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The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Goog

The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet. This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their searches. They can do better. They've chosen to not do so.

doctor_eval 4y ago
> This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their searches. I’d argue that they even encouraged it.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  it sells more ads at a higher price
- blantonl 4y ago
  This is a fair argument to make. Normalizing web site metadata (which is essentially what SEO is) resulted in Google getting crowdsourced work done for them for free. It has been a self-fulfilling positive feedback loop since then.
- krisroadruck 4y ago
  Been working in SEO for nearly 13 years now - can confirm, a lot of SEO content spam is quite literally Googles fault. Google has forced just about every company to become a publisher as the only way to generate traffic to their site. I promise you the vast majority of companies don't want to spend the money pump out 4-30 pieces of mostly remixed/regurgitated content a month or screw around trying to attract links but this is how the algo works and you get what you measure.
  - basch 4y ago
    Exactly. Every time someone with a business says "I want to get to the top of google" the person they are asking for help will respond with some jargony version of "you gotta constantly write content." It is the ONLY answer. And unfortunately Google has become worse than ever at being able to differentiate between insight and fluff.
Hamuko 4y ago
I can't wait for people to switch over from search engine optimization to AI model optimization: figuring out what kind of content you need to produce in order for Google's and OpenAI's models to deliver your message as gospel.
- beamgirl 4y ago
  I'm actually expecting AI training data to turn into a snake eating its tail. I've been spending the last month not sleeping so I could try to get up to speed on deep learning, and my understanding is that AI trained on AI generated output becomes crap surprisingly quickly, and AI generated content is already starting to proliferate. I have no idea the extent to which this will hinder new models being generated, but I could see it becoming quite the problem.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    the tinfoil take is that everyone in charge is fully aware of this eventual problem such that when it occurs, a solution will be presented: ubiquitous verifiable digital ID technology that's required to use popular social media services, such that everything that a Real Person posts will be signed with said digital ID, thus bringing about the end of online anonymity, and the death of the Internet as we presently know it. idk, sounds plausible to me, the way things've been going.
    - beamgirl 4y ago
      Entirely possible, but the amount of people who moved to Mastodon after Twitter got lit on fire gives me hope that people might explore options if things go a step too far
      - Hamuko 4y ago
        My Mastodon is a ghost town while my Twitter feed keeps having hundreds upon hundreds of posts per day.
sixQuarks 4y ago
Agreed, I am looking forward to the disruption of google.
- lagrange77 4y ago
  I am looking forward to the disruption of SEO.
massysett 4y ago
I see this sort of comment a lot, and I honestly don't know what it's talking about. What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering? It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge. I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yahoo!? Back in that era, if I were looking for something as simple as the University of Michigan, I clicked and drilled down through a Yahoo directory. The obvious search query would have been useless. Google changed all that. I view Google as the yellow pages. It works well for that. Is it an oracle of knowledge? Of course not. How could I possibly expect to find knowledge on a place where there is no reward for making it available? People producing knowledge don't work for free. I've tried ChatGPT and it's no better. It serves up stuff that is flat-out wrong.
- luckylion 4y ago
  > What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering? Not optimize for "most documents indexed" but "highest quality of results". One of them encourages adding spam to their index, the other encourages removing spam from their index.
  - gipp 4y ago
    There are giant teams of people at Google whose only job is trying to define things like "spam" and "seo abuse" more precisely in more diverse contexts. There are equally large armies of people outside of it trying to outwit the first group and find more and more elaborate loopholes and workarounds. HN is constantly pushing this notion that "spam" is some well-defined, solvable problem, so obviously Google wants it. That narrative just doesn't make sense from any angle. The notion that more click bait improves Google's bottom line is absurd
    - basch 4y ago
      Their giant teams are an organizational failure then. Product reviews alone, whether it is enterprise software or sports clothing should be something that they can easily comb through by hand, as humans, and uprank sites that are putting out more than affiliate link assemblies.
weaksauce 4y ago
there is that service that you can pay for that offers "high quality" but i haven't tried it. can't remember the name off the top of my head but it was on hn within the last few weeks iirc
- amatix 4y ago
  https://kagi.com https://kagi.com ?
  - weaksauce 4y ago
    yeah that looks to be it
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
svachalek 4y ago
Google has been up against SEO for decades and the motivations are much stronger on the other side of the battle. ChatGPT is running off a fixed training set that no one has had a chance to game yet. When someone tries to build a true, current AI search engine we're going to see a whole new level of hallucinating lie machine.
- johnla 4y ago
  This. Also, once the ChatGPT AI takes off and becomes ubiquitous, then what if there is a lack of credible content for it to train on?
mywittyname 4y ago
I suspect the future is far more bleak. At least with "search results", users can scroll down past the SEO content to something more relevant. Once these new chatgpt models take over, it's winner-take-all for search results. Everyone is going to be throwing money at getting their message seen, since it will be the final word. How much do you think companies are willing to spend to be the answer to, "what is the most reliable car?" or, "who should I vote for?"
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I imagine that ChatGPT would be useless for these things. Immediately saying “I’m sorry dave, I can’t answer that” even now.
- DrSiemer 4y ago
  Obviously those are not questions that you can trust an AI language model with. You have social media or real life connections to discuss that. In theory it is possible that sponsored content will creep in, but that does not invalidate the incredible benefits a well trained language model will have, even despite the occasional for-profit bias.
  - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    >You have social media or real life connections to discuss that. You mean all your Replika "friends" that spit out answers from Bard's mouth? :)
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
They force you to follow their rules so it is cheaper for them to index the site. Then they allow all the SEO hacked content so you have to pay to get above that in the search results. Fun times. And why is the GoogleBot still on HTTP 1.1...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ezoe 4y ago
The last year? Google search was defeated by SEO for more than a decade ago for non-English language such as Japanese.
kikokikokiko 4y ago
The quality of Google search has decreased so much over the last few years that I had to resort to using Yandex, a company that has a budget that is orders of magnitude smaller that the Big G and is under the control of a dictatorship. Google search has two huge problems: SEO and censorship. Search for anything related to products/torrents/streams/politics on Google and your results will SUCK, due to one of the two reasons stated above. The recent Yandex hack/leak has the cynic in me connecting the dots and, seeing how Google search seems to be facing REAL threats to it's dominance since it's creation... maybe some guys with the deepest pockets in the world are starting to enter WAR mode. Destroying Yandex advantages on the SEO battlefield by way of divulging their parameters to the world would be the Franz Ferdinand assassination moment of the Great Search War.
TheCondor 4y ago
Isn't Google data driven? Are you asserting that they look at their copious data and decide to make search worse because it makes them more money? Rather than figuring out a way to make search better and then further optimize their advertising income with this better product? And it seems like they've been pretty damn clever about monetizing quality over the years. It's possible that they have chosen to make search worse for profit, wouldn't be the first time a business did something like that but they have a pretty deep institutional fear of search losing relevance and it's hard to see them doing that. As a long time user and user of the other guys before google, I think Google is shockingly good at finding specific answers to specific questions that I have about all sorts of things, often with fairly deep technical context. Now what is definitely lacking is in the good old days I'd enter some search terms, get pages of results and then some time later I'd find myself enjoyably down some rabbit hole that is tangential to my search needs on some part of the internet that I never even knew existed before. Maybe I'm too busy with work, but I used to spend a lot more time doing internet "research" to get some specific answers, that time seems to be much more efficient; I do sort of feel like I'm corralled to smaller portion of the internet than I used to be. I don't feel like I can't find the information but I have had a hard time re-finding some specific web page I found once way back. Where does ChatGPT and Bard fit in this? I've played with ChatGPT and it's fun, it's neat, I haven't been able to get it to some how synthesize some wisdom though. It's not hard to see it just mimicking things. That might be valuable. That might be fun. Using it to seed search might be an enjoyable thing. Maybe it can help extract context from people to find out the actual question they are asking to find the actual answer they seek. Now I can absolutely see ChatGPT/Bard assisting in me wasting time going down rabbit holes, I'm not sure it'll be as enjoyable or as magical as how it used to be. Are there some examples of shitty google search you can bring up? I just entered "Roth contribution income limit" and without even going to another website, I got what looks like a legit answer to my question. Now I'll click though a few to make sure it's accurate and authentic; at a glance, it's coming from Schwab and it looks like a legit answer to my question. Bing comes up with the same answer, it's presented in a nice table but it's lower on the page and below a sizable paid ad from Merrill Lynch (edge?)

doctor_eval 4y ago

> This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their searches. I’d argue that they even encouraged it.

cjbgkagh 4y ago
it sells more ads at a higher price
blantonl 4y ago
This is a fair argument to make. Normalizing web site metadata (which is essentially what SEO is) resulted in Google getting crowdsourced work done for them for free. It has been a self-fulfilling positive feedback loop since then.
krisroadruck 4y ago
Been working in SEO for nearly 13 years now - can confirm, a lot of SEO content spam is quite literally Googles fault. Google has forced just about every company to become a publisher as the only way to generate traffic to their site. I promise you the vast majority of companies don't want to spend the money pump out 4-30 pieces of mostly remixed/regurgitated content a month or screw around trying to attract links but this is how the algo works and you get what you measure.
- basch 4y ago
  Exactly. Every time someone with a business says "I want to get to the top of google" the person they are asking for help will respond with some jargony version of "you gotta constantly write content." It is the ONLY answer. And unfortunately Google has become worse than ever at being able to differentiate between insight and fluff.

Hamuko 4y ago

I can't wait for people to switch over from search engine optimization to AI model optimization: figuring out what kind of content you need to produce in order for Google's and OpenAI's models to deliver your message as gospel.

beamgirl 4y ago
I'm actually expecting AI training data to turn into a snake eating its tail. I've been spending the last month not sleeping so I could try to get up to speed on deep learning, and my understanding is that AI trained on AI generated output becomes crap surprisingly quickly, and AI generated content is already starting to proliferate. I have no idea the extent to which this will hinder new models being generated, but I could see it becoming quite the problem.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  the tinfoil take is that everyone in charge is fully aware of this eventual problem such that when it occurs, a solution will be presented: ubiquitous verifiable digital ID technology that's required to use popular social media services, such that everything that a Real Person posts will be signed with said digital ID, thus bringing about the end of online anonymity, and the death of the Internet as we presently know it. idk, sounds plausible to me, the way things've been going.
  - beamgirl 4y ago
    Entirely possible, but the amount of people who moved to Mastodon after Twitter got lit on fire gives me hope that people might explore options if things go a step too far
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      My Mastodon is a ghost town while my Twitter feed keeps having hundreds upon hundreds of posts per day.

sixQuarks 4y ago

Agreed, I am looking forward to the disruption of google.

lagrange77 4y ago
I am looking forward to the disruption of SEO.

massysett 4y ago

I see this sort of comment a lot, and I honestly don't know what it's talking about. What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering? It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge. I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yahoo!? Back in that era, if I were looking for something as simple as the University of Michigan, I clicked and drilled down through a Yahoo directory. The obvious search query would have been useless. Google changed all that. I view Google as the yellow pages. It works well for that. Is it an oracle of knowledge? Of course not. How could I possibly expect to find knowledge on a place where there is no reward for making it available? People producing knowledge don't work for free. I've tried ChatGPT and it's no better. It serves up stuff that is flat-out wrong.

luckylion 4y ago
> What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering? Not optimize for "most documents indexed" but "highest quality of results". One of them encourages adding spam to their index, the other encourages removing spam from their index.
- gipp 4y ago
  There are giant teams of people at Google whose only job is trying to define things like "spam" and "seo abuse" more precisely in more diverse contexts. There are equally large armies of people outside of it trying to outwit the first group and find more and more elaborate loopholes and workarounds. HN is constantly pushing this notion that "spam" is some well-defined, solvable problem, so obviously Google wants it. That narrative just doesn't make sense from any angle. The notion that more click bait improves Google's bottom line is absurd
  - basch 4y ago
    Their giant teams are an organizational failure then. Product reviews alone, whether it is enterprise software or sports clothing should be something that they can easily comb through by hand, as humans, and uprank sites that are putting out more than affiliate link assemblies.

weaksauce 4y ago

there is that service that you can pay for that offers "high quality" but i haven't tried it. can't remember the name off the top of my head but it was on hn within the last few weeks iirc

amatix 4y ago
https://kagi.com https://kagi.com ?
- weaksauce 4y ago
  yeah that looks to be it

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

svachalek 4y ago

Google has been up against SEO for decades and the motivations are much stronger on the other side of the battle. ChatGPT is running off a fixed training set that no one has had a chance to game yet. When someone tries to build a true, current AI search engine we're going to see a whole new level of hallucinating lie machine.

johnla 4y ago
This. Also, once the ChatGPT AI takes off and becomes ubiquitous, then what if there is a lack of credible content for it to train on?

mywittyname 4y ago

I suspect the future is far more bleak. At least with "search results", users can scroll down past the SEO content to something more relevant. Once these new chatgpt models take over, it's winner-take-all for search results. Everyone is going to be throwing money at getting their message seen, since it will be the final word. How much do you think companies are willing to spend to be the answer to, "what is the most reliable car?" or, "who should I vote for?"

Aeolun 4y ago
I imagine that ChatGPT would be useless for these things. Immediately saying “I’m sorry dave, I can’t answer that” even now.
DrSiemer 4y ago
Obviously those are not questions that you can trust an AI language model with. You have social media or real life connections to discuss that. In theory it is possible that sponsored content will creep in, but that does not invalidate the incredible benefits a well trained language model will have, even despite the occasional for-profit bias.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  >You have social media or real life connections to discuss that. You mean all your Replika "friends" that spit out answers from Bard's mouth? :)

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

They force you to follow their rules so it is cheaper for them to index the site. Then they allow all the SEO hacked content so you have to pay to get above that in the search results. Fun times. And why is the GoogleBot still on HTTP 1.1...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ezoe 4y ago

The last year? Google search was defeated by SEO for more than a decade ago for non-English language such as Japanese.

kikokikokiko 4y ago

The quality of Google search has decreased so much over the last few years that I had to resort to using Yandex, a company that has a budget that is orders of magnitude smaller that the Big G and is under the control of a dictatorship. Google search has two huge problems: SEO and censorship. Search for anything related to products/torrents/streams/politics on Google and your results will SUCK, due to one of the two reasons stated above. The recent Yandex hack/leak has the cynic in me connecting the dots and, seeing how Google search seems to be facing REAL threats to it's dominance since it's creation... maybe some guys with the deepest pockets in the world are starting to enter WAR mode. Destroying Yandex advantages on the SEO battlefield by way of divulging their parameters to the world would be the Franz Ferdinand assassination moment of the Great Search War.

TheCondor 4y ago

Isn't Google data driven? Are you asserting that they look at their copious data and decide to make search worse because it makes them more money? Rather than figuring out a way to make search better and then further optimize their advertising income with this better product? And it seems like they've been pretty damn clever about monetizing quality over the years. It's possible that they have chosen to make search worse for profit, wouldn't be the first time a business did something like that but they have a pretty deep institutional fear of search losing relevance and it's hard to see them doing that. As a long time user and user of the other guys before google, I think Google is shockingly good at finding specific answers to specific questions that I have about all sorts of things, often with fairly deep technical context. Now what is definitely lacking is in the good old days I'd enter some search terms, get pages of results and then some time later I'd find myself enjoyably down some rabbit hole that is tangential to my search needs on some part of the internet that I never even knew existed before. Maybe I'm too busy with work, but I used to spend a lot more time doing internet "research" to get some specific answers, that time seems to be much more efficient; I do sort of feel like I'm corralled to smaller portion of the internet than I used to be. I don't feel like I can't find the information but I have had a hard time re-finding some specific web page I found once way back. Where does ChatGPT and Bard fit in this? I've played with ChatGPT and it's fun, it's neat, I haven't been able to get it to some how synthesize some wisdom though. It's not hard to see it just mimicking things. That might be valuable. That might be fun. Using it to seed search might be an enjoyable thing. Maybe it can help extract context from people to find out the actual question they are asking to find the actual answer they seek. Now I can absolutely see ChatGPT/Bard assisting in me wasting time going down rabbit holes, I'm not sure it'll be as enjoyable or as magical as how it used to be. Are there some examples of shitty google search you can bring up? I just entered "Roth contribution income limit" and without even going to another website, I got what looks like a legit answer to my question. Now I'll click though a few to make sure it's accurate and authentic; at a glance, it's coming from Schwab and it looks like a legit answer to my question. Bing comes up with the same answer, it's presented in a nice table but it's lower on the page and below a sizable paid ad from Merrill Lynch (edge?)