In this context, if Google is going to give me the recipe without having to scroll through the story, that seems like a win to me.
The ad-revenue driven Internet of web 2.0 is finally dead and I'm not sure I'm all that sad.
But then, the sites it's training on are starting to do the same thing, so maybe it won’t matter. Just last night, I pulled up four sites with “gluten free almond cake” recipes. One specified less than 1/4 the flour it would have needed, and another didn’t have any butter in the ingredients list. I had to eyeball the median and tweak from experience to actually get a bakable cake out.
Local bookshops are great, use them or lose them.
Later and you start seeing "Use this new processed wunderfood ingredient substitute!" (70s-00s)
The only solution is to find recipe books that were printed in previous decades.
Which is ironic, given that Google's entire value proposition (to users) was extracting signal from noise...
... and now it's come full A/B-advertising-optimization to being useless at that, when the need is greater than ever.
Imho, Google's greatest failing was missing how its own incentives warped creation of new web content, and failing to account for that strategically -- it turned the web into something it can't itself usefully parse.
Oh, maybe I should drive to the major city and check several bigger bookstores?
Or order it online? But that would be from the third country because this one is weirdly blind to variety. That will be €20 for a book and some €10 postage.
You're sure I can just get my recipe from the store?
And almond flour does its thing by carmelizing in combination with butter and sugar, turning your whole cake into a sort of giant macaron. You can’t pull it off without any one of those things.
No. It may be good for the consumer right now, but not ultimately (and on top of that, I would argue that reducing everyone to a consumer is already the wrong framing -- you need to ask what's good for the citizens). Having ten competing supermarkets with various interweaving supply lines is ultimately much better than having one giant supermarket, because that one monopolist is able to squeeze both consumers and suppliers to the detriment of both.
It would be nice to find something better than an ad-revenue driven web, but I'm not sure this is it. We'll find out I guess...
Sure they are. I can attest that musicians will gladly publish their music even when no recompense is offered. Surely culinary artists are the same.
This is just disruption.
It’s also not disruption if your product relies on the output of the industry it kills. What will AI train on when it destroys the economics of sharing information with others?
I disagree, Google doesn't rely on a massive amount of recipe websites; they rely on Google and exploit it.
More importantly: These recipes exist from many sources, not just the website that exploited Google to be first in their rankings.
In this instance, the internet is more than top-ranking recipe websites.
Nothing kills passion faster than your only audience being an AI crawler.
Also, at some point even the ad-laden websites will die, and then Googles sources will be extinguished.
No because it's killing competition and becoming an even more obvious monopoly. Then at any occasion they have to choose between consumers and profits, they'll do what shareholders want and increase profits.
No. Temporarily it’s good for the consumer. Ultimately it is bad for the consumer, because as prices drop, so to does quality.
Same reason its not good to have a "company town" where 1 company is the major employer to 50% of the workers.
I'm not saying LLMs are worthless, but I'm saying if you had a magic browser add-on that simply stripped the BS out and showed you the relevant content, it would meet the use cases of the majority of people using AI (regarding search).
Said differently, Google are bringing you a solution to a problem they (largely) created.