Google is Starting To Squash More Spam and AI in Search Results

Google announced updates to its search ranking systems aimed at promoting high-quality content and demoting manipulative or low-effort material, including content generated by AI solely to summarize other sources. The company also stated it is improving its ability to detect and combat tactics used to deceive its ranking algorithms.

SEO is cancer..

[MpVpRb]

..and google has been infected for years
They need to declare a major emergency and fix their service
It's already barely usable, and seems to be getting worse

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[Merk42]

Seems you know how to build a Search Engine, you should do it. Then everyone will use MpVpRb's Search Engine instead of Google's

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[Finallyjoined!!!]

Man, such negativity, simply pointing out that Google's search is utter crap, and has been for a couple of years, is not worthy of such bile.

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[ArchieBunker]

Google’s main concern is serving advertisements, not accurate results.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Google's main concern is serving advertisements, not accurate results.

Wouldn't inaccurate results negatively affect serving advertisements?

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[gunfinity]

Not when Google is the default option, and everything else seems just as bad.

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[nightflameauto]

Google's main concern is serving advertisements, not accurate results.

Wouldn't inaccurate results negatively affect serving advertisements?

Not if the inaccuracies are all paid-for advertisements, or at the best SEO garbage that makes people believe SEO is some get-out-of-jail free card for use on all websites, regardless of if they have any form of merit, or information, or literally anything of value to offer.

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[kvezach]

Sure, just give him a free datacenter first so he can get past the barrier to entry.

Make it better [Re:SEO is cancer..]

[XXongo]

I would suggest, as a start, when I use a term in a search, that pages that include the term I searched for should rank higher than ones that don't.

Just a suggestion.

Re:SEO is cancer..

[CAIMLAS]

It's gotten measurably worse since 2019. I've almost completely stopped using it, and have probably done 1-2 searches on Google in the past month.

DDG/Bing isn't much better.

you.com, gibaru, and yandex are the best search engines at this point for finding useful information that isn't spam or generated content. Guess you've basically got to be unable to be SEO'd, or low enough in significance to not be.

It's a horrible stinking commentary about our society that Baidu and Yandex both provide better, more relevant results for specific keyword US current events than Google or Bing. That shit has to be intentional. Given the recent AI controversy at Google, I'm hard pressed to think it's anything but.

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[radarskiy]

"It's a horrible stinking commentary about our society that Baidu and Yandex both provide better, more relevant results for specific keyword US current events than Google or Bing."

It's mainly a commentary about how most users of Baidu and Yandex don't use English so it is not worth engaging in English-language SEO through that avenue. Have you looked at the Russian language results from Yandex? Comical.

Spam

[burtosis]

User: Have you got anything without spam?

Google: Well, there's spam AI results and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

User: I don't want ANY spam!

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[HBI]

You could consider filtering search results. It's done wonders for my life. Got rid of all the useless Quora and Reddit spam, for instance.

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[sconeu]

You do realize that you completely missed the joke, right?

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[HBI]

No, i didn't miss it, but 40+ years of that skit...it's lost some punch. Though the chanting Vikings are still funny.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Quora? Fine.
Reddit? That's where the best answers are.

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[burtosis]

Quora? Fine. Reddit? That's where the best answers are.

Yep, and adding Site:Reddit.com to most search engines is better than using reddits search function

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[MIPSPro]

Never thought I'd see the day where I'd stop searching Google with some "I think I'm getting fucked here" feeling, then switch to Yandex and get the actual results I'm looking for. Search Google or Youtube for anything related to COVID and you'll get "Would you like some information on the COVID-19 Vaccine?" and about 100 pages of similar garbage-platitudes and government propaganda pretty much no matter what CV19 tidbit you are looking for. Search Yandex and you'll see some actual skeptical articles and re

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[burtosis]

Scholar.google.com is better for that kind of search, still not as good as it could be.

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[denny_deluxe]

So you're mad that Google isn't pushing anti-vaccine stories at you? Okay.

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[MIPSPro]

So you're mad that Google isn't pushing anti-vaccine stories at you?

It's not that they don't "push" a narrative. That's a partisan way of thinking. It's that their level-of-effort seems to be aimed at censoring all skepticism. Tough for anything related to science to work without skepticism & debate, but they appear to want to prevent both.

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[penguinoid]

Also wrongthink are chapters of a web serial that were "removed from the internet" because now it's published. None of the "respectable" search engines are willing show you, even though it's in their index.

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[MIPSPro]

Oh yeah, that's common. I also find a lot of BPOC "alternative" links that just kinda get inserted out of nowhere. It's about as entertaining as doing a Google Image search for various types of criminals (they are almost all white people in the photos, you know just straight in line with those FBI crime statistics, lol). They are much more focused on "content moderation" (also known as censorship) than they are on returning accurate and useful results. The clearer that gets, the less relevant they become.

How about

[ArchieBunker]

Not having to take an extra three clicks to change the results to “verbatim” instead of the default of random shit?

About time they removed Quora from search results!

[iJed]

About time they removed Quora from search results! If only!

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[ArchieBunker]

I love the uBlacklist extension. Banish those unhelpful results forever.

https://chromewebstore.google.... [google.com]
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]

Enshitification

[TheStatsMan]

When you start to A/B test your product, configurations that make money, but worsen the service will emerge. Once a product succumbs to the pressure of shareholder demands for profit, these configurations are promoted as a means to an end. Products teams, analytics teams, and even engineering teams are designed to find as many growth-encouraging configs as possible. Their quest for the almighty dollar inevitably leaves the product a husk of it's former self. The service will never be the same.

As these "solutions" become more difficult to discover, and as growth slows, the quest for increasing revenue will alienate even the core users. As the audience declines, more product compromising solutions must be implemented until, finally, no blood will come from the stone. The product is sold and runs as a museum piece, an artifact of silicon valley and a marvel of the efficient outcomes of vampire capitalism, in the treasure hoard of a bigger, stronger, younger company.

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[OolimPhon]

Which AI did you use to generate this?

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[TheStatsMan]

Seek help.

But what about Quora and Pinterest?

[heptapod]

Quora and Pinterest are the bane of Google. I don't see why they rank higher than Wikipedia or reddit.

I wonder

[kackle]

I wonder what good results are getting unknowingly squashed.

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[PPH]

Both of them.

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[MIPSPro]

Lol. Pretty much.

I can think of two categories getting squashed. 1) Anything that says mean things about the government or pretty much any government. You know, those things that have killed more people than any other human contrivance? 2) Anything about COVID that didn't get approved by the government or some government-adjacent-MSM pit like WaPo.

Re: I wonder

[LindleyF]

Every algorithm has false positives and false negatives. You hope to drive those down but a perfect result isn't practical.

Churnalism

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Churnalism (churn + journalism) has been a blight on news & special interest publishing since long before AI. We get the same few stories going around dozens of publications but they're so obviously from the same original writer. Sometimes they don't even bother paraphrasing it. At least /. is honest about ripping off news from other sources.

It's funny to me

[aldousd666]

Google has always had a perverse financial incentive to work against all the SEO hacks, who were paying their bills, in order to increase their dominance, thus inviting more SEO hacks. It's a vicious cycle, as we have seen.

Neat

[NicknameUnavailable]

So they're moving on to actual issues now that they've banned everyone they disagree with politically, or are they just using "spam" as their new catch-all term for doing exactly that at a time when their entire focus is in gaming the 2024 election. And before someone says it, they've already been caught doing it repeatedly, use a search engine other than google if you want a source, or keep your head in the sand.

Just let us define a "default -site:" list

[Opportunist]

That alone would already solve a TON of problems for most users. Did you know that the google search string has a character limit? I do. Because I add a rather long (and growing) "-site:" list to my search.

If Google just let us define sites we just simply don't want to see in our results, not only would we get better results, Google would also get a very valuable list of sites people are fed up with.

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[tinkerton]

that's a nice idea actually. But it would let people decide what they want to see , maybe Google want that control. They certainly don't want to give me the search results I want to see.

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[Opportunist]

The alternative is a browser plugin. One way or another, people will get to weed out the trash pages that only provide rubbish, and Google gets to decide whether they want the data of what pages people want to avoid or whether they let someone else have it.

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[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

A browser plug-in/add-on/extension is a brilliant idea. Shame I can't code for a damn any more. Perhaps we can submit the idea of slashdot as a request to create it?

Of course they are.

[denny_deluxe]

Google doesn't want that crap to compete with its own ad business.

or so they say

[groobly]

I'll believe it when I see it.

WTF?

[MonkeyProgrammer]

Physician, heal thyself!

If Google is serous about this then the first thing they should do is remove the worthless Bard crap they return with every search. First, it is just a summary of the search results -- or, sometimes, even just a complete rip-off of the first linked-to search result. Second, it takes way longer to return than the regular search results.