam content that serve Google ads targeting doctors? How do you think the entire creative blogosphere of the early 2000s collapsed into nothingness?

Well, they are kind of desperate after missing both cloud and AI.

I would blame trash like Discord more though. Alternative search engines are available, but the crappy little web chat hides info inside.

It is not just about replacing search results with text blurbs generated on Alphabet premise either. They're making it so that unless you have an Android certified (Or Apple) smartphone you will not be a human being, you will be assumed to be a bot and blocked by their captchas.

cotent is dying