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Google Search’s Death by a Thousand Cuts

Matt Rickard reminds us that it’s worth considering the long-term effects that putting public APIs behind paywalls might have on search engines:

Large models are trained on public data scraped via API. Content-heavy sites are most likely to be disrupted by models trained on their own data. Naturally, they want to restrict access and either (1) sell the data or (2) train their own models. This restriction prevents (or complicates) Google’s automatic scraping of the data for Search (and probably for training models, too). Google will lose results, site by site—it will be Google Search’s death by a thousand cuts.