Dear NewPipe community and other beloved creatures, You might have already noticed this: Searching “NewPipe” via Google will yield plenty information about the project, but a link to the official website is missing. This is because Google submitted to a DMCA takedown notice from a French record label, “Because Music”. The notice demands removing our homepage newpipe.net from their search listings along with a set of other domains completely unrelated to our project. The DMCA takedown notice was published in the Lumen database by Google themselves. While worse things could have happened as the result of such a takedown request, Google’s unlisting of our homepage creates a variety of problems. Given the fact that Google no longer counts visits to our site, it will lose relevance. As a result, websites for fake clones of NewPipe that mimic our homepage will tend to rank higher in the results. This could ultimately cause users to fall for such scams. The team is currently discussing what to do about the situation. We are considering taking legal action. If you are a lawyer and have experience with this and would like to help us, please contact us via email (team(at)newpipe.net). Regards, Schabi
Google is also pretty much in crisis. Since the whole Reddit debacle their SEO infested spam results pages got even more exposed. Add to that, that everyone is trying to lock their page down because google is caching a shitton of content which nets the page owners exactly 0 clicks or they even have to pay google for their amp caching.
Good.
Google abandoned the principles that made them a linchpin of mid early 2000s internet. They have betrayed the people that use their services to worship mammon in the search of the almighty dollar.
It is just and fair that scammers have utilized their own search engine optimization dark patterns to completely destroy their utility, and Google has been implicitly accepting and promoting their practices in order to sell more AdWords.
This is not a case of some high empire being besieged by barbarians at the gate. This is the consequences of the people voting for The leopards eating faces party being really upset when their faces are getting eaten by leopards.
Google needs to die so that a new search engine can arise from its ashes. AdWords needs to die so that a new consumer focused ad management system can arise from its ashes.
And honestly the current incarnation of the internet has gone through its awkward teenage phase and is now a young adult that thinks it knows what’s best for itself and everyone else and still has a lot of growing to do even though it is not aware of that.
AI is not going to save the internet. Corporations are not going to save the internet. And if the internet does not learn how to save itself it’s going to be relegated to obscurity, and instead of being a nigh-infinite collection of interesting web pages to browse through it will become merely the backbone of apps on people’s phones.