Google and AI are Destroying the Internet as We Know It

I want to share with you the state of the internet and what’s happening to your favorite independent websites.

Originally Published 1 June 2024.

Update 1 September 2024: Mid August Google began rolling out a search algorithm update that they claimed would help small independent websites. Since then the traffic to this site has decreased even further than described in this post!

Update: 6 November 2024: This site has been relegated to page 2 of Google’s search results for most of the search terms that we used to be in the top 3 or 4 results.

This post is of course outside of the content that I usually share, but I feel it is very important for you to see this info! It is presented as a public service and in an attempt to get info out to the general public regarding what is taking place with the online landscape. People who are not part of the online content creation community might not be aware of the serious issues currently being caused by Google and the recent advent of AI (large language models as they are called).

This is a story of greed and change. Change is of course inevitable, but unmanaged or unethical change is bad for everyone.

But First

First it is important to note, that nothing is free on the internet as many claim, I wrote a post on this many years ago. It costs me quite a bit to run this website, in fact my costs to run a commercial level website like this are well into 5 digits, that’s before travel for research and pictures! You think your Disney vacation is expensive? Now multiply that by 4 to 6 times and you’ll see what my travel costs are like each year. I don’t run this website to make a profit, I can’t. I just want to help my community and to cover my costs.

I and all other commercial level websites rely on advertising income, affiliate relationships, and in some instances sales of products to be able to provide information at the level that we do. We need traffic to come to the site to generate that income.

The unwritten code of the internet going all the way back has been, that if you create good content that your readers like and need, the search engines (Google) will send traffic to you. This has worked well historically. However, Google is not bound or required to send traffic to any site, and slowly over the last few years and very rapidly the last couple of months they have stopped doing so.

Many of your favorite independent, non-corporate websites are in crisis. In the groups that I participate in, some of the content creators have shared that they have had to lay off staff (if they had any) and others have just quit entirely, stopped creating content so that they could go get jobs.

This is a long read, skip to How You Can Help

Google – Greed

When the internet came into being, it was small. The few users at the time would simply type the web or IP address of their desired content. These addresses for the few places they visited perhaps came from memory, a written or printed list, or a digital document. As the internet exploded with content there was no way to find new or desired content, so search engines were invented to catalog what was online and display results in a usable format based on your search criteria.

There were many search engines, some long gone now, remember: AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Dogpile, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, or WebCrawler to name a few? A whole post could be dedicated to how Google became THE internet’s search engine being used for more than 90% of all searches worldwide today, but we’ll stick to the point.

Google is divided into many divisions and products like Ads, Search, Google Earth, the Waze app, and so much more. Relevant to this story are Ads and Search.

In February of 2019 [1] the Google Ads Department generated a company wide crisis over the lack of search query growth on Google’s search platform. Meaning revenue was not growing as they desired.

Note over 75% of Google’s income comes from serving ads on their own search pages (as opposed to the ads they serve on other websites and in apps). They get 100% of the revenue for ads on their site, and just a fraction of revenue for ones served on other’s sites.

Due to this “crisis” the Google Search Department was forced to make many changes incrementally over the coming years to increase search queries on Google and to please the Ads Department.

Some of these changes included:

• Rolling back tweaks to their search algorithms that had improved search results – Making Results Worse (if you don’t find what you need with the first search, you’ll search again and receive more displayed ads).
• Making ads look more like actual search results.
• Increasing the number of ads on a search result page. The more ads on a search results page, the further down the actual results are.
• Implementing various methods of displaying the answers to your search right on Google’s page, such as the summarizer (where you see a snippet of text with the answer to your question right on the search page). Sadly the summarizer has illegally stollen that copyrighted text from a website to display to you. The summarizer does provide a link back to that site, but you already have your answer (this keeps traffic from going to the website that created the answer and decreases that site’s ad revenue).
• “People Also Searched For”, “Related Searches”, or “People Also Ask” these features get you to stay on Google and search again (potentially multiple times). the goal is to keep you on google and away from independent websites.

All of this and further search algorithm updates have slowly over time decreased the traffic going to independent websites and their associated income.

In the last few months this negative trend has GREATLY accelerated.

This severe lack of traffic to independent sites is caused by:

• Displaying Google owned websites like YouTube above all of the actual search results
• Google entering into monetary relationships with other companies that results in those companies showing up above all of the actual search results (Reddit, Quara)
• E-Commerce sites displaying above all of the actual search results
• Placing links to sites with little to no experience on the topic above those with experience.

All of this has the effect of pushing all of the actual good search results so far down the search results page that you might not ever see it, let alone click on it and visit those sites. Even if we rate in the top 3 results, you might never see our link with it so far down the page.

For example I just searched for “Shades of Green Resort” on my desktop computer, the entire visible screen was taken up with 6 links to Shades of Green official pages and a People Also Ask. Then when you start to scroll you’ll see links from (keep in mind as you read this list, that until a couple of weeks ago we held the #2 spot in the search results just below Shades of Green):

• Trip Advisor
• Wikipedia
• A strip of images that links to Google Image Search Results
• Shades of Green’s Facebook Page
• The Disney Tourist Blog
• Knockabout.com, whatever that is
• 2 rows of Google image ads that link to additional google searches for Disney resorts
• Related Searches
• A Youtube (a Google Company) video from Tim Tracker
• Shades of Green’s Instagram (a Google Company)
• MouseSavers
• Trip Advisor again
• The Military Wallet
• Reddit
• The Mouse Experts (My affiliated Travel Agent)
• Yelp
• AllEars.net
• Reddit
• planDisney (an official Disney page that is not associated with Shades of Green)
• Shades of Green’s Reservation Page
• WDWinfo.com
• And finally in 20th spot (not counting pics, ads, and Googles “also” link groups) a link to Military Disney Tips.

FYI, for the majority of our 16 years online we held the number 2 spot behind the official Shades of Green pages!!! That’s because we created this niche, no one was writing about our topics when we started and for most of the last 16 years! The majority of these sites displaying above us now have no or very little experience with Shades of Green, they just copy other’s content (mine or Shades of Green’s) and rely on their domain authority to rank better.

Just how bad is this?

Prior to March 2024 this site’s income had slowly decreased to where I needed to cut back on my travel. In the last 2 months (since early March) traffic and income has so drastically decreased that it is now to the point that there is no money for travel and I’m trying to severely cut back as much as I can on the regular monthly bills for the necessities of running the site. Traffic on the site now is just 10% of what it was at the all time high prior to 2019!

This is a long read, skip to How You Can Help

And Now AI – Change

Ai is here! It’s no longer “coming.”

Slowly AI is being implemented across the spectrum of human endeavors. And just like the internet and industrial revolutions before it, there will be an exponential growth in its use creating both winners and losers. There is great anticipation of how it will affect medicine and healthcare and other areas.

I feel that while change is inevitable, it has to be smart change. Putting online creators out of business, which is what is happening, is not good! Lines of code residing in a box (an AI) can only regurgitate information (stolen information) that it has been fed. It can’t be out in the world experiencing things and forming opinions, it takes people to do that, and creators that can afford to research and share their information with you.

In 2021 all of the various companies involved in creating Large Language Models stole the entire contents of the internet to train their AIs. Against copyright law, they took the contents of Military Disney Tips and hundreds of thousands of other websites to do this. To be specific, roughly 49,000 words or phrases were taken without permission from Military Disney Tips to train Large Language Models [2].

Fast forward to today, when you ask ChatGPT, Facebook’s AI search, or Google’s brand new AI Overviews (rolled out last week [3]), or another AI a question, they will spit out a summarization based on the content that it has ingested that applies to your query.

But, ask ChatGPT about Ice Cold Hydraulics Hosted by Coca-Cola at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, it can’t tell you about it. Because this is a new location and GPT is using the stolen information from 2021. (many websites have now blocked AI bots from stealing data as MDT has).

AIs also hallucinate as it’s called, that is they will make up info and present it as factual in some cases when they do not have an actual answer for you. I have experimented with LLMs and found them doing this on Disney World topics.

AIs also can’t tell the difference between a joke, satire, or good useful information ! There are horror stories going around now of AIs providing answers to queries telling people to drink urine for kidney stones, use glue as an ingredient on your pizza (to keep the toppings from sliding off when the cheese is hot), or eating small rocks for the minerals.

The worst is yet to come, with Google just rolling out their AI Overviews, search is about to change radically. AI Overviews was designed to answer search queries quicker, when you search for something it will generate a response on the search results page – often multiple paragraphs long with a very slick presentation. These results are paraphrased from other sites, without your having to go to those sites to see their content. This sounds good in theory, but it may end up breaking the internet [4], as these sites rely on traffic to generate income so that they can put that info online in the first place.

I can’t stress enough that those in the industry believe what Google and all the AI players have done and are doing by using other’s copyrighted content to present to you or to train their LLMs is copyright theft, and highly illegal. We all deserve compensation for the data that they stole! However government moves slow and there is no regulation in this area. Also all the legal challenges to date have yet to prove legally via the correct arguments that copyright theft has occurred. We’ll have to see where this goes.

Our advertising partner, Raptive (formerly AdThrive), has taken the lead in the industry to try and combat the intellectual property theft and destruction of the internet by engaging with lawmakers and industry leaders including Google.

This is a long read, skip to How You Can Help

Other Factors

There are other negative factors that have also contributed to the drop in traffic to independent websites over the years, but they do not come to the level of Google’s intentional ruin of their search results and AI’s negative impact. Those other factors are:

• Changes in people’s browsing habits
• Mobile vs desktop browsing
• Facebook groups – Where you can ask a question and get an answer back quickly (it might even be right) without having to go to a site and read for yourself
• Reduction of traffic from Facebook – Military Disney Tips has over 42,000 followers on facebook. On average around 3100 of those followers are shown each of our individual facebook posts. Somtimes as low a 500 people see a post.
• The deprecation of 3rd Party Cookies [5] on all browsers except Chrome (coming soon to Chrome) – This makes ads less valuable to advertisers so they pay less
• For Disney sites in particular, Disney’s anti-family, leftist stance which has turned many away (we’ve received many angry emails)

What We Are Doing

First and foremost we are and will continue to pump out quality content that is interesting and needed. We will do this as long as we can based on the monetary environment.

We have tried to drastically cut our bills.

We have added weekly update newsletters between our end-of-month monthly newsletters. This gives us a little traffic boost once a week slightly improving our monthly numbers.

We have also instituted ads within our newsletters. Sorry! This makes us a little extra to go towards the bills.

We made our “Send a Tip” links more obvious on the site and newsletter.

One thing we won’t do is place our content behind a pay wall, requiring that you subscribe to see our content.

How You Can Help

The good news is there are simple ways you can continue to support MDT and the other independent websites that you love.

1. Bookmark your favorite independent sites and visit them often. Think of us regularly, save our link in your bookmarks/shortcuts and drop by for a visit often. Did you know that we publish posts 2, 3 , or more times a week? And most posts are general, interesting Disney content, not just about military discounts. Visit the home page to see lists of new posts and pages (near the top after the intro info).
2. Comment on our posts here on the site. (Not on Facebook!!! that pays Zuckerberg)
3. Subscribe to our newsletter. If you have not yet subscribed to our newsletter, you can do so right here. It’s free, it goes out about twice a week. It contains links to some of our best content and our latest posts. We don’t sell or give away your information to anybody. And if you are already a subscriber: thank you! Most important, when you get the newsletter open it and click on the links to go to the site and enjoy our content.
4. We do accept tips. I know in today’s world we see too many “add a tip” screens when checking out, but a little bit from you can help keep this site going. Tip Here.
5. Do all of your Amazon shopping from our link. If you click this Amazon Link and then save it as the shortcut that you use all the time we will get a very small percentage of your purchases. It won’t change the price that you would normally pay, it’s just a finder’s fee.
6. Use our sponsors for your Disney vacation, we partner with the Ears of Experience Travel Agency and Amusement Park Rentals for stroller and scooter rentals. We’ll get a finder’s fee at no cost to you.
7. Recommend us to your friends. Word of mouth, helpful recommendations from a trusted friend are the very best type of recommendation!
8. Feel free to share our content in groups or message boards when appropriate. If you see a social media thread or message board thread about a topic that we’ve covered, you can give us some love by linking to our pieces in the comments of those groups. If it’s not relevant, don’t — we aren’t looking to spam people, but instead to spread the word about the work we do in authentic ways.
9. Follow us on Facebook. Then click on like or make a comment on every post that you see from us!
10. Sign the Open Letter. If you agree creators’ rights and livelihoods should be protected and want to preserve quality content on the internet, make your voice heard by signing Raptive’s open letter. Anyone can sign. The letter will be presented to a number of congressional staff and reporters in DC at an event that Raptive is hosting at the end of June . We are now over 10,000 signatures!
11. Switch to an alternative search engine. There are other options to Google:
    1. Brave Browser
    2. DuckDuckGo
    3. Startpage
    4. And more
12. You can Exclude Reddit from your search results. This works on Chrome only with an add on.

I’ll close now, wishing you the best in the times to come!

Thank you for reading, and for your support!

Steve

 

Links referred to above: 

[1] The Man Who Killed Google Search

[2] Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart – Scroll 3/4 of the way down and put militarydisneytips.com in the search for website field.

[3] Google AI Overviews: More searches, less satisfaction

[4] Web publishers brace for carnage as Google adds AI answers

[5] The End of The Third-Party Cookie | All You Need To Know