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This might be a trope here, but recently I noticed that the quality of search results has degraded quite a bit for me. When I e.g. search for Golang-related con

This might be a trope here, but recently I noticed that the quality of search results has degraded quite a bit for me. When I e.g. search for Golang-related content (often I want just the official docs of a module like net/http) I get all these developer-focused, SEO-optimized blogs that are kind of helpful but often not, and I have to scroll all the way down to get the official docs. I really wonder if that has to do with AI-generated content becoming more ubiquitous. I have to say I really dislike all these developer-focused publications, with a few notable exceptions. Most of them just write very shallow articles copied almost 1:1 from the official docs, and don't even take care to update their content when stuff changes. I just don't get why Google wouldn't hand-curate search results like for the Golang standard library or any popular framework and make sure the official docs land on top of the list. So, long story short that's definitely an area where ChatGPT will replace Google, if it stays as affordable as it is. Today I e.g. asked it about a decorator-style problem I had in Golang and if there was a solution that could do away with using the "reflect" package and would instead use generics, and sure enough it came up with something that worked brilliantly, tailored exactly to my use case. For me, that is the future of learning about software code (and many other things as well). For publishers probably not so great as people might not go to their sites at all anymore, so I expect a strong upwards trend in anti-automation measures.

rcme 4y ago
My personal opinion is that this has nothing to do with SEO. All those developer-focused blogs serve Google ads, while the official Go documentation does not. Google is trying to boost revenue by promoting results with ads.
- epistasis 4y ago
  This is exactly it. Google is trying to get people to stay on the pages they click, and they optimize for this behavior, not for utility or for quickly accessing information. If you go to a page and immediately find what you are looking for, Google interprets that as failure. This is why Bing and AI based search can completely beat Google web search, because they are trying to serve the searcher rather than serve ads.
  - jocaal 4y ago
    The problem AI search has is monetization, openAI can't run gpu server farms to serve 100M customers for free forever. This was a problem that plagued early google as well, sergey and larry were against using ads for monetization, but in the end that i what drove the business to profitability
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - cutemonster 4y ago
      I wonder if AI search could be sth consumers would happily pay a tiny bit for
      - danielbln 4y ago
        They wouldn't pay for AI search, but might for AI that also searches.
        anonylizard 4y ago
        I don't get where this "Everything must be free+ads' mentality comes from. Netflix thrived for a decade using subscriptions, Microsoft and Apple's businesses are primarily subscription based. AIs are so extremely useful to some users, that they'll gladly pay $$ per month to use it. And the size of 'some' increases radically with each leap in AI's capabilities. GPTs don't have to be gimped to just search. Even GPT-4 today with wolfram alpha can obliterate most low-level tutors. It will be a personal tutor, therapist, coding assistant, secretary, storyteller, entertainer all in one very soon. People will pay for it.
      - sizzle 4y ago
        sth?
- yongjik 4y ago
  I still find it hard to believe. I've been at Google until 2015, which was a long time ago, but at that time the separation between Search and Ads was considered near sacred. Ads representatives couldn't even ask "Hey, my customer asked why their site is below this other irrelevant site for this query, this seems like a bug in search ranking..." Pretty much everybody understood that we will lose in the long term, if we let ad revenue even be a consideration in search ranking. (...which makes today's bad search experiences even more puzzling.)
  - aix1 4y ago
    I'm in neither Search nor Ads, but have been at Google long enough to have seen the massive change in internal culture between 2015 and the present day. I don't want to speculate on any specifics, but it's pretty clear to me that we shouldn't be applying 2015-era logic or perceptions to today's Google and expecting them to hold.
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    I joined in 2014 and left in 2019, and it was much different company by the end. My wife still works there, and she tells me it is different still from since when I left.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Developer focused blogs rarely show google ads. Upsells to saas like fly.io are more common
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  I just don't think this is true. I just think Google has become actually bad at search, and there is no malice. The problem with SEO spam was always there (remember expert sex change?) but they beat it before... but now it became bad again. But they have monopoly anyway (bing is even worse for actually searching, ddg is just bing, brave search sucks) so they don't really care. What are you gonna do, use Ask.com?
  - Yiin 4y ago
    pay for kagi.com, although that's not an option for >99% of internet users.
spoiler 4y ago
I know what you mean, and it's kinda annoying. I often click the blog links knowing I'll probably be disappointed when I see they're certain sites. Personally hosted blogs tend to be a bit better. I wish they added some kind of categorised search. So you can add "+documentation" or "+blog" to at least narrow it down if you know what you're looking for but can't remember the URL
- magicalist 4y ago
  They used to have blog search and it was crushing when they dropped it. I'm sure usage was low, but the few visits blogs got from that mode presumably dropped off the earth after that. Surely identifying personal blogs and the UX cost (tucked away in the Tools menu) couldn't have been too costly.
tifadg1 4y ago
I now only google when I need to sometimes verify that what chatgpt is suggesting isn't BS and I'm immediately reminded that google is barely better between SEO content farms, SEO SO scrappers, legacy information from 10 years ago. And that's with ads blocked. Between chatgpt+ for general guidelines and copilot for specific implementation details, programming feels very fun and alive. And I'm very skeptical to subscribing, but chatgpt provides so much mental relief getting some answers immediately that I'm ecstatic being able to use/pay for it.
- blueblimp 4y ago
  SEO garbage is such a problem these days that, if I were Google, more than using AI as a new frontend for search, I'd be trying to find a way to use it to defeat SEO.
  - nikau 4y ago
    OpenAI should sell a feed of AI generated responses for search engines to consume and flag AI generated content.
  - Edes 4y ago
    SEO for AI will be worse. Their output is a probabilistic distribution conditioned on the text is has read, so you can place text that heavily biases the output. Usually figuring out what this is can be kind of hard, but since OpenAI lets you query GPT-4 for credits, you can just mine what these special phrases are.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  I still cant believe google thought they could ruin the internet like that and continue to dominate search
  - ImaCake 4y ago
    To be fair, it has worked well for them for at least half a decade. It’s only now they are paying the price.
whatshisface 4y ago
I guess the problem is that Google doesn't have a metric for "clicked, wasted ten minutes, and was annoyed."
- nosianu 4y ago
  I think you could actually get them to accept a new strategy with open arms, where everybody needs to have some Google watcher process installed that checks and reports back what you do with the search results (I don't think unless the target website imports Google JS scripts too it can't track any more?) and more specifically, your body reaction to see how you feel. "It's necessary for better search results!"
- cronix 4y ago
  Right, they just care about the 10 minute captive audience bit and how many ads they displayed in that time.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  They could have let Chrome users rank any page they're browsing to get quality feedback. The installed base is massive.
  - pers0n 4y ago
    That would just be gamed like everything else. Downvote the competition, pay SEO folks to rank your stuff high, etc
    - carlosjobim 4y ago
      It would be quite costly to pay millions of people to do your bidding when you're competing against millions of real users.
thequadehunter 4y ago
This has been my thing too. I work in Networking and sometimes I see interesting stuff, but between cisco's beefy docs and obscure blogs I have no idea what the actual use case for it, or how the SD-WAN magic wand does the thing. ChatGPT will get me to verifiable information so fast, and give great in-context examples. It's renewed my passion for the field just when it was getting dull.
tornato7 4y ago
Did ChatGPT really write Go code with generics for you? Last time I fed it some code that implements generics it said, "this is invalid syntax, Go does not support generics" which would make sense since the knowledge cutoff date is 2021
senko 4y ago
> I get all these developer-focused, SEO-optimized blogs that are kind of helpful but often not, and I have to scroll all the way down to get the official docs. I really wonder if that has to do with AI-generated content becoming more ubiquitous No. There's a cottage industry of content writers that just churn out this stuff by the bucket. I have tried to hire writers in the past that should've been niche experts but just regurgitated content like this, and had SEO experts trying to convince me that we should actually aim for low quality because higher-quality articles will be too dense for people. (both contractors got the boot and the "content" went into the bin)
OOPMan 4y ago
I'm confused. Surely ChatGPT, etc have been trained on content from these very same SEO optimisation hellholes you're talking about if it was trained by scraping the web? Is there some trick that allows it to determine whether the content it's being trained on is SEO garbage? Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems like all you're getting is an amalgam of SEO content feed to you by a bot...
- Mizoguchi 4y ago
  Not an expert but one of the datasets used to train OpenAI GPT is Common Crawl and they use Harmonic Centrality not PageRank. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/harmonic-centrality-pagerank/283985/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/harmonic-centrality-page...

rcme 4y ago

My personal opinion is that this has nothing to do with SEO. All those developer-focused blogs serve Google ads, while the official Go documentation does not. Google is trying to boost revenue by promoting results with ads.

epistasis 4y ago
This is exactly it. Google is trying to get people to stay on the pages they click, and they optimize for this behavior, not for utility or for quickly accessing information. If you go to a page and immediately find what you are looking for, Google interprets that as failure. This is why Bing and AI based search can completely beat Google web search, because they are trying to serve the searcher rather than serve ads.
- jocaal 4y ago
  The problem AI search has is monetization, openAI can't run gpu server farms to serve 100M customers for free forever. This was a problem that plagued early google as well, sergey and larry were against using ads for monetization, but in the end that i what drove the business to profitability
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - cutemonster 4y ago
    I wonder if AI search could be sth consumers would happily pay a tiny bit for
    - danielbln 4y ago
      They wouldn't pay for AI search, but might for AI that also searches.
      - anonylizard 4y ago
        I don't get where this "Everything must be free+ads' mentality comes from. Netflix thrived for a decade using subscriptions, Microsoft and Apple's businesses are primarily subscription based. AIs are so extremely useful to some users, that they'll gladly pay $$ per month to use it. And the size of 'some' increases radically with each leap in AI's capabilities. GPTs don't have to be gimped to just search. Even GPT-4 today with wolfram alpha can obliterate most low-level tutors. It will be a personal tutor, therapist, coding assistant, secretary, storyteller, entertainer all in one very soon. People will pay for it.
    - sizzle 4y ago
      sth?
yongjik 4y ago
I still find it hard to believe. I've been at Google until 2015, which was a long time ago, but at that time the separation between Search and Ads was considered near sacred. Ads representatives couldn't even ask "Hey, my customer asked why their site is below this other irrelevant site for this query, this seems like a bug in search ranking..." Pretty much everybody understood that we will lose in the long term, if we let ad revenue even be a consideration in search ranking. (...which makes today's bad search experiences even more puzzling.)
- aix1 4y ago
  I'm in neither Search nor Ads, but have been at Google long enough to have seen the massive change in internal culture between 2015 and the present day. I don't want to speculate on any specifics, but it's pretty clear to me that we shouldn't be applying 2015-era logic or perceptions to today's Google and expecting them to hold.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  I joined in 2014 and left in 2019, and it was much different company by the end. My wife still works there, and she tells me it is different still from since when I left.
ipaddr 4y ago
Developer focused blogs rarely show google ads. Upsells to saas like fly.io are more common
shp0ngle 4y ago
I just don't think this is true. I just think Google has become actually bad at search, and there is no malice. The problem with SEO spam was always there (remember expert sex change?) but they beat it before... but now it became bad again. But they have monopoly anyway (bing is even worse for actually searching, ddg is just bing, brave search sucks) so they don't really care. What are you gonna do, use Ask.com?
- Yiin 4y ago
  pay for kagi.com, although that's not an option for >99% of internet users.

spoiler 4y ago

I know what you mean, and it's kinda annoying. I often click the blog links knowing I'll probably be disappointed when I see they're certain sites. Personally hosted blogs tend to be a bit better. I wish they added some kind of categorised search. So you can add "+documentation" or "+blog" to at least narrow it down if you know what you're looking for but can't remember the URL

magicalist 4y ago
They used to have blog search and it was crushing when they dropped it. I'm sure usage was low, but the few visits blogs got from that mode presumably dropped off the earth after that. Surely identifying personal blogs and the UX cost (tucked away in the Tools menu) couldn't have been too costly.

tifadg1 4y ago

I now only google when I need to sometimes verify that what chatgpt is suggesting isn't BS and I'm immediately reminded that google is barely better between SEO content farms, SEO SO scrappers, legacy information from 10 years ago. And that's with ads blocked. Between chatgpt+ for general guidelines and copilot for specific implementation details, programming feels very fun and alive. And I'm very skeptical to subscribing, but chatgpt provides so much mental relief getting some answers immediately that I'm ecstatic being able to use/pay for it.

blueblimp 4y ago
SEO garbage is such a problem these days that, if I were Google, more than using AI as a new frontend for search, I'd be trying to find a way to use it to defeat SEO.
- nikau 4y ago
  OpenAI should sell a feed of AI generated responses for search engines to consume and flag AI generated content.
- Edes 4y ago
  SEO for AI will be worse. Their output is a probabilistic distribution conditioned on the text is has read, so you can place text that heavily biases the output. Usually figuring out what this is can be kind of hard, but since OpenAI lets you query GPT-4 for credits, you can just mine what these special phrases are.
fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
I still cant believe google thought they could ruin the internet like that and continue to dominate search
- ImaCake 4y ago
  To be fair, it has worked well for them for at least half a decade. It’s only now they are paying the price.

whatshisface 4y ago

I guess the problem is that Google doesn't have a metric for "clicked, wasted ten minutes, and was annoyed."

nosianu 4y ago
I think you could actually get them to accept a new strategy with open arms, where everybody needs to have some Google watcher process installed that checks and reports back what you do with the search results (I don't think unless the target website imports Google JS scripts too it can't track any more?) and more specifically, your body reaction to see how you feel. "It's necessary for better search results!"
cronix 4y ago
Right, they just care about the 10 minute captive audience bit and how many ads they displayed in that time.
carlosjobim 4y ago
They could have let Chrome users rank any page they're browsing to get quality feedback. The installed base is massive.
- pers0n 4y ago
  That would just be gamed like everything else. Downvote the competition, pay SEO folks to rank your stuff high, etc
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    It would be quite costly to pay millions of people to do your bidding when you're competing against millions of real users.

thequadehunter 4y ago

This has been my thing too. I work in Networking and sometimes I see interesting stuff, but between cisco's beefy docs and obscure blogs I have no idea what the actual use case for it, or how the SD-WAN magic wand does the thing. ChatGPT will get me to verifiable information so fast, and give great in-context examples. It's renewed my passion for the field just when it was getting dull.

tornato7 4y ago

Did ChatGPT really write Go code with generics for you? Last time I fed it some code that implements generics it said, "this is invalid syntax, Go does not support generics" which would make sense since the knowledge cutoff date is 2021

senko 4y ago

> I get all these developer-focused, SEO-optimized blogs that are kind of helpful but often not, and I have to scroll all the way down to get the official docs. I really wonder if that has to do with AI-generated content becoming more ubiquitous No. There's a cottage industry of content writers that just churn out this stuff by the bucket. I have tried to hire writers in the past that should've been niche experts but just regurgitated content like this, and had SEO experts trying to convince me that we should actually aim for low quality because higher-quality articles will be too dense for people. (both contractors got the boot and the "content" went into the bin)

OOPMan 4y ago

I'm confused. Surely ChatGPT, etc have been trained on content from these very same SEO optimisation hellholes you're talking about if it was trained by scraping the web? Is there some trick that allows it to determine whether the content it's being trained on is SEO garbage? Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems like all you're getting is an amalgam of SEO content feed to you by a bot...

Mizoguchi 4y ago
Not an expert but one of the datasets used to train OpenAI GPT is Common Crawl and they use Harmonic Centrality not PageRank. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/harmonic-centrality-pagerank/283985/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/harmonic-centrality-page...