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Cloudflare wants Google to change its AI search crawling. Google likely won’t. (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 24 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Cloudflare's customers probably wouldn't be on board with that. Google's properties provide a tonne of traffic to businesses. Doing anything to put that in jeopardy would probably have many of Cloudflare's customers looking for a new provider.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Google used to provide a ton of traffic, they hoard it all themselves now through AI and summaries of content. Eventually the balance of cost/benefit will shift and Google will suddenly see itself rejected from scraping, furthering the product deathspiral.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    content is only 1 category of website

    ecommerce drives all the advertising that funds content… it’s a much bigger market, and they don’t care about content scraping as long as you buy their product

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    And the long term plan there is to strangle sites and take %100 of the adrev spend for themselves since users won't ever leave the Google site. Either way Google as a search engine enters a death spiral, it's already bleeding users.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    it would need to be advertised as a change and have it as a setting that had to be set yea, just have it default blocking abusive trackers, having Google bot or whatever it's crawler name is as on there, with a toggle to allow it again

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Alternatively, you use the cloudflare money to sue the monopoly to decouple search and all other products, since blocking the AI trawlers shouldn't have any measurable impact in search rankings

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I agree, but I think that hurting the companies bottom line is more effective than waiting on an archaic court system to do something. Just look at how slow the /current/ monopoly case on google is going.

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