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Google stops letting sites like Forbes rule search for "Best CBD Gummies"
- akira2501 2y agoAn entire department was just rendered useless. I genuinely don't feel bad.
- kasey_junk 2y agoWas probably a whole company right? Pretty good argument that Forbes the traditional media property and Forbes the seo giant are 2 different things: https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/ https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/
- fakedang 2y agoAnd Forbes the SEO giant was going to buy out the legacy media property.
- readyplayernull 2y agoI wouldn't be surprised of the whole thing being automated.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoIt was funny watching the warrior whatever site back in the day when Panda came along. Love when these people get their horrible business models kneecapped. Now let's make corporate stock manipulation illegal again and ban corporate stock buybacks. Talk about a purely manipulative business strategy.
- red_trumpet 2y agoWhat's the problem with stock buybacks?
- mathgeek 2y agoCouple articles that explore that: https://hbr.org/2020/01/why-stock-buybacks-are-dangerous-for-the-economy https://hbr.org/2020/01/why-stock-buybacks-are-dangerous-for... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/are-stock-buybacks-starving-the-economy/566387/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/are-stock-...
- notyourwork 2y agoNothing directly, it just sounds bad at face value.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago'Stock manipulation is cool, especially when you change executives pay structure to be based purely on said manipulation. Totally creates healthy incentives not perverse ones.'
- notyourwork 2y agoSorry, buy backs are not stock manipulation. Let's step back from emotions and political skew. A company is able to take their capital and deploy it how they see fit. This can include purchasing percentage ownership of their company back from stockholders. Whether or not you agree doesn't make it manipulation in the general sense. It's just a way for a company to use their money.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoWhy do they repurchase the stock? In order to impact the stock's value (also known as manipulating it's value). That is the definition of stock manipulation. No emotions involved, no need for the passive aggressive attack that I'm somehow being emotional. It's not just a way for a company to use their money. It is a company intentionally using funds for stock manipulation, many times by executives who directly benefit from said manipulation. Companies even take out loans purely to re-purchase stock.
- scarface_74 2y agoThe company is giving money back to shareholders. What exactly is wrong with that?
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoIt is not. It is manipulating the value of the stock, which the shareholders can possible take advantage of by selling their stock. Giving money back to shareholders is called a dividend. Manipulating the price of a stock is manipulation, not returning money.
- scarface_74 2y agoWhat’s the practical difference? Either way the amount that ends up in your brokerage account should increase be the same amount. Stock buybacks are more tax efficient for the stock owner in the US
- trompetenaccoun 2y agoI just used the exact prompt they give as an example and got the very spam they claimed to have removed. Vice, The Independent, Healthline, etc... all advertising those gummies in ads disguised as news articles. So yeah, probably not actually rendered useless.
- 12907835202 2y agoIs healthline spam? It's my go to whenever I have a medical question to add healthline to the search
- kiru_io 2y agoGoogle should vibe out others as well. If I search now "Best CBD Gummies", the first few results are: vice.com independent.co.uk healthline.com observer.com How is Forbes worse than any of those shallow comparison pages?
- glial 2y agoFWIW, Kagi is a little better but not much. First results are: * cornbreadhemp.com * forbes.com * healthline.com
- zappchance 2y agoDDG gives me: forbes.com healthline.com medicalnewstoday.com fortune.com But I usually use site:reddit.com in my searches anyway so it doesn't matter to my personal habits.
- al_borland 2y agoKagi does let the user adjust the rankings of these sites if they don't want them coming up. While it would be nice to have this done proactively for the link farms, at least the user does have some control. Forbes did make it on the blocked and lowered leaderboards. https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
- vasco 2y agoProbably all ran by the same people too.
- Ancalagon 2y agoHopefully this is a step in the right direction. Google's search results have gotten so bad - seems like even some of the simplest searches are just packed with AI generated and SEO garbage. I don't even want SearchGPT do take over the search market space because I'm almost sure it will still be garbage. Just bring back the google from 5-10 years ago please :(.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoYou can't go back to the way things were. The world moves forward and changes, and we have to adapt to it. Web search has always been an extremely messy solution to many problems. Think about the premise: type in anything, and somehow it will read your mind, intuit who you are and what you really wanted, find the exact thing amid the morass of the whole web, and then give it to you? That's impossible. So it uses tricks to make it seem like it worked. It uses information about you to refine results. It uses curated, human-edited search and result heuristics for the most common or difficult search queries. It uses a giant corups of data, and shows you things that are like what you wanted. You don't notice that it isn't giving you the best result, because there are so many mediocre-but-acceptable results to look at. And it doesn't have to work perfectly every time, because we can "sift through" results and "refine" our search. Often we are flooded with results that are targeted at us, rather than what we want, because, remember: Google is an advertising company, and the entire Web is now a shopping mall, where either you're being sold-to, or you're just being sold. You will get results, and they will sort-of seem like what you wanted, so you will just sort of sigh and accept it. Because what other option is there? There are more intelligent, more accurate, more safe, ways to solve the problems people have, that are not "a search engine". It's time we start implementing them.
- bgun 2y agoNot sure why you’re being downvoted, this is a pointed analysis of why crawl-based search is insufficient for an Internet of our current scale. There is no corporate-curated algorithm that is up to the task, especially when the primary purpose is to profit from advertising.
- wslh 2y agoMy feeling as a Google user since the beginning is that the search engine doesn't matter anymore in terms of quality. That is why I wonder how Google supposely discover their own "bugs" so late.
- burnt-resistor 2y ago[flagged]
- PaulHoule 2y agoAMEN! I remember this guy http://www.seobook.com/blog http://www.seobook.com/blog pointing out the line between what you can get away with with SEO and what you can't get away with and what you can't get away with is making Google look stupid.
- AlienRobot 2y agoAfter scrolling a bit I looked at my scrollbar and I was scared. Yes, this is /blog. The whole blog.
- PhasmaFelis 2y agoNot for more than five years or so, at least.
- PaulHoule 2y agoThat blogger talks about his speculations which I agree with. Google has been fighting against SEO spammers since the very beginning, in fact there was keyword stuffing even before there was Google. Google at some point made a decision to privilege sites like Forbes because they were dealing with hundreds of subprime sites that looked even sketchier. Rather than playing whac-a-mole with new spammers every month as they change the rules they could put sites like Forbes and Wirecutter on top, ultimately discouraging other SEO spammers from even trying, and being able to manage the relationship. (e.g. if you see Forbes rank for "best CBD gummies" just once it looks a little sketchy but you get over it, you only really catch the bad smell after you've done 5,000 searches and see Forbes ranks so high on so many of them) I've been working with a financial analyst to quantify the value of online engagement (what value does YC get from an HN comment? what value do users get from it?) and reviews are one of the clearest examples since a review adds or subtracts revenue from a vendor and gives customers a certain amount of satisfaction. It's an interesting area in my mind because the stakes are so high.
- bhartzer 2y agoGoogle should have done this 5-10 years ago.
- al_borland 2y agoI assume the threat to their business posed by OpenAI (and others) is what is getting them to start addressing these long standing issues. I'm glad they're doing it, but upset that they let users suffer with sub-par results for so many years.
- warkdarrior 2y agoHow does OpenAI's searchGPT rank Forbes Advisor/Marketplace?
- al_borland 2y agoGood point. I just asked ChatGPT for the best CBD gummies, then asked what sources it used for the list. This was the first thing it said… > Consumer reviews from trusted websites like Healthline, CNET, and Forbes Health that provide in-depth reviews and rankings based on effectiveness, ingredients, and customer feedback. So the LLMs are now giving us affiliate link garbage, but we can’t easily see that was the source, and the affiliate links don’t even work. Everyone loses in this scenario.
- walterbell 2y agoSeptember thread on Forbes Marketplace and "parasite SEO" (300 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41590466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41590466
- bhouston 2y agoWhich is also CNN Underscored Money: https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money. And also USA Today Blueprint: https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/ https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/ Details here: https://larslofgren.com/cnn-usa-today-forbes-marketplace/ https://larslofgren.com/cnn-usa-today-forbes-marketplace/
- walterbell 2y agoAs others noted, this has been an issue for years. What prompted Google to act now, using a manual override that was supposedly not feasible in the era of algorithms? Did the viral articles by Lars provide ammunition for teams within Google?
- itsoktocry 2y agoWhat's hilarious is when people boast about being "in Forbes" like it's the magazine from 20 years ago, and not this parasitic SEO operation that publishes garbage on anything.
- dangus 2y agoI took advantage of this in business school. A lot of my professors considered Forbes a reputable business magazine. It was amazing, I could easily cite a source for just about anything I wanted to say.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoMaybe the professors knew and were taking advantage to look the other way to make their job easier.
- dangus 2y agohaha maybe, I got my A’s and my piece of paper, and now I’m qualified to cut costs at your local private equity firm!
- pimlottc 2y agoWell, of course; “Forbes” still carries prestige and cachet. If it didn’t, this scam wouldn’t work.
- maeil 2y ago> If it didn’t, this scam wouldn’t work. It would, as this scam relies on the domain authority, regardless of their "offline authority".
- dmead 2y agoWhat was the website they had to delist like 10 years ago that was like this? I'm drawing a blank.
- xnx 2y agoGoogle's official statement on the change: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/11/site-reputation-abuse https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/11/site-reput... That page gives a good hint at how opaque these paid placements can be to an outsider like Google. Really tough to prevent too much collateral damage when going after bad actors like Forbes. Glad Google is working on it though.
- NelsonMinar 2y agoI'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.
- mjr00 2y ago> 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.
- chipsrafferty 2y agoBecause ChatGPT is dependent on good search when it searches the web? Or because it completes with Google when it provides a good answer without searching? Or what do you mean specifically?
- ryandvm 2y agoI would say the latter. For software dev questions, my Google searches and Stack Overflow visits have fallen off a cliff since I started paying for ChatGPT. Ironically, I probably would have paid the same amount to Google for ad-free, old-style (accurate) Google searches, but no, they just wanted to keep cranking that ad dial up every year so that ship has sailed. At this point, I'm enjoying watching the old guard of search scrambling to find a life jacket.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- urbandw311er 2y agoSite that has historically abused its monopoly to game search profits clamps down on others doing exactly the same thing.
- yapyap 2y agoone lawsuit too late
- jsemrau 2y agoGoogle starts getting into the way too much. Recently I searched for German football clubs that "fan rivalries" and Google refused that and only gave me results for "fan friendships" .
- rjrdi38dbbdb 2y agoOne area where Google search is terribly broken is porn. If your search for some specific term "$foo", nearly every result is just 'search site $bar for "$foo"', taking you to the site's search page, regardless of whether $foo is actually found on the site.
- scarface_74 2y agoOn the other hand, when I use to search for anything near the city I lived in, porn showed up way too frequently https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumming,_Georgia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumming,_Georgia
- rjrdi38dbbdb 2y agoAre locals particularly attached to that name? Seems like a referendum for a name change would be a good idea, considering the current typical usage of that term.
- G1N 2y agoHad an old roommate who moved here after getting married to be closer to family. Weirdly, the name never at any point came up so I think everyone is just kind of resigned to the fact that they live in a place called Cumming
- buryat 2y agohow many people do you think search for $foo and the opposite?
- rjrdi38dbbdb 2y agoWhat do you mean by the opposite? The search behavior is the same whether $foo is a popular generic term or something niche.
- kmoser 2y agoWhat does that have to do with porn?
- scarface_74 2y agoWhen I search for “best pet insurance”, US News & World Reports still shows up 5th. When I search for “Best Delta credit card”, CNBC shows up 6th
- simonw 2y agoAn interesting intellectual exercise is to think about how a search engine could provide the best possible answer (from a user satisfaction perspective) to a query like "best CBD gummies". A lot of people have a significant financial incentive to win at that search query. What would the perfect top search result for that look like? It would probably be an article written by professional writers in a trustworthy publication with a strong ethics policy, provably followed over the years, concerning whether they accept payment for promoting specific products in supposedly impartial reviews. If you can figure out how to algorithmically detect that kind of content you could build a pretty great search engine!
- batch12 2y agoI think it'd maybe a query for the best gummies would be based on reviews from users, but I guess that's the point. Having something understand what one means by best is hard.
- johnfn 2y agoHm, I think that Amazon shows that just user votes might not be sufficient - e.g. because users can be paid off to give 5 star reviews, which bias the results.
- johnfn 2y agoI think I'd be pretty happy if Consumer Reports was on the top for queries like these (if they had the relevant data, of course). I think they follow your criteria pretty closely.
- ameliaquining 2y agoAre we assuming that this search engine is only used by a few nerds, or is the idea to build something that remains good even if it gets popular enough that webmasters have strong financial incentives to game it like they currently do with Google Search? Because the latter sounds like a much, much harder problem, and in particular like it probably requires huge financial resources in order to win the ongoing cat-and-mouse game, if that's even possible.
- fwip 2y agoIt sounds like they're just deranking the blog spam posts. In my opinion, Google should derank the whole domain/brand. If you purposely put your name on garbage, we should put your name in the trash.
- citizenpaul 2y agoWhy doesn't google just manually block/derank all these massive content spam sites like forbes, business insider. Actually solving the problem even though its not some neat tech solution. This is like watching doctors theorize on how to save a bleeding out patient that dies because they are talking.
- Seattle3503 2y agoThe article says Google took "manual action", which implies thats exaxtly what they did.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kmoser 2y agoGoogle has reams of company reviews, both those they've scraped and those they've solicited from the public. How hard could it be for them to downrank sites that advertise companies with relatively bad reviews, and uprank sites that advertise companies with relatively good reviews? They could even scale the downranking so that the higher your site's reputation, the more it gets downranked if you're advertising poorly-reviewed companies. That would ding Forbes more than it would ding Joe's Little Blog, and prevent highly ranking sites (like Forbes) from having a monopoly on some search results.
- theendisney 2y agoIf you advertise with paid articles you are not spending as much as you could on adsense.
- consf 2y ago[dead]
- RaymonAntho 2y ago[flagged]
- PcChip 2y agoAfter getting used to kagi i can’t imagine going back to google, that would be like trying to use the web without uBlock origin after getting used to it
- lofaszvanitt 2y agoJust rotate results... If there are 10000 good articles for a query, why only show 10. 10 because almost noone goes beyond page 1.
- MR4D 2y agoTranslation: Google doesn’t like companies managing their own traffic without Google’s “help”, so Google drops their ranking so the companies have to pay the master (Google). Classic shakedown.