Comment

Comment on Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find

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.

source

Sort:hotnew top

FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Did they say they stopped?

source
- Carighan@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
  source
  - willis936@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
    source
    blusterydayve26@midwest.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    gave up playing their bread and butter game
    
    Search was never Google’s 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.
    
    source
    EmergMemeHologram@startrek.website ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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:
    
    theverge.com/…/seo-search-engine-optimization-exp…
    
    Now that there’s no dialogue, the spammers don’t need to care about anything but increasing reach while not getting banned.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
frezik@midwest.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

source