5 ms·

Don't bet on AI staying clean. A lot of HN readers conceptualize the forces attacking the integrity of the search results as just some isolated people taking o

by jerf 2y ago

Don't bet on AI staying clean. A lot of HN readers conceptualize the forces attacking the integrity of the search results as just some isolated people taking occasional potshots, and then maybe slinking away if their trick gets blocked. It is probably a lot more accurate to visualize the SEO industry as a Dark Google. Roughly as well resourced, with many smart people working on it full time, day in, day out, with information sharing and coordination. It isn't literally one company, but this conception is probably a lot closer then the one in the heads of most people reading this. Dark Google is motivated, resourced, and smart. And then, once I started thinking of it that way for this post, I realized that increasingly.... Google is increasingly at beck and call of Dark Google. They're increasingly the real customers of Google and the real source of money. It's why Google just seems to be getting worse and worse for us... it's because we're not the real customers any more. Dark Google rules. And if Dark Google has not yet figured out how to scam AI... it is only a matter of time. Dark Google is where Google gets its money now. When Dark Google turns its attention to AI fully, OpenAI will be no more able to resist its economic incentives than Google did. Can't wait for the first screenshot of someone searching for the impact of the battle of Gettysburg on the civil war and seeing the AI do its subtle best to slide an add for Coca Cola into it in some semantically bizarre manner.

_false 2y ago
I like the Dark Google metaphor, but SEO agencies being Google's real customers makes no sense to me.
- jonplackett 2y ago
  Yeah I also didn’t get this. Can you explain what you meant?
- flpm 2y ago
  I think it's more a symbiotic relationship, they feed on each other and both benefit at the expense of the users
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  Maybe one step removed, if I understand it right, the spam sites make money by offering ad space and traffic, and Google makes money by selling ad placement on those sites, so actually Google and Dark Google are on the same side of the marketplace. In a way, it's the other way around, Google is paying the spammers for providing billboard space for their ad placement services. The pervese incentive is that the harder it is to find what I'm looking for, the more ads I get served, hence all ad supported products trend towards becoming useless (see also: Amazon.com)
- marcus0x62 2y ago
  Not OP, but here's how I read it: the SEO operators are driving traffic to google's ad network, where google make's its money. They aren't necessarily paying google much: the ad buyers are doing that, but they deliver the eyeballs to google's ads. Its kind of like the US hospital system, where doctors are considered by the hospital, if not de jure then certainly de facto, to be the real customers of the hospital. Doctors don't pay the hospital much of anything -- the patients do, usually via their insurance company -- but without the doctors, no procedures happen (i.e., no "traffic.") Hospitals can't bill for room and board, nursing services, therapy, etc., where the hospital makes its operating income without the doctors, and in markets where multiple hospitals exist, doctors drive the patients to the hospital(s) of the doctor's choice. Ergo, the doctor is the "real" customer of the hospital. The hospitals can and have adapted to get a bigger share of the revenue pie by hiring their own doctors and buying up the clinics that drive a lot of customers to hospitals in the first place, just like Google has introduced products that are more vertically integrated, but the basic dynamic still exists where they are dependent on third parties to deliver customers.
  - d0mine 2y ago
    Hospitals are increasingly owned by insurance companies. The customers are not doctors but shareholders. That is why a cure is seen as a threat.
    - lostlogin 2y ago
      That doesn’t make sense - a sick patient costs the shareholders money.
      - simonh 2y ago
        Only if you treat the patient. Cures cost money to administer. Better to just deny cover in the first place.
        robertlagrant 2y ago
        That's got nothing to do with cures. In that world administering a cure would be cheaper than treating a chronic illness, which is the opposite of what's being said.
- edgyquant 2y ago
  SEO agencies often onboard people to AdWords
lostlogin 2y ago
> we're not the real customers any more. Were we ever? I didn’t pay for search. I don’t pay for email.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Yeah it’s hard to see how most HN user were the ‘real customers’ of Google at any point in time. It makes no sense to claim that.
- Doctor_Fegg 2y ago
  I pay for both now (Kagi, Runbox). It’s just so much better.
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    I’m a Kagi customer too, and I’ve got the family on it. I don’t miss Google at all. Block lists, Wiki hit at the top. It’s great.
dkkergoog 2y ago
[dead]
m463 2y ago
Google isn't a search company, it is an identification company. that is its moat.
NBJack 2y ago
I very much agree this is effectivity a 'honeymoon' period. Expect the SEO collective to shift focus on AI if the search approach becomes profitable in a few years. That said, given an "AI search" is estimated to be at least ten times [0] as expensive per query than traditional search, I hope you like ads. For those hoping to see that cost to go down, training costs for improved models have instead been going up. [1] [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do-googles-ai-answers-cost-the-environment/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do-googles-a... [1] https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2024/openais-gpt-5-model-reportedly-behind-schedule-with-uncertain-future/ https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2024/openai...
- captainbland 2y ago
  > I very much agree this is effectivity a 'honeymoon' period. At this point I'd be much more interested to hear which "unicorn" tech company did not have such a honeymoon period which it later turned away from. This should really be the default, expected behaviour at this point.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    > At this point I'd be much more interested to hear which "unicorn" tech company did not have such a honeymoon period which it later turned away from Doctolib in France (and Italy, Germany, Netherlands) is one such example. Founded in 2013 so decent life, still as good as in the beginning for both consumers (people booking healthcare appointments) and the customers (doctors paying to use it for their appointment management). And they're only getting better, with e.g. an AI assistant in beta to take notes during appointments.
    - sersi 2y ago
      Only criticism is that they've made it increasingly hard to book a doctor appointment for people who don't have a carte vital.
      - sofixa 2y ago
sethev 2y ago
I think you're right, but also this doesn't contradict the article. Google reset to a cleaner state (leaving behind the advertising choked portals of the late 90s). Over time both internal and external forces have chipped aways at Google's original model. Perhaps AI could drive a similar reset.
ccppurcell 2y ago
"dark Google" seems like the title of a blog post I would find on HN! This is intended as a compliment, in case not clear... Add some important facts and figures (what is the revenue of dark Google, who and how many are they employing) and write it up!
mettamage 2y ago
Fun take Disconcerting take I like the narrative aspect of it
bambax 2y ago
"Dark Google" is dark as in bad, but not as in obfuscated. They can be seen and observed in places like LinkedIn where they discuss their plans in the open. But I don't think Google is part of them, or their slave. I think Google is our last line of defense. True, it's not very effective; more like the knight in Monty Python's Sacred Grail. Still, when we lose Google, we'll have nothing else.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
Dark Google isn't a new thing. Isn't even an Internet thing. It's the very same cancerous growth on society that's been ruining every single communication medium we invented, the disease that's the answer to "why X sucks?" for any X. Advertising industry. I wish I knew what it would take for people to stop treating the unholy blend of marketing communications as respectable occupation, and consider it for what it is: a guild of liars ruining lives and societies.
- johny115 2y ago
  Devs always complain about advertising, but it's why devs tend to do much better comparatively to other jobs in same region. Without distribution mechanisms, there are no sales, without sales, there are no well paid jobs, and eventually no jobs at all. Similar can be said about almost any other job, except the well-paid part. Look at the world before advertising. Everything had to be local small scale only. So everything was very expensive, because no large-scale manufacturing effectivity and massive discounting on end product. Lot of technology isn't even possible on small scale. Nothing worse than salty uneducated devs that think they understand how world works, just because they know how to code, but know nothing about history, economy, business and marketing. I don't like intrusive advertising either. Nobody says that it has to be pushed to the most extreme level possible for it to maintain the benefits. Not even remotely. I also use agressive adblock, I don't react to ads in Google or YouTube, because they tend to be bad and completely non-relevant. I occasionaly react to Instagram ads though, for example. I bought products off Instagram ads and I am glad for it. Some way to promote your product to consumers is extremely valuable and healthy to the modern world. Unless you want to separate yourself from it and become a self-sufficient small community oriented society, like Mormons. The idea of virality and "build great product and they will come" has to be the stupidest crap devs tend to believe. It only works briefly in the early stage within the new market category. 99.9% of world'S products are in mature stage, and those beliefs will get you bankrupt. World needs advertising. New startup founders of great valuable products need advertising. You can notice that those that understand that, succeed vastly more often.
  - kkarakk 2y ago
    going from 0 to profitable doesn't require that much marketing. people do discuss good products and recommend them for pain points independent of being bombarded with ads for them. you can talk about your product to people who need it. going from profitable to "we own gigantic yachts that supply our humongous yachts" aka jeff bezos money requires absurdly crafted insidious borderline evil marketing.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> And if Dark Google has not yet figured out how to scam AI... it is only a matter of time. There is one thing the AI companies have going for them that Google doesn't: They don't have 90% market share. That's a huge problem that only Google has, because if your black hat SEO stops working against Google, you dedicate all your efforts to fixing it until it does, and then Google has to win against the combined efforts of everyone in the world. Now suppose there were a dozen search engines that all had around equal market share. You find something that works against the first one but that causes you to get dropped to page 10 by two of the other ones. You finally find something that works against three quarters of them... for a week... after which it still works against a third of them but doing that causes the other two thirds to drop you again. To have any chance with those now you have to stop doing that, but if you do you fall off the front page for the third it was still working against. Also, by the end of the month that third will be a quarter. You could target only one specific search engine, but then you're doing the same amount of work for only 8% of the advantage, meanwhile that search engine can concentrate their efforts on thwarting the similarly smaller percentage of black hat SEOs who chose to target them instead of one of the competing search engines. It's much harder to hit a dozen moving targets at once than just one.
- squiggleblaz 2y ago
  If beating SEO was something a company with a different algorithm could do, then it would have happened by now. Google remains the default search engine because the alternatives are perhaps even more susceptible to SEO than Google, so there just isn't the motivation to use them. Why do I have to go to the second or third page to find an answer with a naive search on DDG?
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > If beating SEO was something a company with a different algorithm could do, then it would have happened by now. The reductio of this argument is that nothing can ever change or improve because if it was possible someone would have done it already. More to the point, people who have used Kagi seem to speak favorably of it. A search engine you have to pay for is never going to be the mass market option, but it can have enough users to be self-sustaining and remain one of the options, and it proves it can be done.
discordance 2y ago
It's taken 20 years of a public company having to show quarter on quarter, year on year revenue increases, which has resulted in (Dark) Google squeezing dollars over quality. I think AI companies have a bit more time to avoid a similar situation.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Or not. If the rates stay where there are or do not drop drastically there is lot sooner pressure to actually show profits. 2010s were very special economic environment.

by jerf 2y ago

_false 2y ago

I like the Dark Google metaphor, but SEO agencies being Google's real customers makes no sense to me.

jonplackett 2y ago
Yeah I also didn’t get this. Can you explain what you meant?
flpm 2y ago
I think it's more a symbiotic relationship, they feed on each other and both benefit at the expense of the users
jazzyjackson 2y ago
Maybe one step removed, if I understand it right, the spam sites make money by offering ad space and traffic, and Google makes money by selling ad placement on those sites, so actually Google and Dark Google are on the same side of the marketplace. In a way, it's the other way around, Google is paying the spammers for providing billboard space for their ad placement services. The pervese incentive is that the harder it is to find what I'm looking for, the more ads I get served, hence all ad supported products trend towards becoming useless (see also: Amazon.com)
marcus0x62 2y ago
Not OP, but here's how I read it: the SEO operators are driving traffic to google's ad network, where google make's its money. They aren't necessarily paying google much: the ad buyers are doing that, but they deliver the eyeballs to google's ads. Its kind of like the US hospital system, where doctors are considered by the hospital, if not de jure then certainly de facto, to be the real customers of the hospital. Doctors don't pay the hospital much of anything -- the patients do, usually via their insurance company -- but without the doctors, no procedures happen (i.e., no "traffic.") Hospitals can't bill for room and board, nursing services, therapy, etc., where the hospital makes its operating income without the doctors, and in markets where multiple hospitals exist, doctors drive the patients to the hospital(s) of the doctor's choice. Ergo, the doctor is the "real" customer of the hospital. The hospitals can and have adapted to get a bigger share of the revenue pie by hiring their own doctors and buying up the clinics that drive a lot of customers to hospitals in the first place, just like Google has introduced products that are more vertically integrated, but the basic dynamic still exists where they are dependent on third parties to deliver customers.
- d0mine 2y ago
  Hospitals are increasingly owned by insurance companies. The customers are not doctors but shareholders. That is why a cure is seen as a threat.
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    That doesn’t make sense - a sick patient costs the shareholders money.
    - simonh 2y ago
      Only if you treat the patient. Cures cost money to administer. Better to just deny cover in the first place.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        That's got nothing to do with cures. In that world administering a cure would be cheaper than treating a chronic illness, which is the opposite of what's being said.
edgyquant 2y ago
SEO agencies often onboard people to AdWords

lostlogin 2y ago

> we're not the real customers any more. Were we ever? I didn’t pay for search. I don’t pay for email.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Yeah it’s hard to see how most HN user were the ‘real customers’ of Google at any point in time. It makes no sense to claim that.
Doctor_Fegg 2y ago
I pay for both now (Kagi, Runbox). It’s just so much better.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  I’m a Kagi customer too, and I’ve got the family on it. I don’t miss Google at all. Block lists, Wiki hit at the top. It’s great.

dkkergoog 2y ago

[dead]

m463 2y ago

Google isn't a search company, it is an identification company. that is its moat.

NBJack 2y ago

I very much agree this is effectivity a 'honeymoon' period. Expect the SEO collective to shift focus on AI if the search approach becomes profitable in a few years. That said, given an "AI search" is estimated to be at least ten times [0] as expensive per query than traditional search, I hope you like ads. For those hoping to see that cost to go down, training costs for improved models have instead been going up. [1] [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do-googles-ai-answers-cost-the-environment/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do-googles-a... [1] https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2024/openais-gpt-5-model-reportedly-behind-schedule-with-uncertain-future/ https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2024/openai...

captainbland 2y ago
> I very much agree this is effectivity a 'honeymoon' period. At this point I'd be much more interested to hear which "unicorn" tech company did not have such a honeymoon period which it later turned away from. This should really be the default, expected behaviour at this point.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > At this point I'd be much more interested to hear which "unicorn" tech company did not have such a honeymoon period which it later turned away from Doctolib in France (and Italy, Germany, Netherlands) is one such example. Founded in 2013 so decent life, still as good as in the beginning for both consumers (people booking healthcare appointments) and the customers (doctors paying to use it for their appointment management). And they're only getting better, with e.g. an AI assistant in beta to take notes during appointments.
  - sersi 2y ago
    Only criticism is that they've made it increasingly hard to book a doctor appointment for people who don't have a carte vital.
    - sofixa 2y ago

sethev 2y ago

I think you're right, but also this doesn't contradict the article. Google reset to a cleaner state (leaving behind the advertising choked portals of the late 90s). Over time both internal and external forces have chipped aways at Google's original model. Perhaps AI could drive a similar reset.

ccppurcell 2y ago

"dark Google" seems like the title of a blog post I would find on HN! This is intended as a compliment, in case not clear... Add some important facts and figures (what is the revenue of dark Google, who and how many are they employing) and write it up!

mettamage 2y ago

Fun take Disconcerting take I like the narrative aspect of it

bambax 2y ago

"Dark Google" is dark as in bad, but not as in obfuscated. They can be seen and observed in places like LinkedIn where they discuss their plans in the open. But I don't think Google is part of them, or their slave. I think Google is our last line of defense. True, it's not very effective; more like the knight in Monty Python's Sacred Grail. Still, when we lose Google, we'll have nothing else.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

Dark Google isn't a new thing. Isn't even an Internet thing. It's the very same cancerous growth on society that's been ruining every single communication medium we invented, the disease that's the answer to "why X sucks?" for any X. Advertising industry. I wish I knew what it would take for people to stop treating the unholy blend of marketing communications as respectable occupation, and consider it for what it is: a guild of liars ruining lives and societies.

johny115 2y ago
Devs always complain about advertising, but it's why devs tend to do much better comparatively to other jobs in same region. Without distribution mechanisms, there are no sales, without sales, there are no well paid jobs, and eventually no jobs at all. Similar can be said about almost any other job, except the well-paid part. Look at the world before advertising. Everything had to be local small scale only. So everything was very expensive, because no large-scale manufacturing effectivity and massive discounting on end product. Lot of technology isn't even possible on small scale. Nothing worse than salty uneducated devs that think they understand how world works, just because they know how to code, but know nothing about history, economy, business and marketing. I don't like intrusive advertising either. Nobody says that it has to be pushed to the most extreme level possible for it to maintain the benefits. Not even remotely. I also use agressive adblock, I don't react to ads in Google or YouTube, because they tend to be bad and completely non-relevant. I occasionaly react to Instagram ads though, for example. I bought products off Instagram ads and I am glad for it. Some way to promote your product to consumers is extremely valuable and healthy to the modern world. Unless you want to separate yourself from it and become a self-sufficient small community oriented society, like Mormons. The idea of virality and "build great product and they will come" has to be the stupidest crap devs tend to believe. It only works briefly in the early stage within the new market category. 99.9% of world'S products are in mature stage, and those beliefs will get you bankrupt. World needs advertising. New startup founders of great valuable products need advertising. You can notice that those that understand that, succeed vastly more often.
- kkarakk 2y ago
  going from 0 to profitable doesn't require that much marketing. people do discuss good products and recommend them for pain points independent of being bombarded with ads for them. you can talk about your product to people who need it. going from profitable to "we own gigantic yachts that supply our humongous yachts" aka jeff bezos money requires absurdly crafted insidious borderline evil marketing.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> And if Dark Google has not yet figured out how to scam AI... it is only a matter of time. There is one thing the AI companies have going for them that Google doesn't: They don't have 90% market share. That's a huge problem that only Google has, because if your black hat SEO stops working against Google, you dedicate all your efforts to fixing it until it does, and then Google has to win against the combined efforts of everyone in the world. Now suppose there were a dozen search engines that all had around equal market share. You find something that works against the first one but that causes you to get dropped to page 10 by two of the other ones. You finally find something that works against three quarters of them... for a week... after which it still works against a third of them but doing that causes the other two thirds to drop you again. To have any chance with those now you have to stop doing that, but if you do you fall off the front page for the third it was still working against. Also, by the end of the month that third will be a quarter. You could target only one specific search engine, but then you're doing the same amount of work for only 8% of the advantage, meanwhile that search engine can concentrate their efforts on thwarting the similarly smaller percentage of black hat SEOs who chose to target them instead of one of the competing search engines. It's much harder to hit a dozen moving targets at once than just one.

squiggleblaz 2y ago
If beating SEO was something a company with a different algorithm could do, then it would have happened by now. Google remains the default search engine because the alternatives are perhaps even more susceptible to SEO than Google, so there just isn't the motivation to use them. Why do I have to go to the second or third page to find an answer with a naive search on DDG?
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > If beating SEO was something a company with a different algorithm could do, then it would have happened by now. The reductio of this argument is that nothing can ever change or improve because if it was possible someone would have done it already. More to the point, people who have used Kagi seem to speak favorably of it. A search engine you have to pay for is never going to be the mass market option, but it can have enough users to be self-sustaining and remain one of the options, and it proves it can be done.

discordance 2y ago

It's taken 20 years of a public company having to show quarter on quarter, year on year revenue increases, which has resulted in (Dark) Google squeezing dollars over quality. I think AI companies have a bit more time to avoid a similar situation.

Ekaros 2y ago
Or not. If the rates stay where there are or do not drop drastically there is lot sooner pressure to actually show profits. 2010s were very special economic environment.