I’m furious today! Because enough is enough! And I have a message for everyone in tech: At what point did you actually think we needed AI in our browsers and search engines? At what point did someone decide that people had forgotten how to read? That three lines churned out by some obscure algorithm were going to replace the work of someone who spent hours building quality content?

Nobody asked for this crap! And you did it anyway! AI everywhere in our search engines and browsers. Most of the time at the expense of our privacy. And most of the time for features that are completely pointless. You did this without asking, without warning, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Well, it’s not! It’s just unacceptable! And that’s exactly what I’m going to call out in this article.

I’m also going to offer some radical solutions to defend ourselves against this assault. And I mean assault! Yes, this is absolutely an assault that hits both web users and content creators. So as far as I’m concerned, if you come at me don’t expect me to turn the other cheek. Listen up, tech people: Don’t forget that without users and without content creators you are nothing! Absolutely nothing! You owe us everything and we don’t owe you a damn thing! Now that that’s clear, let’s dig in.

Google, Bing and Now GPT: How American Companies Are Rigging Search Results for Their Own Benefit

Coming from Google and Bing, we’re honestly not surprised. Those two have always played the same game, pushing up sites that pay to appear while burying independent sites with no ad budget. That’s their business model, built on censorship that doesn’t dare speak its name, and we’ve known it for a long time.

Their algorithms are not neutral. They serve a rigged system. And don’t even get us started on sites that challenge libertarian ideology, like sites that criticize Big Tech, anticapitalist sites, and alternative media that asks the real questions… Those get pushed so far down the search results they practically cease to exist. In the end, why risk outraging the public with official censorship when you can just quietly limit the audience? The question is on the table.

As if that weren’t enough, with the arrival of GPT Search and generative AI baked directly into search engines, we’ve crossed an even more alarming line. Now it’s not just the order of search results that’s being shaped. The content itself is being filtered, summarized, and reinterpreted by a machine before it ever reaches you. A machine trained by American corporations, with their own biases and their own agendas front and center. From now on, if you don’t make a conscious effort, you’re operating in complete darkness. Instead of results, Big Tech serves up on a silver platter exactly what it has decided you should or shouldn’t know. This crude manipulation is leading us straight toward the death of the independent web.

Internet Search Is a Common Good, Not a Market!

Internet search should be a public service! Sure, someone will call that a communist idea. Well, I own it and I couldn’t care less! Because the real question is: Who should control the gateway to the web?

Richard Stallman, Aaron Swartz, Tim Berners-Lee… None of these giants of the digital world built the foundations of a free web so that three American corporations could claim them as their own private cash machine. Berners-Lee invented the web and gave it as a gift to humanity. Swartz fought his whole life for freedom of access to information, right up until it killed him. Stallman has been shouting for forty years that free software is not optional but a political necessity.

And yet we let Google become the sole gateway to the web. We let a private company, funded by advertising, decide what exists and what doesn’t on the internet. That is the real scandal! This is not some fringe political question. It’s a question of democratic survival.

Ecosia, Firefox, Brave, DuckDuckGo: We Really Liked You, But…

The most painful part of all this is the behavior of the so-called alternative search engines and browsers. Because Google and Bing, we crossed those off our list a long time ago. But you others, you were our alternatives. You were the ones carrying the values of the free web, privacy, and respect for the user. So we were happy to recommend you to our readers, our friends, and our families.

But you did exactly what we were running away from with Big Tech. Exactly the same thing! AI summaries here, an integrated assistant there, an AI window popping up without anyone asking for it… Firefox embedding Microsoft’s Copilot in its sidebar. Ecosia summarizing your articles for you while it plants trees. Brave shoving Leo AI into the browser. DuckDuckGo with its AI Answers turned on by default… This list just makes me sick!

We’re not going to declare war on you for it. We have to admit, you help a lot of people discover NovaFuture. Genuinely, thank you for that. But we’re going to tell you the truth as friends: You missed a historic opportunity! You had a unique card to play, being resolutely different, resolutely human, resolutely on the side of users and resolutely on the side of content creators. Instead, you chose to blindly follow the herd. So we just hope this was a momentary lapse and that you’ll all get your act together. Right?

AI Summaries in Search Engines Are a Declaration of War Against Content Creators

What exactly is an AI summary in a search engine? Here’s how it works: A machine takes someone’s work, digests it, spits out three lines, and displays them for you without you ever needing to visit the original site. The content creator never sees your visit. They never see any return on their work. Simply because they no longer exist. So their search ranking collapses, their visibility disappears, and their hours of work go straight in the trash. Meanwhile the AI helps itself without asking permission and without giving anything back.

An article on NovaFuture is not some throwaway thing. It’s hours of research, writing, fact-checking, and formatting. It’s written with two layers of love: the love of writing and the love of sharing. Every long article is long for three reasons: Because the subject deserves it! Because the full picture simply doesn’t fit in three lines. Because cutting corners is betrayal. And when a machine decides for you that you don’t need to read the original, it’s not doing you a favor. It’s stealing from you an experience, a nuance, a shared emotion, and a complete thought.

And on opinion pieces it gets even worse! An AI summary on a political, social, or philosophical topic will systematically steer toward whatever reinforces your existing views, toward consensus, toward whatever offends nobody… In short, it’s just an automated echo chamber. Not to mention that a summary can be incredibly easy to manipulate. You’ll never know since you didn’t read the original content and instead trusted three lines produced by a machine whose biases and true intentions you know nothing about. Bottom line: everyone needs to relearn how to actually read!

How to Block AI Scrapers to Protect Your Site and Take Back Control as a User

Let’s start with the technical reality. The major AI systems couldn’t care less about your robots.txt file. It’s a convention, not a law. It’s the equivalent of putting a “No Entry” sign on an open door. Blocking at the .htaccess level is already more serious, but it gets bypassed more and more easily. The reason is that bots keep changing their user-agent and IP to get around blocks. They’ll even impersonate web browsers. In short, it’s a never-ending cat-and-mouse game.

The real solution is dynamic blocking at the server level. An intelligent system that analyzes request behavior in real time, detects the characteristic patterns of scraper bots, and automatically blocks them before they’ve swallowed anything. It works. But unfortunately it’s only available to those who have a VPS or dedicated server and who really know what they’re doing. For shared hosting it’s a dead end, you simply don’t have access to that level of configuration.

So we’re putting out a call to developers because the web desperately needs simple, accessible, and effective tools. Like plugins for CMS platforms that implement these dynamic blocking strategies without the webmaster needing a PhD in system administration. It’s doable and doesn’t have to be complex. So this is a shoutout to the developers who honor us with their presence here. We don’t have the capacity to go all-in on a project like this ourselves. But we’re happy to contribute at our level if needed. What we’ve observed so far is that only algorithms can effectively fight harmful algorithms. Anything static simply doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t work for long.

Now, on the user side. If you haven’t done it yet, we encourage you to disable AI summaries in the settings of each search engine and browser where that’s possible. Switch to clean alternatives like Searx, Marginalia, Mojeek, or Librewolf. But above all don’t stay silent… Make noise! On social media, on forums, and by emailing publishers directly. Tell Firefox, Ecosia, Brave, and DuckDuckGo loud and clear that you don’t want their AI. That you chose their tools precisely to escape this kind of thing and that you feel betrayed… In short, you need to apply as much pressure as possible because it’s a method that works. While your silence only makes the problem worse.

AI Is Just a Tool. We’re Not Here to Put Software on Trial.

The world is not black and white. And we’d be dishonest to claim that AI is absolute evil. A tool is a tool. It all depends on who’s holding it and for what purpose.

AI to accelerate scientific research, to help doctors make more accurate diagnoses, to improve weather forecasting and better anticipate climate disasters… We’re 100% for it. Without hesitation. That’s exactly the kind of use case that justifies years of research and billions invested in this technology. It’s useful, it’s concrete, and it can genuinely improve lives.

On the other hand, AI used to surveil people, to scrape content creators’ work without asking or paying them, to steal artists’ work and regurgitate it in their place, to summarize other people’s thinking and make people increasingly passive and dependent… That’s a hard no! And this harmful AI needs to be fought right now, not in ten years when it’s even more deeply embedded in our habits and our tools.

The difference between the two? It’s very simple. In the first case AI serves humanity. In the second, humanity serves the AI and the commercial interests of those who control it. We are squarely facing an enormous choice as a society.

Thinking You’ll Save Time With AI Is a Massive Illusion

We’re going to be straight about this because it matters. On paper AI should save you time. Except that in practice it’s far more complicated than that. Because if you use AI seriously, you can’t afford to trust it blindly. No exceptions: every claim must be verified. Every number must be cross-checked. Every source must be validated. Because AI hallucinates, invents, confuses, oversimplifies… and does all of this with a straight-faced confidence that would make any professional liar look like an amateur. And if you don’t check everything thoroughly, your credibility is reduced to zero. So in the end, the time savings just aren’t there.

And on top of that there’s a new problem. The web is filling up at a terrifying speed with AI-generated content. Articles, analyses, complete guides, in-depth studies… all of it produced in industrial quantities, without thought, without expertise, and without any soul. So when you do research for work, you now have to be wary of that too. Sorting the real from the synthetic is an extra layer of work we didn’t have before. So in the end the time saved on one side is lost on the other. And not many people are saying that out loud.

What If We Built Our Own Search Engine?

Yeah we know what you’re thinking. Same old story, but then what do we actually do about it? Nothing, like always? Well here’s our answer:

What if we built our own independent search engine? A truly 100% free and 100% open source search engine. We’re not joking! We’re talking about a real, buildable, genuinely useful project. Not some geeky pipe dream. But a tool that serves users and content creators.

The concept I have in mind is a hybrid between a classic search engine and a collaborative directory. And for the interface, a completely stripped-down look. Just a search field and a submit button. Like Google in 1998 before it became the devil despite its grand promises. Remember? “Don’t be evil.” We all got a good laugh out of that one, because we immediately knew exactly how it was going to go.

Technically, let’s be serious about this. The crawler is Scrapy in Python: robust, scalable, and battle-tested. It crawls the web and at the same time evaluates each site against clear, transparent criteria. The index is stored in PostgreSQL. Simple, reliable, and easily auditable.

The scoring system is the heart of the project. Each site gets a score based on weighted criteria. Adwords, Bing, or other ad network detected via DOM analysis? Not indexed. Trackers identified by cross-referencing EasyList and EasyPrivacy? Not indexed. Content massively generated by AI detected via a homegrown trained classifier or an API like GPTZero? Not indexed. Garbage belongs in the trash, not in this search engine.

For cases that are hard to catch automatically, like scam sites, borderline content… we add a layer of collaborative human curation. A community that flags, validates, and filters out… Not an opaque algorithm making all the calls behind closed doors. Instead, human beings exercising oversight in full transparency. That gives you a hybrid system that combines the power of the machine with the intelligence of the collective.

The backend could run on Flask or FastAPI since both are lightweight and high-performance. With an open API so anyone can contribute, fork, or improve. A VPS is enough to get started. The architecture would be modular so it can scale as the community grows. Everything is self-hostable, decentralizable, and free.

Is it simple? No! Is it impossible? Absolutely not! It just takes motivation, skills, and infrastructure. But above all it takes people who are sick of putting up with this and who’d rather build something. I’m sure that resonates with you 😉

You Code? You’ve Got Infrastructure? You Want to Moderate? Let’s Talk on NovaFlow!

This call is dead serious. We’re not daydreaming out loud. We’re laying the groundwork for a beautiful project that can become real if the right people step up.

Do you code in Python? Do you know crawling, indexing, and data processing? Do you have a server running and bandwidth to contribute to a project that actually means something? Are you a sysadmin, developer, designer, or simply someone who’s fed up with putting up with this and wants to help build something clean?

Then come discuss it on NovaFlow. We’ll lay the groundwork together. The architecture, the priorities, the first steps… Because a project like this isn’t built alone, it’s built with a motivated community of people who share the same values and are ready to roll up their sleeves. Nothing can stop us. Truly nothing. Except a lack of will. And we don’t think that’s your problem.

Conclusion: Speaking Honestly to Move Forward

From the bottom of my heart, I spent several hours putting this article together. The only thing that motivated me was thinking that if this can help even one person feel a little less alone in what they’re thinking, that would be a real satisfaction for me. This is NovaFuture, and sometimes we might come across as a couple of Don Quixotes fighting windmills. I think that myself sometimes. But it passes quickly, because I remind myself that at least we have the decency not to give up and that the monsters we’re fighting are very real. And that in the end we’ll win because we have nothing to lose, not even anything to gain except our stolen freedom.

No AI will ever be able to summarize this feeling for you. No AI will ever truly care about who you are. No AI will ever tell you how to change the system. Only real human exchanges can move us toward something better. At my core, I’m basically a geek who could probably be called antisocial. Fair enough. But this time I genuinely wanted to share what’s really on my mind and drop the serious face of the guy hammering away at code in his Linux terminal. So thank you for reading all the way to this ending that is only the beginning of a story that keeps writing itself in the depths of the underground web. No matter how many of us there are, all that matters is standing together around the idea that another world is possible. So see you very soon for concrete action.