Yeah, the first measurements are rolling in and not looking great: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/
Basically, imagine someone built a machine that made it trivial to generate an infinite number of realistic-looking articles (=LLMs). And there’s a monetary incentive to do so (=ad money).
So, I have to imagine, all search engines are absolutely being blasted with spam content, and they have to filter out realistic-looking articles to make their search results worthwhile at all, but as a result, some real search results will also get filtered out or ranked badly.Huh. I hate advertising and think it’s brainwashing that harms our minds, increases consumerism and causes massive environmental damage and biases all content and news production.
Affiliate links are just another form of advertising.
So the solution is very easy, outlaw affiliate links. Or advertising in general. Amazon and others should no longer be allowed to offer affiliate systems. Or remove any page with affiliate page or linking to pages with affiliate pages from search results.
You can’t create rules and structures that prioritize profit and expect positive results.
for many years now – stopped using them back when they started to ignore +include, -exclude, and “phrases”
So wait, the search operators don’t work anymore? It seemed like it but is that confirmed?
They still work as intended actually, but most pages are so inundated with SEO garble that they’re effectively useless
They really don’t, though. Inclusion/exclusion operators work most of the time, but it’ll still return results with explicitly-excluded keywords. It also fucks up results by returning entries with similar words to your query, even when you double-quote a part of the search term. Advanced queries that use booleans and logical AND/OR don’t work at all anymore, that functionality has been completely removed. It returns what it thinks you want, not what you actually want, even when explicitly crafting a query to be as specific as possible.
I use Kagi for search now and it’s 1000x better, especially when researching technical issues; it’s like when Google actually respected your search terms and query as a whole.
They still work but they search the entire page, not just what’s visible in your browser. A search for
"term"does not implicate you being able to findtermon the results’ rendered pages.So pages are just including every relevant term hidden somewhere like they making resumes in the early aughts with 4pt white text with bullshit at the bottom?
A popular SEO trick around 15 years ago was to put a bunch of search terms in a heading tag near the top of your page markup and just style it to minimize its appearance, because if you completely hid it google would penalize your pagerank score. They test for visibility but it’s difficult to do so in a foolproof and futureproof way so there’s likely a similar technique still seeing some limited use today.
It’s far less effective or straightforward than the modern prevailing SEO strategy; which is using generative AI that have been trained on all the top-ranked pages to produce exactly what google likes and ranks highly. Which has a knock-on effect of causing all these AIs to start eating themselves by training on pages produced by AI, like a kind of human-centipede ouroboros.
Yes. If you do a search on this site for posts about google, you’ll find multiple threads about this. Basically it seems that google is losing the arms race against SEO, and new LLM bots are mostly responsible.
Basically it seems that google is losing the arms race against SEO[…]
What does this mean in particular?
Companies are better at getting their shitty product/spammy pages to the top of search results than Google is able to find high quality pages to show you.
Google has to create algorithms to judge pages based on their content and get good results , companies only have to fine tune their pages to match the algorithm.
Google is no longer a search engine.
It’s a storefront.
Don’t miss this article (Lemmy discussion) from an air purifier review site for an in-depth look at how trusted publishers have been downsizing, then outsourcing generation of affiliate listicles. Drowns out sites who actually buy & test products.
alt-text: Google results for “best air purifiers “dotdash meredith”” showing People, Better Homes & Gardens, and a dozen other brands showing up, all reusing the same low-quality content
I only really use NYT Wirecutter for any kind of site that tests and reviews products.
They list their methodology regarding how they choose which ones to test, who is testing, how the test is being conducted, what the results are based on, etc etc
Is it the best one? No idea, give me your recs because I’d love to have multiple sites to go to. If I can’t find anything on Wirecutter, I’ll break down and see if Reddit has anything good.
Truly shameful how useless so many once great tools now are, and it’s all in the name of greed.
Edit: Just finished the article you linked - great read, thanks. Looks like Wirecutter is still good along with Tech Gear Lab and of course the site that wrote the article, HouseFresh.
I have 3 sites to try now! :)
General - Wirecutter
Tech - rtings
General incl. cars - Consumer Reports
Air purifiers apparently - House Fresh
Elsewhere there’s so much fraud I’ve been tempted towards crazy. Like, start a company where I personally meet people who want to review stuff and scan their IDs and take their SSNs before publishing any of their experiences/recommendations. Try to suss out if they have family connections to any products, any possible financial compensation…
For restaurants I’ve wanted to sit outside locations and ask diners who are leaving “ay this any good btw?”, given that’s hard to fake.
It blows my mind we haven’t solved review fraud!
alt-text: shoutout the local library for free Consumer Reports access; screenshot of their laptop comparison table with no ads, no SEO spam, no BS
For the UK, Which does similar things to ConsumerReports.
They’re not always experts, but they’re generally good reviews, and I honestly don’t have enough life to investigate every tumble drier myself. So having a summary of “in this price range, get this one” is very useful.
Yes. I’m using the same search methods I’ve always used that used to get me relevant results, and I get a bunch of fucking sponsored links instead. I’ve noticed lately that if the result of a search is a YouTube video and I click on it, it doesn’t go to YouTube but opens up as a search result and plays me ads somehow bypassing my adblocker that works just fine in actual YouTube. More than once after the ad was done, the video refused to load, which was utterly infuriating.
Google assistant on my phone has also become garbage. They changed the functionality of the few key things I liked to use, and now it’s totally useless to me. Google is swirling down the shitter faster than yesterdays tacos. Honestly, if it wasn’t for email, photos, and using an Android phone, I’d probably be done with them entirely.
I don’t say this to be dismissive, but Google’s search results have been getting worse for the better part of a decade now, and they’re still far above anyone else. While I do think that engines like Bing are closer to Google’s quality than most give them credit for, Google is still the only game in town. There are other search engines that people use, but they are niches in niches, and are probably used for belief reasons over an improvement in quality.
Frankly, I think that for the first time in history, the search market is open for competition. There is an argument to be made whether Google either doesn’t care about their search quality, or that it’s simply a hard problem to solve for anyone. If the former is true, then a competitor could make a very real case for overthrowing Google, given the right backing and hype behind them.
The rate at which the results got worse has a notable pattern in line with their drive for ad revenue. Most of the results are garbage because they are driven by money rather than user choice and popularity. The more money you pour into tuning SEO and Google Ads the higher you rank. To hell with relevance or what users actually want.
I ran a web community for writers from 1997 onward, and threw in the towel this year. The site had a core following but we relied on a steady trickle of new users from organic search and word of mouth to stay afloat. And little by little no matter how much time I put into SEO and the site we continued to slide due to a combination of seo rank and google just removing pages without explanation or reason. After spending the last 5 years rebuilding the site for SEO and mobile optimization, I watched google index 99% of the sitemap, our rank come back up slightly, new users starting to come in… And then it just… Stopped. I went to check the indexing, and google had silently moved all the indexed pages back to “crawled but not indexed” for no bloody reason. Zero errors, codes or messages.
I threw in the towel. The site was costing me nearly $500usd a month to operate and I could not throw a dime at ads. I had tried getting ad revenue on the site a few years back even though I did not want ads on the site and it looked promising… I got 90% of the way to covering monthly costs, but before the first cheque was cut google banned me from that service with no explanation. I followed every rule, discouraged regular members from clicking ads unless they really wanted to see the thing the ad was showing. Still got banned. And google just doesn’t even care to explain themselves.
I closed the site in January because I realized the internet I fell in love with, the one I created that community for… Its dead. Killed by capitalism.
Might be for the best. I can throw my coding time at open-source projects now. Just need to find one that entices me.
That’s heartbreaking but not an uncommon story - it does seem like Google has the power of life and death over websites and it seems very fickle and opaque.
Have you thought about restarting it on the Fediverse?
Ars had an article about it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/
It’s not just you—Google Search is getting worse. A new study from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence looked at Google search quality for a year and found the company is losing the war against SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam.
They’re also not particularly motivated to try harder. They don’t have a lot of competition, and they make a lot of money this way. And their leadership are idiots.
What I will find interesting since it seems I find better content on stuff like lemmy. I wonder if we will go back to the model of webrings and human aggregated with a mix of user generated links search like yahoo used to be to combat the AI wasteland that is current search. With a web of trust model.
I wonder if we will go back to the model of webrings and human aggregated with a mix of user generated links search like yahoo used to be to combat the AI wasteland that is current search. With a web of trust model.
That definitely seems to be the way to go. A human-curated (likely bot-assissted) collection of links with a range of ways to find content wouldn’t return as many results but how many do we actually need?
I remember when Google launched and the idea of getting 10 million search results seemed very impressive but, for most searches, we aren’t even going to the second page of results and we may not bother scrolling down beyond the first handful.
We need quality not quantity. The early search engines’ pitch was that humans couldn’t possibly index the web and we all went along with this. However, it’s now clear that, partly because of the influence of Google and the desire to game the system no matter the outcome, the Internet is increasingly shit - it’s content generated by machines to fool other machines into showing it to humans.
Yeah, they’ve been getting progressively less useful. UBlock Origin helps but I feel like Google Search was much better in the past.
I saw an article on a technology Lemmy the other day that showed how Google was pretty much helping to make sure you get shitty results. I’ll have to see if I can find it and link it.
When I’m on a VPN connected through the US, absolutely. When I’m not on a VPN, also yes, but not nearly as bad.
100% the page ranking system is too easy to abuse. So a lot of garbage gets to the top of results.
But the internet is just too big to do proper index searches like the old days.
I don’t mean this mean I’m genuinely curious. Do you not use the front page or only really occasionally use lemmy world?
I’m just so curious how you don’t see this every day on the feeds. Again I’m not meaning this like, GO USE A SEARCH ENGINE! it’s just that this is such a prevalent topic here, and lemmy is so niche, how you’ve avoided an answer up until this post?!
He probably googled it and got an LLM telling him Google search is still amazing and it’s all his imagination
In general yes. I’m not going to pull exact numbers up but I think it started declining around 2018.
I’ve heard it said they switched to whatever was most profitable rather than what was actually useful or relevant. I still find good results when looking up niche tech issues, but if it’s more mainstream I get really weird results, so that might indeed be what’s happening.
I live in central Canada.
I am reading the comments, and I am noticing that other people’s experiences are very different than mine.
For me, Google Search has reached the point where it will not even give me results for my search terms. I say this without an iota of hyperbole.
It’s so coincidental that this conversation comes up, but I actually sat there yesterday agog, looking at my desktop Firefox browser window… Scrolling through the entire search results page and realizing that not a single thing was even close to what I searched
It is noteworthy because I have been observing a steady decline, but it was the very first time I could make use of literally nothing that they gave back. In an unsettling way, the gravity of it hit me emotionally right there.
Canada doesn’t exist in Google…It is a the proverbial happy tone/hue couple…sorry, if I that wasn’t oblique enough
Canada is trying to de-google itself by “Search Engine Optimization” death by inviting a Nazi.
Google any image for happy >tone/hue< couple
Google (Kinda) Apologizes After Woke AI Gemini Exposed As Anti-White Racist
This reads like an incoherent AI-generated rambling. I’m sorry if you actually have a point you’re trying to make, but all I see is broken English, lack of direction, and an unrelated link at the end. If you are in fact not a bot, then please slow down and quality check before posting.
I’m only a farm tool, don’t shoot…your dominance is noted
