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This is no different than the decades-old technique of "cloaking", to fool crawlers from Google and other search engines.

I fail to see the value in doing this.

"Oh hey everybody! I set up a website which presents different content to a crawler than to a human ..... and the crawler indexed it!!"




> This is no different than the decades-old technique of "cloaking", to fool crawlers from Google and other search engines. Isn't this more "Hey, why is this website giving my NotebookLM different info than my own browser?" You reading Page_1 and the machine is "reading" a different Page_2, what's the difference between that information?

I'm reading this less as

> "We serve different data to Google when they are crawling and users who actually visit the page"

and more

> "We serve the user different data if they access the page through AI (NotebookLM in this case) vs. when they visit the page in their browser".

The former just affects page rankings, which had primarily interfaced with the user through keywords and search terms -- you could hijack the search terms and related words that Google associated with your page and make it preferable on searched (i.e. SEO).

The latter though is providing different content on access method. That sort of situation isn't new (you could serve different content to Windows vs. Mac, FireFox vs. Chrome, etc.), but it's done in a way that feels a little more sinister -- I get 2 different sets of information, and I'm not even sure if I did because the AI information is obfuscated by the AI processes. I guess I could make a browser plugin to download the page as I see it and upload it to NotebookLM, subverting it's normal retrieval process of reaching out to the internet itself.




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