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Google stops letting sites like Forbes rule search for "Best CBD Gummies"

(arstechnica.com)
212 points pseudolus | 8 comments | 20 Nov 24 21:07 UTC | HN request time: 1.279s | source | bottom
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NelsonMinar ◴[20 Nov 24 23:59 UTC] No.42199494[source]▶
I'm confused about how or why this is a new policy. My memory is inside Google we were discussing this risk back in 2003, probably earlier. Search quality was on it. I just assumed they'd lost the arms race, or that the parasites' ranking was justified for other reasons that were hard to tease apart. What are they doing new now?

I think often about Mahalo, the sleazy shovel content that was spamming the web back in 2007. Google shut that down somewhat fast, although it did take several years. These days with AI and more aggressive spammers it's a losing battle. The real problem is the financial incentives that make this kind of spamming profitable in the first place.

My tiny little blog gets about 3 requests a week for someone to "pay me to run a guest article". Going rate is $50-$200 and again, my blog is tiny.

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1. xivzgrev ◴[21 Nov 24 03:31 UTC] No.42200832[source]▶
I miss Google of 2003

What would it take for someone to make it today? No AI, only 1 on mobile, and sites with heavy ad loads are punished

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2. theendisney ◴[21 Nov 24 04:32 UTC] No.42201143[source]▶
Just traffic.
3. Spivak ◴[21 Nov 24 04:48 UTC] No.42201222[source]▶
You're mostly describing Kagi. They do have AI results but you have to explicitly ask for them. They have an "No AI" image search option as well.

I also like my "Before AI" lens I can click on to search the internet pre-2021. And you can downrank or fully block those garbage spam sites. They even have a "leaderboard" for most blocked/pinned sites you can use to get started.

4. vikingerik ◴[21 Nov 24 05:00 UTC] No.42201281[source]▶
It would take a benefactor who wants to pay for running it for its own sake and not for profit. As soon as there's a profit motive, enshittification sets in since you're serving whoever pays rather than your users.
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5. nielsbot ◴[21 Nov 24 05:40 UTC] No.42201466[source]▶
or maybe a government utility
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6. openrisk ◴[21 Nov 24 06:56 UTC] No.42201816{3}[source]▶
Governments have been in recent decades completely hands off from anything tech related. For the longest time they followed the usual neoliberal economist trope that markets solve everything optimally. As a result they have created in the so-called "big tech" conglomerates a monster fit for the history books, the most broken and cornered market there ever was.

But a wholly government run search engine is not a solution. There are inherent biases in both constructing and presenting indices. You dont want to further stoke the anti-commons mistrust of polarized societies.

What the public sector could do is fund all the background techonologies to make it easy to have much larger numbers of search engines. Some of those assembled services could be completely open source, others could be value adding with various added services and customizations.

In any case the status quo is a disaster that has no future. Its effectively a forced dumbification of society as it artificially suppresses the flow of high-quality public information. Incidentally it also doesnt solve the problem that much of the world's information is private. Desktop search should become a thing again, in line with local AI etc.

7. oneshtein ◴[21 Nov 24 08:45 UTC] No.42202333[source]▶
Install a spam filter for search engines, like uBlackList.

Use bunch of different search engines. In Firefox, enable search entry, then visit search engines and click green + in the entry, to add search engine.

8. Shorel ◴[21 Nov 24 09:38 UTC] No.42202571[source]▶
I think it would be easy to make, with two decades of hardware improvements.

The problem is that the web of 2003 doesn't exist any longer.

Google existence changed the websites for better or worse. The Google of 2003 is no longer capable of dealing with today's web SEO dirty tricks.