Google search is losing the fight with SEO spam, study says
Study finds "search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam."
I guess we all kinda knew that, but it's always nice to have a study backing your opinions.
What fight? Google is making money, and nearly everyone is playing Google's game following their tune. Google is definitely not losing.
A lot of people dont remember pre-google these days.
Normal search engines worked, but Google was better results.
Now that every website is gaming SEO and the top half of search results is ads that pay to be first...
Google isn't that much better. I went to DuckDuckGo recently. The only thing Google does better is local results. But that's because Google always knows where I am and where I've been.
There's no longer a reason to use Google as a search engine, except habit.
Pretty much same with chrome
The main thing that got me switching to Google back then wasn't the better results, but their promise not to collect or use our data.
That all changed after 9/11, but by then Google had grown so huge it was hard to avoid them.
Even so, I still went back to Webcrawler and the others quite a lot and never really consistently used one search engine faithfully.
DDG uses Bing as the search API, and I don't see any evidence that it doesn't use SEO as well.
I remember pre-Google. There were a few human curated sites back then (like DMoz and Yahoo). I'm thinking that might be a way to combat spam and AI sites. As a side bonus, maybe it will help de-Google the planet.
I'm looking for a Wikipedia-but-for-the-web, where human curators find real web content for me. I found Curlie.org, and tried to sign up for it, but never got a response back on my sign-ups. Still I'm hopeful for something like that.
The Google ads team is functionally all of the company's revenue.
Google search still remains their most used product offering with most of their ad revenue (58.1% in 2022).
Google leadership is terrified that anyone could eat their lunch, because they know the search offering is getting worse and worse.
The origin of Google was taking out complacent search companies that had gotten comfy.
I'm pretty sure when I was laid off (1 year ago yesterday ❤️❤️ thanks Google) it was because they saw LLMs as a threat they hadn't taken seriously enough... Combined with that asshole billionaire being pissy that Google was only making 1.2 million per employee instead of 1.3 million.
With the end result of enshittification, people will migrate if their experience is bad enough. Google wants to strike a balance between making as much money as humanly possible and making the search experience at least decent enough to retain the majority of their users.
I would venture a guess that most people aren’t even realizing that their results are crap. I can’t even see them realizing it until after, I don’t know, all of the products they found via Google search and purchased wound up being gimmicky crap like MyPillow? Even then, I would be really surprised if they figured out what was going on.
I switched to DDG merely to get rid of Google's irrelevant paid results up top.
If I'm searching for brand model manual I don't need every competitor's marketing detritus.
Likewise contact details etc... it's maddening.
Yes, but DDG seems to have worse organic results in my experience. I mean the bar is low, but DDG falls under it.
Oh yeah, the results are worse, but at least I can filter with search grammar and not also have to mentally filter out the ads too.
I'm not sure if we've ended up back at the ol' altavista/askjeeves keyword-stuffed hell yet, but it's close.
IMHO, the problem with Google isn't SEO. It's Google. When Google was great, it would find exactly what you were searching for. The whole point was to get you off of Google and on to whatever site you were looking for as quickly as possible. Over the last several years, their search has increasingly been drinking the 'engagement algorithm' Kool-Aid. Now Google doesn't search for what you ask, it searches for what it thinks you are trying to find. Which is fucking useless because I know exactly what I'm trying to find and that's exactly what I typed in. Selecting verbatim search and putting things in quotes helps. But it's still displays tons of irrelevant stuff that doesn't include what I searched for.
It's actually easy to point to exactly when the downfall started. Years ago Google was trying to make a social network called Google+ that would compete with Facebook. Before this, a + operator in the search field meant only show results that contain that particular term. But they wanted people to search for Google+, so they changed it so the plus sign became a searchable term and quotes were necessary to include a term or phrase. That was the moment Google decided that search wasn't their most important product. And it's been slow downhill ever since.
Okay, sure that was bad. But consider all the value that we've gained by having a lively and competitive alternative to Facebook! I mean, who do you know that doesn't treat Google+ as their first point of contact with the internet?
Lol Don't know anybody that does that, not since they closed in 2019 :P Amusingly, double quotes are still the standard 'must include' operator on Google search.
Google has also completely blown a very good opportunity to make a ubiquitous chat system. Several iterations of Google talk and Google meet and the like, only one of which federated outside of Google, none of which are compatible with each other, all of which seem to get remade or rebranded every few years.
Competitor to Facebook would have been a great idea. I had actually planned to join Google+. But shortly after it launched they started pushing it so fucking hard, like almost sneakly signing up people for it and making it damn near required to do anything, that made me say hell no. I'm pretty sure I wasn't alone in that regard.
I don't know what the hell is going on at Big G HQ, but it doesn't seem like they have much of any real mission these days. Haven't really since 'don't be evil' stopped being part of their mission statement.
There are literal careers dedicated to gaming search results. That’s bound to happen.
And careers dedicated to counter SEO. Fun huh.
My problem is replacing search terms with synonyms (which are often wrong for the context) and ignoring things like quotation marks or other search tools. It’s hard to exclude irrelevant results. Sometimes I’ll know an article’s exact title, search with and without quotes, and never find it.
It's time for Google to die. They are a truly awful company now so it's time to take her down to the shed like ol' blockbuster
What will be replacing it? Bing?
No joke, I’ve been using Bing’s GPT-4 search and it’s helped me much more frequently than Google lately. AI might actually be where Bing out-competes Google.
Before we had Google, we had Altavista and before that we had indexes like Yahoo. Maybe we should consider going back. With the help of AI (I know...) it seems feasible to keep up with the ever growing content.
Maybe we should consider going back.
You can't really go back. Those old engines worked on more naive algorithms against a significantly smaller pool of websites.
The more modern iteration of Altavista/AOL/Yahoo has been the aggregation sites like Reddit, where people still post and interact with the site to establish relevancy. Even that's been enshittified, but its a far better source than some basic web crawler that just scans website text and metadata for the word "Horse" and returns a big listical of results based on a hash weighted by number of link-backs.
That system was gamed decades ago and is almost trivial to undermine in the modern moment. Nevermind how hard you'd need to work to recreate the original baseline hash tables that these old engines built up over their own decades of operation.
Google’s relevance of search has gone extremely downhill in the last few years even before the surge of AI articles, so it’s no surprise the keyword-injected articles are all that’s winning now.
But holy shit does it piss me off how many of these first page results have literally incorrect information now too. Want to learn how to do something in software? See a release date? Find accurate information? Good fucking luck.
For all people complain about the decline in ad revenue, there's still clearly a strong incentive to get click-bait responses.
I honestly wonder if the solution isn't to fight the SEO wars forever, but to just cut this shit off at the root and screen out sites that host ads, period. Obviously, Google can't limit its search by screening out folks that use AdSense because... that's half their business model. But perhaps a search engine that does bias itself against sites that monetize click-throughs could dramatically improve results.
Yeah it's pretty wild how bad search results have been lately. The unfettered proliferation of AI bullshit on the internet is gonna have some really goddamn irritating impacts on just about everything I think.
I’ve been trying DuckDuckGo recently and already started seeing some better results. I’m not ready to change my default search engine yet, but if it keeps up I could see that happening sooner than later.
I recommend reading the actual paper this article is about. DDG is actually by far the worst by their measures. Google is 9% spam compared to 31% for DDG and 23% for Bing. That's a huge difference.
I would recommend trying a SearXNG instance if you haven't before. You can combine results from multiple sources. I use Google as my main source while also having access to the DDG-style !bangs.
My family was looking for a specific manual and couldn't find it on Google, the only search engine they know about. It was one of the first results on DDG.
I'm using DDG for a while now and I'm happy with it overall.
Been using DDG as my default for about 4 years now. It’s actually just gotten better as Google has gotten worse. I used to use the bangs a lot to check Google from DDG, but do that less and less.
I remember back in the day when the same shit was happening because websites would just put, like, an entire dictionary in tiny, hidden text somewhere at the bottom of the main page so it would have a greater chance of showing up no matter what you typed into the search engine.
It's pretty wild that they didn't think about people doing exactly the same thing with all the new methods they came up with to make searches "relevant" since that was one thing that made Google so much better than the competition back then.
Any system you make to push certain things over other things are going to be figured out and gamed.
that's the thing, in the past they had this problem try to solve it and fixed it, now they just cash out from ads campaigns and fuck you customer stop complaining and submit
Arent they trying to make their search worse so you have to search multiple times, showing you more ads?
The study found that ddg was worse than google though. But they only searched for products, so nk complete "test".
Ddg is still good for non product shit, hell sometimes if im looking up niche enough shit itll give me results with for example space battle forums.
I would think they'd make more money by sending you to sites that use Google ads.
The ads on Google's own pages are often fairly benign as far as internet ads go. I've certainly never had them tell me I'm the millionth visitor and try to reward me with the gift of an epileptic fit.
First I tried duckduckgo, now I’m checking out kagi.
I'm really enjoying perplexity.ai most of the time you just get the answer you're looking for.
Google search has,become so bad I couldn't even get the number of my insurance company yesterday. There was nothing but spam on the first page. I am in the market for something new.
Same. Though according to the article, Google is still better than competition, so yeah, not that many alternatives.
and the study itself points out that Google has improved over the past year and is performing better than other search engines. More broadly, numerous third parties have measured search engine results for other types of queries and found Google to be of significantly higher quality than the rest.
I've been noticing this the past 6 months or so. It's not much different than duckduckgo now. And now I'm thinking I need to find more search engines since google is no longer the end all be all when I'm looking for something.
I would expect its only going to get worse as they try to suppress wages across the board in tech
Yea