A couple of years back I worked with a company which maintained specific data which was the main traffic driver on that page. Google approached them and wanted to pay for the rights to get the data and display it on top of the search results, a feature which was fairly new back then.
This was an interesting dilemma because it was very clear that the money was way less than the loss in ad revenue due to traffic drop, but it was also clear that if we wouldn’t take the deal, a more desperate competitor would, which would result in the same traffic loss but without the extra google money. So the company took the deal.
History repeats itself here, with the difference that instead of paying for the data, the ai crawlers simply take it for free.
Then we go and pay to Cloudeflare or other cloud providers you host sites with to prevent Google from scraping.
Let the big guys fight it out.
There is money in protecting the websites. If you host with OVH they are interested in you making money so you can pay them.
That's the problem with the current monopolistic system, the money won't go down the stream, it's like a dam. One big dam owned by a few people is worse than many small dams
This reminds me of Walmarts squeezing strategy with all the manufacturers. Business with us at the price we say or out of business.
But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?
In this context, if Google is going to give me the recipe without having to scroll through the story, that seems like a win to me.
The ad-revenue driven Internet of web 2.0 is finally dead and I'm not sure I'm all that sad.
But google won’t give you the recipe. It’ll give you a pretty piece of text that resembles a recipe. You’ll only find out it’s not a recipe when it fails to produce a cake.
But then, the sites it's training on are starting to do the same thing, so maybe it won’t matter. Just last night, I pulled up four sites with “gluten free almond cake” recipes. One specified less than 1/4 the flour it would have needed, and another didn’t have any butter in the ingredients list. I had to eyeball the median and tweak from experience to actually get a bakable cake out.
You don't need butter to make cake, it ends up lighter and softer without it
You need to compensate for not adding it though. The recipe without was literally the same ingredient list as the site it copied, just missing a line.
And almond flour does its thing by carmelizing in combination with butter and sugar, turning your whole cake into a sort of giant macaron. You can’t pull it off without any one of those things.
You can buy recipe books at brick and mortar stores, and they're mostly not AI slop yet.
My partner recently bought a receipe book that was probably 100% slop, from the recipes themselvea to the images for each dish.
Without some way to generate revenue, people aren't going to publish recipes (for Google to scrape into their AI.) Maybe we could live without more recipes being fed into the machine, but there are many other types of content that will suffer the same fate.
It would be nice to find something better than an ad-revenue driven web, but I'm not sure this is it. We'll find out I guess...
> people aren't going to publish recipes
Sure they are. I can attest that musicians will gladly publish their music even when no recompense is offered. Surely culinary artists are the same.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy6VMDXB2SQ
Some people will. The vast majority won’t. You are not playing for an audience, only for crawlers, so what is the point?
Those who won’t were doing it for the money. Those who continue are those who do it for passion, or those whose recipe is just a way to attract people to their business (e.g. kitchenware company). I don’t think it is necessarily bad, the quantity will decrease but the quality may even improve
We just won't get countless recipe websites where you have to scroll, scroll, scroll through slop about someone's day to read a scraped recipe that every other website has.
This is just disruption.
Does the current Google search results indicate that they will be any different?
It’s also not disruption if your product relies on the output of the industry it kills. What will AI train on when it destroys the economics of sharing information with others?
> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?
No because it's killing competition and becoming an even more obvious monopoly. Then at any occasion they have to choose between consumers and profits, they'll do what shareholders want and increase profits.
You can find many ad free recipes in the cookbooks at your local library. They're likely of higher quality as well.
> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?
No. Temporarily it’s good for the consumer. Ultimately it is bad for the consumer, because as prices drop, so to does quality.
It's not uncommon for free things to be higher quality than cheap things, especially when we're not talking about physical goods. Think hobbyist vs hack. Selective pro bono vs quantity over quality. The former describes old internet while the latter describes much ad-supported internet. I'm not saying cheap is better than expensive, and I'm not saying everything works this way, but I do think many things do, especially for pure information that doesn't have a major capital cost associated.
No, because now Google controls entirely what you see. They could decide to show you the recipe after all.
Also, at some point even the ad-laden websites will die, and then Googles sources will be extinguished.
Yep, this is exactly why some companies simply don't work with Walmart.
it's because both google and walmart have too much market power
This is tough for the manufacturer, but great for the consumer.
I think it's a good tradeoff.
A similar dilemma presents itself when blocking AI spiders.
You’re free to block them, but the websites cloning your content won’t. So either way they’ll get the content they’re after.
Worse, when/if the time comes that LLMs source their claims they’ll refer you to the websites that cloned your content.
Real-world Prisoner's Dilemma.
[dead]
It always comes back to game theory haha
That doesn't feel like a repetition at all? You said that the first time there was "traffic loss but without the extra google money", but that this time there's no extra google money either way.
The part where data providers lose traffic because their own data is displayed directly on the google premises is what repeats.
"Nice data you got there, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it"
The fact is that internet is already "tech giants own realm": the power is way beyond public imagination and affects all of us in real life on daily bases, but there are still people thinking they are not the "evil one" here.