this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Protests broke Reddit hack for useful Google search results—and Google knows it (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by PopBobert@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] TheKingBee@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

I don't really think it's Googles fault that the internet is mostly garbage.

They're convenient scapegoat, but they're essentially a phone book.

[–] eighty@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's a bit of a chicken-egg problem. But I'm leaning towards Google in this case.

Google is an advertising company. They get paid to show certain results higher, while balancing relevant results by the number of visits and matching key phrases. This is essentially what SEO is.

There are reports of people having to create a separate website designed for SEO, filled with buzzwords and useless fluff, just to show up on searches. It's a combination of bots, LLM, SEO, and '00s/'10s tech companies actually needing to make money that leads to screwing over the user and their experience to squeeze more profits.

[–] snek@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I think this is a very accurate description of the problem. A company can do anything for money, and we feel those effects in the declining quality of search results as everyone dances to the repetitive tunes of SEO. It could be possible to persuade Google to adopt and apply better Internet ethics, but I feel like moving away from large companies like Google and adopt other alternatives is the best solution altogether. Just cut it from the root.

[–] tdawg@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

While this is technically true to what google was originally designed for, it does not represent reality as it exists today. Sites can, and do specifically cater towards SEO. In particular almost any index-able site specifically gets designed to be put at the front. Not only that but many sites will actually PAY to show up as an ad when their competitors names are searched. As a result you end up with a system that only rewards players who follow a very specific set of rules. Rules which are inherently optimized for ad revenue on google's part

source: have been working in tech for 5+ years

[–] hydra@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Except it is, they used to have a good quality crawler that didn't prioritize machine-generated SEO slop from content farms. Within the first page and without adding terms like site:reddit.com, -site:pinterest.com -site:quora.com or before:2016 you could easily get what you wanted.