RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116605858023186072
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Quick strategy discussion, for those who understand Google indexing and SEO:
If I want to yank a web site out of Google’s now-fully-extractive search, should I (1) disallow googlebot in robots.txt or (2) add `<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">` to all the page headers?
The goal here is not just to remove my contributions to the commons from Google’s results, but to •make Google aware• that sites are pulling consent. What will best do that?
2/2
@inthehands for the last ~ 18 months or so before I shut my websites down last year I just served never-ending gzip streams of null bytes to all of Google’s IP space (and anyone else identifying themselves as a crawler more generally, among a few other criteria). It didn’t take very long for Google to drop the index listing.
In particular OpenAI’s dumbass scraper just kept coming back every day for gigabytes and gigabytes of “robots.txt” and other URLs, getting a 10:1 bandwidth expansion out of gzip was quite satisfying
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RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116605858023186072
Google Search rests on a social contract: their bots can crawl our sites, they can index our sites, and they can show excerpts of our sites because
and •only because•
they send people to our sites. •Our• sites, our words, with our design, with our links, with our context and our aesthetics, shared the way we want to share them.
Google is announcing — unambiguously and with great fanfare — that they are now fully breaking that already-ragged contract. We should reciprocate.
1/2
@inthehands
We need to get together a federated search index. -
RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116605858023186072
Google Search rests on a social contract: their bots can crawl our sites, they can index our sites, and they can show excerpts of our sites because
and •only because•
they send people to our sites. •Our• sites, our words, with our design, with our links, with our context and our aesthetics, shared the way we want to share them.
Google is announcing — unambiguously and with great fanfare — that they are now fully breaking that already-ragged contract. We should reciprocate.
1/2
@inthehands Google: how do I degoogle?
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@inthehands Google: how do I degoogle?
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@inthehands It's important to note that search indexing is considered "transformative" and thus fair use *because* it does not supplant the market for the original content. That goes out the window when the product functions to capture traffic that would otherwise go to the cites. They are acting with impunity, but existing copyright law addresses this if courts find it to be not transformative.
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@inthehands I fear that when we block the bot, they'll access the site through Chrome. Getting what people browsing get. I don't know what could stop them.
@gherhartd @inthehands Use Brave browser and Brave search, or equivalent, might be one way
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@sollat @inthehands They do that already by recalculating and finding the most efficient route regardless of what you tell it to do. Google knows best. Pay no attention to the sign that says "turn back now. there has never been a bridge across this 1500 foot deep canyon."
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@inthehands meta noindex it is, definitely. robots disallow can actually hurt the process, since google cannot access the file with the noindex header and therefore won't deindex.
btw, they do indeed respect noindex and robots.txt ATM, since its qute easy to check if pages still get found. Then again, you never know what does not show up in search but is used for training (without giving credit, obv.) anyway. As far as i see, google still remains more standard compliant as e.g. OpenAI. -
@inthehands
I doubt the cynicism = surrender part. Cynicism is refusing to surrender in the face of an overly mighty enemy.@musevg dunno, could go either way. i know people who are cynical, so they don't actively impede destructive institutionalism because they have an honestly pretty accurate view of the power imbalance.
then again, i also know cynics who love to impede the movement of monoliths specifically because they are aware of that same power imbalance. -
Quick strategy discussion, for those who understand Google indexing and SEO:
If I want to yank a web site out of Google’s now-fully-extractive search, should I (1) disallow googlebot in robots.txt or (2) add `<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">` to all the page headers?
The goal here is not just to remove my contributions to the commons from Google’s results, but to •make Google aware• that sites are pulling consent. What will best do that?
2/2
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@gherhartd @inthehands Use Brave browser and Brave search, or equivalent, might be one way
@commons_protocol Brave is just Google Chrome in a fancy overcoat - it's still contributing to Google's dominance over the web (even if you ignore the other problems with it)
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Defeatism is a form of surrender. Cynicism is surrender. Despair is surrender. Nihilism is surrender.
Our job is to •care• and to •keep caring• and to •keep doing and keep building• and to •endure• longer than them.
our mission, for those who accept it, is to go out there and care about ourselves and each other enough to take our world and make it work for us all
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RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116605858023186072
Google Search rests on a social contract: their bots can crawl our sites, they can index our sites, and they can show excerpts of our sites because
and •only because•
they send people to our sites. •Our• sites, our words, with our design, with our links, with our context and our aesthetics, shared the way we want to share them.
Google is announcing — unambiguously and with great fanfare — that they are now fully breaking that already-ragged contract. We should reciprocate.
1/2
@inthehands Google? Blocked.
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RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116605858023186072
Google Search rests on a social contract: their bots can crawl our sites, they can index our sites, and they can show excerpts of our sites because
and •only because•
they send people to our sites. •Our• sites, our words, with our design, with our links, with our context and our aesthetics, shared the way we want to share them.
Google is announcing — unambiguously and with great fanfare — that they are now fully breaking that already-ragged contract. We should reciprocate.
1/2
Do they not understand that websites consenting to have their pages indexed is the sole reason their LLM's even function? Without a constant source of new human writing, the only training data Google will have is the AI generated slop the internet has been filled with over the last four years.
Soulless, empty webpages that take a mind-numbing amount of paragraphs to answer the most menial questions you can think of, all in excruciatingly little detail and utterly bland style. Merely filler for adspace, akin to the bit of fluff before a recipe, but without the intent.
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@inthehands
We need to get together a federated search index.Lets start now. How can I help?
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@commons_protocol Brave is just Google Chrome in a fancy overcoat - it's still contributing to Google's dominance over the web (even if you ignore the other problems with it)
@irina My understanding is that Brave is an independent instance and remains privacy focussed with an established, fully independent search index, remaining unaffected by Google's algorithmic updates or interface changes.
I understand it uses its own distinct features and privacy-focused architecture, without adopting Google’s specific changes.
Nevertheless, google has dominated the web for about 25 years already and I don't doubt there are systemic issues at foot either way and the whole sea is shifting!
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Quick strategy discussion, for those who understand Google indexing and SEO:
If I want to yank a web site out of Google’s now-fully-extractive search, should I (1) disallow googlebot in robots.txt or (2) add `<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">` to all the page headers?
The goal here is not just to remove my contributions to the commons from Google’s results, but to •make Google aware• that sites are pulling consent. What will best do that?
2/2
@inthehands if you want to remove it immediately, as unintuative as it sounds, claiming ownership of the site in Google Search Console will allow you to remove any URL in their index from being included in results, but only temporarily. I think you have to renew the exclude every 45 days or something link that. If a random blog excludes their content, it won't impact Google at all. If Wikipedia were to do that, the trust in the accuracy of Google's results would start to be impacted.
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RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116605858023186072
Google Search rests on a social contract: their bots can crawl our sites, they can index our sites, and they can show excerpts of our sites because
and •only because•
they send people to our sites. •Our• sites, our words, with our design, with our links, with our context and our aesthetics, shared the way we want to share them.
Google is announcing — unambiguously and with great fanfare — that they are now fully breaking that already-ragged contract. We should reciprocate.
1/2
@inthehands
"Get in, loser. We're doing web rings again." -
@gherhartd @inthehands Use Brave browser and Brave search, or equivalent, might be one way
Brave’s leadership is too personally despicable for me to consider their products
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@inthehands My site is tiny, but I had to make sure and add that into my own. I don't care if Google never happens to come across it, the idea of them using my site to train their LLM is sickening.
I also have to say, your site is absolutely gorgeous.
