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SEO Arms Race Has Left Google and the Web Drowning in Garbage Text (theverge.com) 43

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Search's dominance has created a cottage industry of SEO professionals who promise to share their lucrative tricks to climb to the top of search results. From YouTubers to firms peddling proprietary tools, SEO hustlers propagate a never-ending stream of marketing content that floods Search. Some companies sell tools that allow marketers to mass-produce and distribute blog posts, press releases, and even robot-narrated podcast materials, with the purpose of creating backlinks -- a signal that Google uses to rank content in Search. Small businesses must decide if they'll try to learn SEO practices themselves or pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have a marketing firm do it for them.

While other platforms are still nowhere close to overtaking Search, entrepreneurs like Dziura, who sells feminist gifts, are taking note of how people are (or aren't) using Google. Now, any retailer, big or small, can add more text to their website without a team of copywriters, and given AI's tendency to generate falsehoods, there's even less guarantee that what consumers are reading is real. It's why people append "reddit" to the end of searches -- they want an actual answer or opinion, not one mediated by a search ranking algorithm. Dziura specifically notes the trend of young people using TikTok for Google-able things and has seen shoppers flocking to TikTok, Reels, or live shopping events. People like videos and product shots with hands holding items. If shoppers want candid shots and videos of products, Dziura will give them that.

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SEO Arms Race Has Left Google and the Web Drowning in Garbage Text

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  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday June 16, 2023 @10:20AM (#63607812)
    is that they're garbage for the small businesses. I've known a few who paid for SEO, and the only one that ever made any money off it was someone who realized "this isn't paying any money, but I could do my own SEO service and make bank". That guy is doing well, because a sucker's born every minute.

    It's crazy because the SEO "industry" is bad for everyone. Businesses pay a ton of money and get basically nothing out of it. Users get crapflooded search results and Google's product is increasingly worthless.

    Well, everybody but the SEO companies scamming people out of money. And I guess Reddit, which has become the only functional place left to find useful information thanks to it's mods.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      ... and Google's product is increasingly worthless.

      This part, at least, is true. Even before Google started their efforts to chase OpenAI by creating and integrating their Bard AI, the quality of Google Search results has been steadily going downhill.

      Not so long ago you could still guarantee decent search results by way of search phrases, "quoting phrases" or even "individual" "words" to ensure that the returned results actually contained what you were looking for, but now that doesn't even work. Ever more

  • Goodhart's law (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Friday June 16, 2023 @10:20AM (#63607814)
    "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." - Charles Goodhart, 1975

    Or: Once you use a measure as a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

    Big tech are trying to do analysis on the cheap & the quality shows. Now that everyone's learnt how to trick the stat counters, the stat counters have become meaningless. The same with reviews. It's all just useless noise now.
    • I would say, it's an arms race. Right now google is losing because it hasn't mastered and deployed this generation of AI. The search paradigm isn't a good fit for a web all fluffed up with generative AI content. This is why chat will beat search for information retrieval, because it condenses all that fluff into an answer to your question.
      • Condensed junk is still junk.
        • Sure, it might be that, increasingly, most pages are auto-generated junk. The problem is you can't weed them out simply relying on keyword search or word distributions or pagerank any more because the new spam is generated with algorithms that are sophisticated enough to fool those measures. The bar has been raised.
          • Once again, we go back to good ol' fashioned attribution, supporting evidence, reputation, etc.. Random interwebs pipes stuff, no matter the quantity, doesn't differentiate quality. If someone can come up with machines that can reliably & flexibly judge quality, then you're talking.
      • Meta AI Training (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Friday June 16, 2023 @10:44AM (#63607896) Journal

        The search paradigm isn't a good fit for a web all fluffed up with generative AI content.

        If you think AI content now is bad just remember that they train their models on text grabbed from the web so soon they will be training their models on junk generated by an earlier generation of AI.

        • Re:Meta AI Training (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Calydor ( 739835 ) on Friday June 16, 2023 @10:52AM (#63607918)

          It's photocopies all the way down.

        • by ls671 ( 1122017 )

          Every night before going to bed, I train my AI by reading it story books. Hopefully, my AI will end up trained as well as my kids were. No internet for my AI for now, it's much too young for that still...

        • by PPH ( 736903 )

          they will be training their models on junk generated by an earlier generation of AI

          This.

          Because LLMs just calculate the probability of the next word in a sentence from the frequency that it has been seen in terabytes of training data seen on the web. All the SEO companies have to do is to get their clients' names in enough places that it will become the inevitable completion of a query.

          I mean, who can't figure out the next word in "less filling, tastes ..."?

    • I really wish some game theorist would come along and either prove that all ratings/rankings are inevitably useless, or that there's a practically foolproof algorithm to adjust them. I qualify that with *practically* because it doesn't have to be perfect. BTC's consensus mechanism is vulnerable to a 50% attack, but that requires too much processing power for anybody to have attempted it. No, I'm not suggesting blockchain as the answer to search, I'm just using it as an example of a successful consensus m

    • Big tech are trying to do analysis on the cheap & the quality shows.

      Nothing to do with cheaping out. Google's anti-SEO efforts are massive (literally thousands of engineers, costing billions of dollars annually), have been ever since the search engine got popular and have been consistently increasing every year. Precisely because of Goodhart's law it's a fundamentally hard problem, one that is dynamic and always favors the SEO side.

      • That's just putting lipstick on a pig. It's the metrics in the first place that are cheap & poor quality. Sure, they can throw good money after bad if they want.
        • That's just putting lipstick on a pig. It's the metrics in the first place that are cheap & poor quality. Sure, they can throw good money after bad if they want.

          What metrics are you referring to? Do you even know what is measured, or how, or even in what units?

          • by g01d4 ( 888748 )

            It's the metrics in the first place that are cheap & poor quality.

            Goodhart's law doesn't seem to take quality into consideration unless you want to add a corollary about the rate of collapse varying with quality.

            • I don't know if you've done your research methods courses but... if you don't control sufficiently for threats to validity, i.e. the quality of the data, then everything else is pointless. In research, this is a given & doesn't even need saying. It seems big tech companies need to re-learn this stuff all over again... or is it that they're simply selling junk & telling us it's gold?
              • I don't know if you've done your research methods courses but... if you don't control sufficiently for threats to validity, i.e. the quality of the data, then everything else is pointless. In research, this is a given & doesn't even need saying. It seems big tech companies need to re-learn this stuff all over again.

                What's your basis for asserting that they don't know what they're doing? You seem to be assuming that if the metrics are gathered correctly the problem will be easy to solve. What's your basis for that assumption?

                • I'm not going to give you a lesson on research methods. Simply put, apart from very specific circumstances which are typically focused on qualitative research, for a variety of reasons, it's considered malpractice to gather the data & then make up the questions or simply searching the data for patterns, AKA p-hacking.

                  I'm not saying that the data scientists that they may have hired don't know, it's likely that the executives don't care as long as the money keeps rolling in. Snake oil has always been a
  • Wikimedia got close but let too many mini dictator's get in the way and gatekept over "notability".
    • How would a non-profit Internet fund the massive ongoing effort required to separate the wheat from the SEO chaff? Wikimedia only manages, barely, because the interest isn't that high (no one has yet found a good way to use Wikipedia content to sell stuff... watch out when they do), and because for contentious articles they can simply lock them down and prevent changes (the mini dictators you mentioned -- you call them a flaw, I'd say they're the only thing that prevents complete catastrophe). Both points b

  • The entire thing is a mess and while the tech sector bears a lot of responsibility, so do small businesses. I work in the medical field. About a year ago I worked for a chain of urgent care centers that catered to pediatrics. These tools would actually send a survey soliciting comments to the parents before they even got to the parking lot. They could make comments and they could do star ratings. Anything less than 5 for occasionally 4) got you into trouble. The company used this to calculate bonuses, reten
  • Allow people to downvote results and hide stuff from their results in the future. Also give users the option to weight by other peoples votes. Really, your model is stale do something!
    • Re:Hey Google! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Friday June 16, 2023 @01:43PM (#63608540)

      Search results which are then curated would go a long way to improving internet searches.

      Google used to, briefly, have such functionality - long ago, before the days of Google+ or even Google Newsgroups, before they adopted Do Evil as their business model. It made the search results better for a brief period of time until they started ad-incentivizing their own search results.

      That's when shit started to go sideways.

  • > Google Search's dominance has created a cottage industry of SEO professionals

    Yes, because Google totally didn't rise to prominence in the first place by being better than other search engines at overcoming the SEO problem and doing relevancy ranking that favored what the user was actually looking for over what the webmasters wanted to show them. People didn't used to have to spend 10+ minutes crafting boolean queries to weed out all the unrelated commercial garbage from the results in order to find wh
    • by packrat0x ( 798359 ) on Friday June 16, 2023 @01:10PM (#63608442)

      So basicly, Google needs to bring back pagerank. The current system is obviously
      different. It's now context oriented--to overcome typos and misheard spoken commands.
      Will pagerank make them more money than what they're doing now?

    • While your criticism is valid—as someone who SEOed my way to the top of AltaVista, Yahoo!, and others in the '90s I can attest to the truth of how terrible it once was—I think you overlook that the article also makes a valid point. Google did rise to prominence by being more resistant to SEO manipulation than others, but now they're falling for some of the same traps that make '90s search suck.

      Google tries to keep the secret sauce secret but there are three major problems. The first, as the arti

  • Google just needs to update its bots to use AI, and all the SEO garbage will disappear, right???

    But then the SEO companies will counter with their own AI to thwart the Google AI.

    And so it goes.

    This problem isn't new, this crap has been happening since Google itself became a thing, back in the 90s.

  • The SEO arms race is just a symptom of a core problem with capitalism that's far older than computers and the Internet, companies pump out advertising that's full of falsehoods to trick buyers into buying products for incorrect reasons. You know, those buyers who are supposed to be perfectly informed, perfectly rational, and perfectly selfish examples of "homo economicus"...

  • Observer effect - everything from URLS to images have been designed to appease Google and the end result has been to transform the internet into a shitty spamnet.
  • by SendBot ( 29932 ) on Friday June 16, 2023 @09:15PM (#63609450) Homepage Journal

    I get genuinely angry at Google delivering search results for something I did not search for, because it operates on a codified assumption that what I'm asking for is not what I'm asking for, but rather something else that resembles a more common search.

    Example: I wanted to know exactly what kind of bird Zazu from The Lion King is. On my mobile phone, I speak "What kind of animal is Zazu" and it correctly registers what I say before gaslighting me into searching "What kind of animal is in the zoo?"

    I spoke like an idiot into my phone two more times to fail before typing in the little virtual keyboard to have the same wrong behavior, then I went to duckduckgo (bing, essentially) and got the answer I was looking for.

    While I'm here griping about Google: I'm conditioned to expect google products to pop up annoyances when I'm in stride expecting utility from their applications. I already don't care what it's trying to bother me about, just hunting for the "okay, got it" button as fast as possible.

  • Online recipes.

    Who cares about your nonna? Show me the recipe.

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