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this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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This won't last long. It's too public now. Google will find a way to kill it and force their AI on you as much as possible.
Google's too smart for that. They know there's a big backlash against AI in the tech savvy crowd and that it's bleeding users to competitors. So they offer this escape valve that they know the techies will easily find and use, but which 99% of the population will never even look for. This way they can still push AI on almost everyone while at the same time retain as many disgruntled techies as they can.
Google kills its golden goose search engine and is thought here up be too smart to disable a workaround... I'm doubtful.
But it's not a workaround. This Web-Filter is a function that Google offers by choice. It's in the menu on the search page.
You're giving them a lot more credit than is probably warranted. They've killed off so many popular things and workarounds that really cost them nothing to leave available for the tech savvy they've very much shut down to force people to use the systems they want to push.
googie hasn't been tech savvy friendly for a while now
I can think of a couple examples, like leaving the boot loader unlocked on their pixel phones. You might be right though.
Ok. But what benefit would they gain by forcing people into AI search? That's not rhetorical, I'm legitimately asking. Are you saying this is just about controlling the experience? Because they already did, and all this is doing is weakening that control. It's certainly not easier or more cost-effective. They'll get LLM training data from either interface. The other things they shut down cost them development or maintenance or even just server space, but even if they managed 100% adoption of AI search they'll still need to maintain their old platform as a data source for the AI and for the below-page results. So what financial incentive do they have to push people to a more expensive, less-liked endpoint for that data?
I've given up trying to understand what benefit companies like googie get from most of the shitty consumer-hostile decisions they make. You'll have to ask them when they inevitably shut that down what they get from doing that.
Learning what their profit motives are is helpful in the future, so that you can learn how to extract value from the corporation. This is the game in a capitalist hellscape: figure out how to get more out of them than they get out of you.
Yeah, my problem though is that I think about actual profitability when I try that while they're playing a game of shells moving and manipulating quarterly profits to make a company look profitable so they can cut and run while the the company burns behind them
Then there's whatever the fuck companies like Microsoft and Apple and googie are doing that seem like horrible ideas to me that nobody seems to like and yet it never seems to hurt their bottom line enough to stop.
At this point I honestly think the only reason those three are still profitable is they've cornered their area of the market and there's just nobody for their customers to move to in adequate numbers to make a difference
But, I'm pretty jaded at this point... Maybe you're right and the googe will leave that workaround. At this point it won't matter to me because I don't use their search anymore and don't think I ever will again, and I certainly don't trust any new tech coming from them to not be dragged out back and shot the second I start to rely on it, so I just don't bother anymore
Why should they? The Web-Filter is a function that Google implemented themselves. It's not a secret trick or something.
lol it's just what happens when you click More -> Web which is something they just introduced like a week or two ago. I'm all for hating on tech giants, but comments like this go beyond cynicism/jadedness and go right to conspiracyville.