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Google search quality has been decreasing not because of a lack of AI, but because of AI itself. LLM spamming and a decade of SEO maxxing has made pagerank comp

Google search quality has been decreasing not because of a lack of AI, but because of AI itself. LLM spamming and a decade of SEO maxxing has made pagerank completely obsolete. No one has a personal site anymore, backlinks don't mean anything now. Maybe we need a need a new paradigm for search ranking. Voting, experts, introduce organic feedback back into the loop ?

meiraleal 2y ago
Google shot their own foot. Starting with discontinuing Google Reader, the biggest ecosystem of blogs at the time. Could have evolved into a moat against social media walled garden.
p3rls 2y ago
Gotta imagine that Conde Nast, Hearst etc are not going to take these changes lying down and the last ten years of SEOmaxxing have given them literally all the money, power etc in the web scene. They will be able to clone any in-depth "expert" site with their firepower and then come in with backlinks, socials etc and we're back to the status quo ante. With the March updates I thought there was a chance that Google could pull it off, but now I am leaning towards it's all doomed. Personally I wish I never got into building websites when I have to compete with ugly wordpresses from SEO companies in India taking my #1 spot for English content. I wish I could get angry about the forbes articles in my niches but at least that's written ostensibly by a professional-- when you start getting beaten by center-aligned text from South Asia you know there was -never- a chance for quality to win.
- arnaudsm 2y ago
  Provocative proposition: what about search engine that bans everything with ads and affiliate links? Wikipedia won over competitors because it has an anti-business-model. Only the passionate write for it, which paradoxically ensures quality. My favorite content on the internet is always non-profit, sincere stuff. Like this comment thread :) That's a scary prospect for creators that live off the internet, but if the ecosystem is already doomed it may be the last option.
  - p3rls 2y ago
    Yeah, okay, this sounds great until the point where I have a company with people that must eat, APIs that aren't free etc. and I look around and I see wikipedia is doing more than fine financially, has ads, morphed itself into three distinct properties in my niche (wikipedia, fandom, subdomain.fandom.com/inmyniche.html) that all take up precious google slots with almost the exact same content, and now you are asking for additional handouts to be given to this ex-pornographer Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia won over competitors because Jimmy Wales honed his marketing tactics from years of being a pornographer. Not because of any inherent strength of the wikipedia platform. In fact those first articles on wikipedia were all horrible and far worse than the other online encyclopedias if you remember. Wikipedia's success was mostly due to good timing, good governance and great SEO. And btw it is hysterical some think HN is non-profit. Sure, perhaps technically. But this is exactly why I think we are doomed. If even the self-proclaimed guardians of the internet (ala the IT Crowd) cannot grasp the simple concept that HN is as astroturfed (if not more) than reddit there is simply no hope for the internet as a whole to understand these concepts. So long and thanks for all the phishing attempts.

meiraleal 2y ago

Google shot their own foot. Starting with discontinuing Google Reader, the biggest ecosystem of blogs at the time. Could have evolved into a moat against social media walled garden.

p3rls 2y ago

Gotta imagine that Conde Nast, Hearst etc are not going to take these changes lying down and the last ten years of SEOmaxxing have given them literally all the money, power etc in the web scene. They will be able to clone any in-depth "expert" site with their firepower and then come in with backlinks, socials etc and we're back to the status quo ante. With the March updates I thought there was a chance that Google could pull it off, but now I am leaning towards it's all doomed. Personally I wish I never got into building websites when I have to compete with ugly wordpresses from SEO companies in India taking my #1 spot for English content. I wish I could get angry about the forbes articles in my niches but at least that's written ostensibly by a professional-- when you start getting beaten by center-aligned text from South Asia you know there was -never- a chance for quality to win.

arnaudsm 2y ago
Provocative proposition: what about search engine that bans everything with ads and affiliate links? Wikipedia won over competitors because it has an anti-business-model. Only the passionate write for it, which paradoxically ensures quality. My favorite content on the internet is always non-profit, sincere stuff. Like this comment thread :) That's a scary prospect for creators that live off the internet, but if the ecosystem is already doomed it may be the last option.
- p3rls 2y ago
  Yeah, okay, this sounds great until the point where I have a company with people that must eat, APIs that aren't free etc. and I look around and I see wikipedia is doing more than fine financially, has ads, morphed itself into three distinct properties in my niche (wikipedia, fandom, subdomain.fandom.com/inmyniche.html) that all take up precious google slots with almost the exact same content, and now you are asking for additional handouts to be given to this ex-pornographer Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia won over competitors because Jimmy Wales honed his marketing tactics from years of being a pornographer. Not because of any inherent strength of the wikipedia platform. In fact those first articles on wikipedia were all horrible and far worse than the other online encyclopedias if you remember. Wikipedia's success was mostly due to good timing, good governance and great SEO. And btw it is hysterical some think HN is non-profit. Sure, perhaps technically. But this is exactly why I think we are doomed. If even the self-proclaimed guardians of the internet (ala the IT Crowd) cannot grasp the simple concept that HN is as astroturfed (if not more) than reddit there is simply no hope for the internet as a whole to understand these concepts. So long and thanks for all the phishing attempts.