Comment by jruohonen
9 days ago
It affects science too (and there you'd want solid archiving as much as possible). Increasingly, meta-data is full of errors and general purpose search engines for science are breaking down, including even things like Google Scholar. I suppose some big science publishers are blocking AI bots too.
Google ruined its own search engine on top of that as well though.
We are increasingly becoming blind. To me it looks as if this is done on purpose actually.
Did Google ruin it, or did advesarial activity between Google's algorithm and SEO ruin it? The latter seems more likely because the incentives make sense, and also inevitable.
Google ruined it, maximizing ad sales no matter the outcomes. SEO adapted to Google, Google adapted only to maximize their own profits.
In practice, Doubleclick acquired Google, so they now cover both sides of the adversity.
It was. Advertising is incompatible with accurate data retrieval/routing. We've also implemented "obligation to deindex". So providing an unbiased index of the web as she is is essentially (in the U.S.) verboten.
> I suppose some big science publishers are blocking AI bots too.
That's a travesty, considering that a huge chunk of science is public-funded; the public is being denied the benefits of what they're paying for, essentially.
The public can still access the sites themselves.
> The public can still access the sites themselves.
Indefinitely? Probably not.
What about when a regime wants to make the science disappear?
9 replies →
If anyone wants the surreal experience of seeing blogs and websites made by real humans they should check out https://marginalia-search.com
It's far from perfect but it does achieve its stated goal: of resurfacing real people on the internet.
It recently got some NLNet funding and I hope to see it flourish - to my knowledge there aren't any other projects trying to claw back control of the internet towards the commons.
https://about.marginalia-search.com
Thank god for pubmed and deterministic search operators.
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