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

(arstechnica.com)
259 points pseudolus | 3 comments | 20 Nov 24 21:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.58s | source
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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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mjr00 ◴[21 Nov 24 00:06 UTC] No.42199551[source]▶
> I'm confused about how or why this is a new policy.

My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT.

> The real problem is the financial incentives that make this kind of spamming profitable in the first place.

Yeah, but the financial incentives exist on both ends. There's a gross symbiotic relationship between Google and SEO spammers, because Google also owns the ad network the spammers put on their page. If Google puts ad-laden SEO blogspam as the top result and a user clicks it, the user sees a bunch of ads from Google. Everyone wins: Google, the SEO spammers, and advertisers. Well, everyone except the user, but who cares about them?

My guess/hope is that ChatGPT has made someone who actually cares about the quality of search results actually step in and say things have gone too far.

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1. bigstrat2003 ◴[21 Nov 24 18:33 UTC] No.42207207[source]▶
> My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT.

ChatGPT doesn't even fulfill the same function, to say nothing about the poor reliability inherent to the way it works. In no sense is it a real competitor to Google.

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2. milesvp ◴[21 Nov 24 21:09 UTC] No.42208679[source]▶
This is absolutely not my experience. My googlefu has gone to shit. I can no longer have some sense for what I’m looking for and find it. Something I know exists, I just don’t know the terms of art to pull up the wealth of knowledge. I used to be able to do a half dozen searches, and finally on page 4 or 5 finally find some clues as to the terms I need. Now, there is no page 4… like ever. Clearly not many people were going past page 3 so they stopped serving that content.

Now I use chatgpt for these kinds of queries, and it feels like using google circa 2004.

I know this is a small edge case, and ultimately I need to use google to crosscheck, but it hints at the rot that has taken over at google, and represents a potential shift. If I could get good reference links from chatgpt, I may be able to stop using google for an increasing number of my queries.

3. stcroixx ◴[21 Nov 24 21:20 UTC] No.42208782[source]▶
All the developers I work with have stopped using Google search entirely in favor of ChatGPT. Even my wife prefers it after seeing how bad googles results are and full of ads.