605
Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
605 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
59329 readers
6443 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Here's my theory... Google wants to artificially fuck up it's search functionality. It wants to offer good performance for a fee. And it's going to be doing that by giving it's own AI the correct filters while at the same time tripping every other AI capable of searching the net such that the other AI results become garbage and only the Google one works correctly. Anyway that's my conspiracy theory, fuck Google with a bunch of sharp forks.
It's much simpler than that. Google is an ad company, not a search company. SEO spam gives them ad clicks just the same as quality content, if not more so. As long as they don't became bad enough that everybody switches to the competition, they simply don't have to care.
It does? I thought the point of SEO was to show up in search results without having to pay for keyword placement.
It's not about the ads on Google.com, but the ads on the SEO sites themselves, those are also served by Google. Ever heard of DoubleClick? That's also Google. If Google Search would give you good clean non-commercial sites without ads, they would lose money.
Exactly. Google has an incentive to send you to the most ad infested seo garbage, that just barely answers your search.
Or they just cannot complete with literal millions of people attempting to optimize their webpages for discovery using Google.
If other services like kagi can offer better results they should be able as well, right?
I think it's simply a question of what are Google's interests. Users doesn't pay anything to Google for the service, so that's not where Google's interests are. Advertisers pay Google, so that's where Google's interests are. Google has no interests to make the search better for users, they want to make it better for advertisers.
They still need to make the system appealing to users.
If users had higher standards, then Google would have to meet those standards or lose out on business.
To do that, you simply have to inform users about other available search engines and remind them again that those exist when one of their searches fails.
And AI is just making it worse. Entire websites of SEO-optimized content can be generated in seconds now. No one will be able to keep up with all that!