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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 o

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.

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 ago
  Because 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 ago
    I 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.
    - thephyber 2y ago
      Stackoverflow visits fell[1] off a cliff since GPT became popular. Google is getting destroyed by the chatbot workflow because it is no longer the start of a browser session and clickthrus (the things that earn the high sponsored link rates) are falling as more users get their queries answered faster with less effort. [1] https://x.com/altimor/status/1853893158368928124?s=46 https://x.com/altimor/status/1853893158368928124?s=46
      - rockskon 2y ago
        Are they, though? Inaccurate info is pretty common from LLMs.
        thephyber 2y ago
        Inaccurate info exists everywhere. StackOverflow contains inaccurate, outdated, incomplete info. Caveat Emptor wherever you are. LLMs are like a knife. It is a tool that can hurt you if you misuse it, but it also has the capability to save LOTS to time if you use it well.
        rockskon 2y ago
        A knife's function is deterministic. LLMs are not. They routinely misinterpret the information they've ingested and confidently spit out incorrect statements. Worse - they confidently spit out incorrect statements in ways we cannot anticipate. This isn't comparable to a person. This isn't comparable to human intelligence. This isn't a problem that can be handwaved away by saying "people are sometimes wrong too!"
- NelsonMinar 2y ago
  You're totally right about that symbiotic relationship. We were aware of that risk in the early days when AdSense launched, we saw some very innovative and gross exploitation and created some policies to rein it in. But ultimately if Google makes a buck coming and going, they will do that. Wasn't there a big story last year in the wake of the DOJ antitrust investigation about Google manipulating search quality to boost ad revenue? I can't put my hands on a reference now, in part because Google is so bad at search these days I can't find anything more than a few months old.
  - Eisenstein 2y ago
    > Wasn't there a big story last year in the wake of the DOJ antitrust investigation about Google manipulating search quality to boost ad revenue? This is the email chain you are looking for: * https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417581.pdf https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417581.pdf
- nurumaik 2y ago
  > Google wins Define "wins". From what happening right now, it seems that google may lose much more than it earned by aligning with seo spammers Maybe they need to start locking employee stock options for 100 years to prevent them optimizing short-term gains?
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Google's only taking the greedy approach. Spam sites on top, spam sites use google adsense, people click spam sites, they click google ads. It works great, until it doesn't. But that's a problem for the next CEO.
    - Scoundreller 2y ago
      iunno, I used to rank pretty well for things in my country like "$company's tech support number". Unlike every $company, my page had a nice clean URL like whatever.tld/Tech-Support-Number-for-$company and I'd just list of their phone numbers with a few paragraphs about how $company is shit. Maybe 50kb total. Meanwhile $company's page was company.tld/234897234982-029823749823742-2340823492 and 3 pages down was a phone number if your browser didn't choke on the javascript. For ISP ones, I recommended people print a copy so they can call if they can't get on the internet, which kinda backfired when a major ISP changed their tech support number (!) and it redirected to a toll-free squatter's sex chat line. Turns out $company really hates it when you call their call (cost) centres. I had maybe 50 pages for our different oligopolies and averaged $500/month revenue on adsense, so GOOG's cut was $250/month. Today, for one $company, the first 9 results are different pages from $company.tld, each unhelpful with a phone number in their own way, and they don't run adsense!
  - pjc50 2y ago
    > locking employee stock options for 100 years This is just a ban by another name. Besides, options are not the massive tax incentive that they used to be. The problems are locked into the nature of being publicly traded companies. If you want to do government search policy, do government search policy.
- klabb3 2y ago
  > My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT. Bingo. I always chuckle when people here say Google has lost it, and become incompetent. Well, they all make the mistake of assuming that they’re trying but failing, rather than that it’s deliberate simply due to boring economics. Now look at how quickly decades-long problems, so big they have an entire cottage industry built around it, suddenly be cleaned up. Incompetence? Nah. Of course, this does nothing to convince regulators and not even average HN user that innovation is harmed by these dominant players. Someone’s gotta think of the poor mega-corps.
- resoluteteeth 2y ago
  > My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT. My guess is it's because a bunch of articles about it have been posted to hn recently.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  > 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.
  - milesvp 2y ago
    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.
  - stcroixx 2y ago
    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.
nurumaik 2y ago
Just manually review top K websites and ban such garbage? Sometimes dumb, bruteforce and biased solution can work way better than any automation you can come up with
- dotancohen 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - danielheath 2y ago
    Scale to what? You could manually look at the top million searches each year with four average college graduates.
    - carstenhag 2y ago
      In all languages of the world? Is that realistic? How could you know whether something in Vietnamese is spam or not? In my opinion it could work, but you'd definitely need 40-80 and not 4 people.
      - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
        Google has ~180k employees. that seems like a pretty small price to pay to make search work...
        disgruntledphd2 2y ago
        And they've been doing user testing of search results for well over a decade (FB started at least 10 years ago, and Google were well into it at that point).
  - consteval 2y ago
    Not everything needs to be computerized and completely automated. You're allowed to just... use human labor. Sure, if every phone call requires an operator that doesn't scale. Okay, so we now have automatic routing. But having a receptionist to route company requests, which may be complex and may not map nicely, still makes sense. It's a human operator, and you pay them. So what, it's a small expense.
lern_too_spel 2y ago
Because it became an embarrassing news story (https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/ https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/, also mentioned in this article). They would have lazily left it unfixed if everybody weren't laughing at them.
- walterbell 2y ago
  If so, the author deserves a Web Signal Award for succeeding where customers, regulators and execs failed despite years of trying.
dawnerd 2y ago
Seriously, they tackled this years ago with the panda update to kill off all the how to and similar seo spam. It's like after around that time they just stopped caring at all and let the best X sites take over.
lumost 2y ago
Searching for python documentation was the worst, geeks for geeks and others would get the top slot for reskinning the pypi docs with ads. The entire thing was so blatant and obvious that I assumed Google did not care due to ad revenue. When ChatGPT launched search, you could immediately skip over all the crap. It made search nice again.
stackghost 2y ago
>My memory is inside Google we were discussing this risk back in 2003, probably earlier. Yeah but that was before they hired the incompetent grifter Prabhakar Raghavan and eventually made him head of Search.
- thephyber 2y ago
  Seems like post hoc fallacy. But people were complaining about the sAme issues under Matt Cutts. Also, there has been A Ton more money and work chasing the SEO farm game. Now big private equity companies have focused on buying a stable of big brands to do the same that used to be garage startups.
- robk 2y ago
  I think it's nick fox now and he's old school and as competent as they come
xivzgrev 2y ago
I miss Google of 2003 What would it take for someone to make it today? No AI, only 1 on mobile, and sites with heavy ad loads are punished
- theendisney 2y ago
  Just traffic.
- Spivak 2y ago
  You're mostly describing Kagi. They do have AI results but you have to explicitly ask for them. They have an "No AI" image search option as well. I also like my "Before AI" lens I can click on to search the internet pre-2021. And you can downrank or fully block those garbage spam sites. They even have a "leaderboard" for most blocked/pinned sites you can use to get started.
- vikingerik 2y ago
  It would take a benefactor who wants to pay for running it for its own sake and not for profit. As soon as there's a profit motive, enshittification sets in since you're serving whoever pays rather than your users.
  - nielsbot 2y ago
    or maybe a government utility
    - openrisk 2y ago
      Governments have been in recent decades completely hands off from anything tech related. For the longest time they followed the usual neoliberal economist trope that markets solve everything optimally. As a result they have created in the so-called "big tech" conglomerates a monster fit for the history books, the most broken and cornered market there ever was. But a wholly government run search engine is not a solution. There are inherent biases in both constructing and presenting indices. You dont want to further stoke the anti-commons mistrust of polarized societies. What the public sector could do is fund all the background techonologies to make it easy to have much larger numbers of search engines. Some of those assembled services could be completely open source, others could be value adding with various added services and customizations. In any case the status quo is a disaster that has no future. Its effectively a forced dumbification of society as it artificially suppresses the flow of high-quality public information. Incidentally it also doesnt solve the problem that much of the world's information is private. Desktop search should become a thing again, in line with local AI etc.
masto 2y ago
The Google you remember from 2003 was murdered and its corpse is being worn by an entirely unrecognizable company.
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  “Do all evil” its new unofficial slogan.
  - mint2 2y ago
    Google’s unofficial/official core policies are great too! Like the well know “all discussion must be self destructing or cc the attorneys so no one can find our evil plotting”
Electricniko 2y ago
The air purifier review site Housefresh dug into why sites like theirs were seeing less traffic back in the spring, and it amounts to a handful of companies buying up popular magazine/blog brands and using them as affiliate farms that cross-post to sites within their networks of brands to boost visibility: https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/ https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/ On HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40239811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40239811 And their previous article mentioned in that post generated a lot of discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433451
- pickledoyster 2y ago
  If an air purifier review site is publishing research on their search traffic and affiliate site rings, I feel it's safe to say that their specialty is in seo, not air purifiers.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    I think that's unfair. They could've hired someone to analyse this, or maybe it's just run by people who work other gigs too. I can post about dance and in-depth http traffic optimisation - people know more than one thing.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    Everything is like this. If you want to sell a nonzero quantity of a generic product, you have to be an expert in advertising and SEO.
htrp 2y ago
>Google shut that down somewhat fast, > although it did take several years. You and I have very different definitions of fast

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 ago
Because 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 ago
  I 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.
  - thephyber 2y ago
    Stackoverflow visits fell[1] off a cliff since GPT became popular. Google is getting destroyed by the chatbot workflow because it is no longer the start of a browser session and clickthrus (the things that earn the high sponsored link rates) are falling as more users get their queries answered faster with less effort. [1] https://x.com/altimor/status/1853893158368928124?s=46 https://x.com/altimor/status/1853893158368928124?s=46
    - rockskon 2y ago
      Are they, though? Inaccurate info is pretty common from LLMs.
      - thephyber 2y ago
        Inaccurate info exists everywhere. StackOverflow contains inaccurate, outdated, incomplete info. Caveat Emptor wherever you are. LLMs are like a knife. It is a tool that can hurt you if you misuse it, but it also has the capability to save LOTS to time if you use it well.
        rockskon 2y ago
        A knife's function is deterministic. LLMs are not. They routinely misinterpret the information they've ingested and confidently spit out incorrect statements. Worse - they confidently spit out incorrect statements in ways we cannot anticipate. This isn't comparable to a person. This isn't comparable to human intelligence. This isn't a problem that can be handwaved away by saying "people are sometimes wrong too!"
NelsonMinar 2y ago
You're totally right about that symbiotic relationship. We were aware of that risk in the early days when AdSense launched, we saw some very innovative and gross exploitation and created some policies to rein it in. But ultimately if Google makes a buck coming and going, they will do that. Wasn't there a big story last year in the wake of the DOJ antitrust investigation about Google manipulating search quality to boost ad revenue? I can't put my hands on a reference now, in part because Google is so bad at search these days I can't find anything more than a few months old.
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  > Wasn't there a big story last year in the wake of the DOJ antitrust investigation about Google manipulating search quality to boost ad revenue? This is the email chain you are looking for: * https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417581.pdf https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417581.pdf
nurumaik 2y ago
> Google wins Define "wins". From what happening right now, it seems that google may lose much more than it earned by aligning with seo spammers Maybe they need to start locking employee stock options for 100 years to prevent them optimizing short-term gains?
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Google's only taking the greedy approach. Spam sites on top, spam sites use google adsense, people click spam sites, they click google ads. It works great, until it doesn't. But that's a problem for the next CEO.
  - Scoundreller 2y ago
    iunno, I used to rank pretty well for things in my country like "$company's tech support number". Unlike every $company, my page had a nice clean URL like whatever.tld/Tech-Support-Number-for-$company and I'd just list of their phone numbers with a few paragraphs about how $company is shit. Maybe 50kb total. Meanwhile $company's page was company.tld/234897234982-029823749823742-2340823492 and 3 pages down was a phone number if your browser didn't choke on the javascript. For ISP ones, I recommended people print a copy so they can call if they can't get on the internet, which kinda backfired when a major ISP changed their tech support number (!) and it redirected to a toll-free squatter's sex chat line. Turns out $company really hates it when you call their call (cost) centres. I had maybe 50 pages for our different oligopolies and averaged $500/month revenue on adsense, so GOOG's cut was $250/month. Today, for one $company, the first 9 results are different pages from $company.tld, each unhelpful with a phone number in their own way, and they don't run adsense!
- pjc50 2y ago
  > locking employee stock options for 100 years This is just a ban by another name. Besides, options are not the massive tax incentive that they used to be. The problems are locked into the nature of being publicly traded companies. If you want to do government search policy, do government search policy.
klabb3 2y ago
> My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT. Bingo. I always chuckle when people here say Google has lost it, and become incompetent. Well, they all make the mistake of assuming that they’re trying but failing, rather than that it’s deliberate simply due to boring economics. Now look at how quickly decades-long problems, so big they have an entire cottage industry built around it, suddenly be cleaned up. Incompetence? Nah. Of course, this does nothing to convince regulators and not even average HN user that innovation is harmed by these dominant players. Someone’s gotta think of the poor mega-corps.
resoluteteeth 2y ago
> My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT. My guess is it's because a bunch of articles about it have been posted to hn recently.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
> 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.
- milesvp 2y ago
  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.
- stcroixx 2y ago
  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.

nurumaik 2y ago

Just manually review top K websites and ban such garbage? Sometimes dumb, bruteforce and biased solution can work way better than any automation you can come up with

dotancohen 2y ago
[flagged]
- danielheath 2y ago
  Scale to what? You could manually look at the top million searches each year with four average college graduates.
  - carstenhag 2y ago
    In all languages of the world? Is that realistic? How could you know whether something in Vietnamese is spam or not? In my opinion it could work, but you'd definitely need 40-80 and not 4 people.
    - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
      Google has ~180k employees. that seems like a pretty small price to pay to make search work...
      - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
        And they've been doing user testing of search results for well over a decade (FB started at least 10 years ago, and Google were well into it at that point).
- consteval 2y ago
  Not everything needs to be computerized and completely automated. You're allowed to just... use human labor. Sure, if every phone call requires an operator that doesn't scale. Okay, so we now have automatic routing. But having a receptionist to route company requests, which may be complex and may not map nicely, still makes sense. It's a human operator, and you pay them. So what, it's a small expense.

lern_too_spel 2y ago

Because it became an embarrassing news story (https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/ https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/, also mentioned in this article). They would have lazily left it unfixed if everybody weren't laughing at them.

walterbell 2y ago
If so, the author deserves a Web Signal Award for succeeding where customers, regulators and execs failed despite years of trying.

dawnerd 2y ago

Seriously, they tackled this years ago with the panda update to kill off all the how to and similar seo spam. It's like after around that time they just stopped caring at all and let the best X sites take over.

lumost 2y ago

Searching for python documentation was the worst, geeks for geeks and others would get the top slot for reskinning the pypi docs with ads. The entire thing was so blatant and obvious that I assumed Google did not care due to ad revenue. When ChatGPT launched search, you could immediately skip over all the crap. It made search nice again.

stackghost 2y ago

>My memory is inside Google we were discussing this risk back in 2003, probably earlier. Yeah but that was before they hired the incompetent grifter Prabhakar Raghavan and eventually made him head of Search.

thephyber 2y ago
Seems like post hoc fallacy. But people were complaining about the sAme issues under Matt Cutts. Also, there has been A Ton more money and work chasing the SEO farm game. Now big private equity companies have focused on buying a stable of big brands to do the same that used to be garage startups.
robk 2y ago
I think it's nick fox now and he's old school and as competent as they come

xivzgrev 2y ago

I miss Google of 2003 What would it take for someone to make it today? No AI, only 1 on mobile, and sites with heavy ad loads are punished

theendisney 2y ago
Just traffic.
Spivak 2y ago
You're mostly describing Kagi. They do have AI results but you have to explicitly ask for them. They have an "No AI" image search option as well. I also like my "Before AI" lens I can click on to search the internet pre-2021. And you can downrank or fully block those garbage spam sites. They even have a "leaderboard" for most blocked/pinned sites you can use to get started.
vikingerik 2y ago
It would take a benefactor who wants to pay for running it for its own sake and not for profit. As soon as there's a profit motive, enshittification sets in since you're serving whoever pays rather than your users.
- nielsbot 2y ago
  or maybe a government utility
  - openrisk 2y ago
    Governments have been in recent decades completely hands off from anything tech related. For the longest time they followed the usual neoliberal economist trope that markets solve everything optimally. As a result they have created in the so-called "big tech" conglomerates a monster fit for the history books, the most broken and cornered market there ever was. But a wholly government run search engine is not a solution. There are inherent biases in both constructing and presenting indices. You dont want to further stoke the anti-commons mistrust of polarized societies. What the public sector could do is fund all the background techonologies to make it easy to have much larger numbers of search engines. Some of those assembled services could be completely open source, others could be value adding with various added services and customizations. In any case the status quo is a disaster that has no future. Its effectively a forced dumbification of society as it artificially suppresses the flow of high-quality public information. Incidentally it also doesnt solve the problem that much of the world's information is private. Desktop search should become a thing again, in line with local AI etc.

masto 2y ago

The Google you remember from 2003 was murdered and its corpse is being worn by an entirely unrecognizable company.

giancarlostoro 2y ago
“Do all evil” its new unofficial slogan.
- mint2 2y ago
  Google’s unofficial/official core policies are great too! Like the well know “all discussion must be self destructing or cc the attorneys so no one can find our evil plotting”

Electricniko 2y ago

The air purifier review site Housefresh dug into why sites like theirs were seeing less traffic back in the spring, and it amounts to a handful of companies buying up popular magazine/blog brands and using them as affiliate farms that cross-post to sites within their networks of brands to boost visibility: https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/ https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/ On HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40239811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40239811 And their previous article mentioned in that post generated a lot of discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433451

pickledoyster 2y ago
If an air purifier review site is publishing research on their search traffic and affiliate site rings, I feel it's safe to say that their specialty is in seo, not air purifiers.
- viraptor 2y ago
  I think that's unfair. They could've hired someone to analyse this, or maybe it's just run by people who work other gigs too. I can post about dance and in-depth http traffic optimisation - people know more than one thing.
- pjc50 2y ago
  Everything is like this. If you want to sell a nonzero quantity of a generic product, you have to be an expert in advertising and SEO.

htrp 2y ago

>Google shut that down somewhat fast, > although it did take several years. You and I have very different definitions of fast