Comment by mrdependable
1 day ago
They want to capture more of the value that was previously going to others. That's basically what this has all been leading to. Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own? Now they are going to do the same to e-commerce. Either they are going to let customers buy their products through Google's interface, or they won't be discovered. No more ownership of the customer relationship. Stores will be a backend warehouse and manufacturer now with Google taking a percentage of all profits.
> Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own?
I think this is a step beyond that - why should people be creating cooking websites when you can ask LLM how to cook given thing, while indeed, serving their own ads. It's the continuation of "we own content other people produce" policy
recall the pizza sauce glue trick, to stop cheese from sliding off.
there are other such goodies like mashed potatoes with broken lightbulb gravy, or fiberglass omelette, enjoyed by beldar conehead.
i wouldnt trust an AI for any recipe that i dont have personal experience with.
the safety rails are not very strong yet.
If you are half decent at cooking it is actually pretty helpful to explore cooking something new. Just like coding it is nice to get specific answers to your specific question and it is pretty easy to reason about the quality using your own experience.
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I agree and this response was following OPs example. But the point still stands - the goal is to outsource, in a weird way, the results being served = Google as such wouldn't need to pay for content. Now, if accuracy of such sources doesn't matter (or is good enough) for casual user...
Given most cooking or recipe websites have been AI slop for a few years now......
I'll stick with my mom's handwritten recipe book.
There are virtually no combinations of food which are toxic, you can mix any food with any food and, while it might not be good, it will still be food. (The only exception I know of is alcohol and mushrooms containing coprine, e.g. inky caps)
Point is, unless you're stupid enough to add glue or broken glass to your meal just because a recipe told you to, it's perfectly safe. More than just safe, LLM recipes these days are utterly boring in their normalacy, and, unlike cookbook recipes, can dynamically adapt to what you actually have in your pantry.
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Google already killed cooking websites - when it refused to show them in search unless they added long slop content to it. And it killed blogosphere when it decided blogs wont be found if they just contain content without deliberate SEO play.
And I think the rest of it will end the same way. People will be significantly less eager to do all that free work when no one will be able to find it.
You can also tell the LLM exactly what you have in the fridge or what allergies you have and get customized recipes. It’s just a better experience, 2026 is rough for a recipe site.
Would you trust the tool that recommended putting glue on pizza to give you a good recipe?
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This video tells me otherwise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDQds7VZkfg ( Cold Ones - We Drank AI's Horrible Cocktail Ideas). This is a tongue in cheek response though, as LLMs improved significantly since then.
Is this mushroom edible.jpg
> You can also tell the LLM exactly what you have in the fridge or what allergies you have and get customized recipes.
Can you really though? Are the results delicious? I've never tried that.
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> You can also tell the LLM exactly what
You can - but it's not advisable, not in the least.
It is the same thing as when they pushed for AMP. They wanted to prevent traffic from leaving google.com then too.
In that case at least they could point out that end users got better results with AMP than they do with news sites w/o ad blockers. The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it.
> The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it
They believe they won’t be wrong for long.
The results are not wrong, they are AI. Google wants that to become a distinct thing that is neither. What's a better answer for Google than one that generates more usage? If we all push in the same direction we can make AI work, we just need to accept we will need to hold its hand for a while.
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Maybe it's high time to burn it all down.
Block Googlebot from your sites.
Let's go back to webrings.
It's certainly long been clear that Google is phasing out even the idea that they serve end-users "links" to other websites. They're just refining the idea and making it more and more explicit. It absolutely places them in an obviously adversarial position to every single other website on the Internet, and anyone who continues to cooperate with Google today is probably handing Google the tools to put them out of business. Unfortunately, whole generations of people have grown up learning that the safest and easiest way to navigate to a website is to type some version of the brand into their browser (which Google likely owns outright) and click the first thing Google spits back, so Google enters this battle holding most of the cards :(
Also — it's objectively a better search product to give users what they're looking for right away.
Though that's not to say they're acting altruisticly here.
Google seems to be racing toward a new dark pattern where users learn to trust rely on the AI for neutral, smart objectively correct answers — which boosts trust in its sponsored product recommendations. Super gross.
Exactly! They also have been letting the results of google search get seriously degraded by ads. Would many people prefer AI over google search circa 2010?
They killed their competition and now they will give you the product that gives them the most money.
Why would anyone go to google anymore tho? If it doesn't furnish results it's just a chatbot
I would assume that they've A/B-tested any such important change extensively and basically know that it won't affect their numbers for the worse.
Given my own time at google, I highly doubt these a/b tests are constructed to actually yield a better product rather than push pet products
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This has been their MO with their search for a decade+ now. "Native" results hiding actual search results below the fold killed many 2010s era websites that relied on search traffic.
"Greed is bad"