Comment on Google Kneecaps Loads Of Very Big Websites After SEO Change
ronmaide@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I’m kind of conflicted about this. On one hand it’s dangerous that the public’s access to information is so tightly coupled to a single organizations decisions, and I can see the danger in Google making a change like this.
On the other hand, clickbait and SEO gaming has gone on so long that using a site like Google has become significantly less useful to actually finding information, and if a site like Kotakus traffic is down by 60% as a result—is that due to Google being dangerous, or Kotaku having a pile of garbage content meant to game the system and bring in traffic?
For what it’s worth I’m using Kotaku as an example because the article used Kotaku as an example—I have no actual opinion or evidence around the actual content on that particular site.
When a handful of monopolies decide that no factchecking will be seen by anybody, anymore,
and only profitable-to-their-dictatorship disinformation will be seen,
then humanity will not have any means of countering that:
it will be too late.
We are “the frog dropped into the slowly-heating pot of water”.
People pretend that monopoly is “maybe” harmful, economically, but it is an existential-threat to countries, and with globalization, now to civil-rights as a valid-category.
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On the other hand, clickbait and SEO gaming has gone on so long that using a site like Google has become significantly less useful
That’s the same old game of “whack-a-mole” that every search engine since the beginning of the internet has had to play.
Search engines try to provide useful results to keep users trusting them enough to keep coming back, and advertisers keep trying to use SEO to manipulate themselves to the top of the search results
dantheclamman@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s an example of why monopolies are harmful. They create distorted economies that don’t serve consumers. Like ecosystems overcome by a monoculture, monopolies are inherently less resilient, less functional and prone to sudden disruption.
Wrench@lemmy.world 6 months ago
How exactly would it be any different without Google / SEO. Parsing of website content to determine topics would be a shit show historically, or ridiculously computation heavy now that LLMs could conceivably do a decent job at classifying content. So Google created a way for sites to tag the kind of content they have. Pretty much any search engine would need the same kind of mechanism.
And content providers are always going to be incentivized to be the top search result, which means targeting search algorithms. That’s just the nature of the beast.
If there were multiple SEO implementations, that just means more work to target multiple algorithms. And the content owners with more resources, hundreds of developers, would ultimately win because they can target every algorithm.
I really don’t see how Google as a “monopoly” changes these basic fundamentals.
dantheclamman@lemmy.world 6 months ago
If there were multiple sources of traffic, the pressure to optimize to one source would be lower, and the disruption caused by algorithm changes would be muted. Which would mean more interesting content less driven by a narrow set of metrics
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Except nothing else actually does meaningfully better than Google, even with Google being the only thing sites care about optimizing for.
It’s incredibly difficult to do a useful search if sites are hostile and doing everything possible to muddy the results.