this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
907 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59135 readers
2234 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What I find is that Google is now still better for what I usually search (a mix of programming, gaming and random factoids) compared to Bing or DDG, but no longer by such a wide margin as it used to.
Best as I can tell, it's because in the past Google constantly tweaked the parameters of their scrapers and models, in turn leading to SEO constantly having to re- and re-optimize, and making it difficult to artificially push your spam and crap content high. They must have stopped doing this, leading to this steady rise of generated spammy content, and now Google feels a lot like other search engines in that i have to very actively discard 80%+ of the results including the whole first page.
(edit)
I recommend reading the actual paper. Interesting though Google has gotten worse, it's results are still massively superior to the competition. 9% spam compared to 31% for DDG and 23% for Bing. Damn. That's still a huge difference, shit as nearly-10%-spam is. I would however say its increased percentage of social media results (11% vs 6% respectively 5%) is bad, but eh, I guess there are users to genuinely want to see those results. π€·
Did they say they stopped?
No but it's my gut feeling, and it matches with the temporal progress in the paper. Cannot truly know of course, but it's what I would suspect.
The converse is that SEO spam has become better at the game than google, despite google's best efforts. It's a less comfortable thought because how could a bunch of unorganized distributed actors out compete the one of the world's richest company at their bread and butter game. The alternative is that one of the world's richest companies gave up playing their bread and butter game.
Search was never Googleβs money maker, that was AdWords. Search was merely the tool they used to get users in the door and exposed to AdWords, where they made their money. AdWords raked in ~100M/day in the early 2010s iirc.
The SEO community is not disorganized, they have conferences, write books, communicate with each other and work together. It's a very organized community.
What's changed is a few years ago Google stopped engaging with that community and changed from a "how can we actually work together" to an adversarial relationship.
This article is actually a great read on the topic:
https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results
Now that there's no dialogue, the spammers don't need to care about anything but increasing reach while not getting banned.
Just to add to that, on my main job as a web developer, we had contracted to an SEO company some years ago, and they were constantly in communication with Google. One of our web sites had done something Google didn't like in the past, and Google flagged that and it was killing its position in the search rankings. Google themselves won't tell you much more than that, but the SEO group was able to figure out what it was and get Google to give us a clean pass.
Used to be that way. Just from personal observation, I concur with the poster above that this relationship has broken down and it's worse for everyone.
Per your edit, there might be a blind spot in the study. Consider when you've searched for a recipe, and the top result you find always starts with "My cousins showed up one day and I had to scramble to make something . . . ". A big story you don't care about before you can get to what you want. That's happening because Google is giving those kind of recipe posts a higher rank. Ironically, adding this human story to the post is there for the sake of robots, not people.
I wouldn't classify posts like that as spam, exactly. I still find the recipe I want. But they do make the experience worse.