Comment by NelsonMinar
14 hours ago
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.
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433451
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.
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.
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.
The Google you remember from 2003 was murdered and its corpse is being worn by an entirely unrecognizable company.
“Do all evil” its new unofficial slogan.
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
Yes, but that doesn't scale.
Scale to what? You could manually look at the top million searches each year with four average college graduates.
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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.
>Google shut that down somewhat fast,
> although it did take several years.
You and I have very different definitions of fast
> 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.
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.
> 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
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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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?
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.
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> 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.
> 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.
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
I think it would be easy to make, with two decades of hardware improvements.
The problem is that the web of 2003 doesn't exist any longer.
Google existence changed the websites for better or worse. The Google of 2003 is no longer capable of dealing with today's web SEO dirty tricks.
Install a spam filter for search engines, like uBlackList.
Use bunch of different search engines. In Firefox, enable search entry, then visit search engines and click green + in the entry, to add search engine.
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.
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.
or maybe a government utility
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Just traffic.
>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.
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.
I think it's nick fox now and he's old school and as competent as they come
Because it became an embarrassing news story (https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/, also mentioned in this article). They would have lazily left it unfixed if everybody weren't laughing at them.
If so, the author deserves a Web Signal Award for succeeding where customers, regulators and execs failed despite years of trying.
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.