Google says deleting old pages to bamboozle Search is "not a thing!" as CNET erases its history. The tech news site removed thousands of old articles in a recent bid to appease Google and improve its performance in search results over the past few months.
  • andrew@lemmy.stuart.funEnglish
    991·
    1 year ago

    I’m so annoyed we’re here 25 years from Google’s founding, catering to them with the euphemism “SEO” rather than doing what’s best for the web and for humanity and expecting Google, the Search Engine company, to improve its capacity to search optimally.

    • Dojan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      341·
      1 year ago

      Relevant song.

      Honestly, Google’s decrease in quality feels very noticeable to me. It’s not just Google itself but it’s across their services. They’re making the user experience worse, and promoting irrelevant, mass-produced garbage. On occasion when I’ve been looking for something non-technical and niche, I’ve been taken to random machine-translated websites that just seem entirely AI generated.

      This is a great example.. A friend of mine was contemplating getting a sugar glider (swedish: Korthuvad flygpungekorre, or just flygekorre) and I got curious about what they’re like as pets. So I Googled it and got the above result. It is poppycock! Almost entirely nonsensical!

      Sugar gliders in the Wild

      Babysugarslips begin life in their mothers bag and are called joeys, just like kangaroos. Because of this unique start on life sugar gliding aeroplanes are classified as pungdjur, not rodents like the similar sexy squirrel.
      …
      The sugar whisk is an omnivore, so apart from nectar and juice they’ll also eat both plant material and meat, including fruit, insects, and even small birds or rodents.
      …
      If your swingers aren’t tame and not used to being handled, it might take some time and patience to get them to the point where they’re sexy.

      This type of content has gotten “better” since the release of better language models, but whenever you bump into an article that’s written by a machine, it’s always so very obvious, because they have a tendency to just meander and not really say anything of substance at all. A prime example being this article about World of Warcraft players being excited about “glorbo”, archive.org link.

  • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
    713·
    1 year ago

    Google is supposed (SUPPOSED) to serve up closest to what you search for. SEO is the antithesis of this - it games the system to get a given website closer to or in front of your eyeballs even if it’s content is less relevant. And Google has allowed this to continue (or more likely encouraged it on the down low because businesses that are SEO obsessed are more likely to be send money Google’s way) because Google isn’t a search engine anymore - Google is an advertising company with some internet services slapped on. Google ‘search’ is just a clown face for one of their advertising strategies. It doesn’t serve up what’s relevant - it serves up as much results that generate it revenue as possible without being so obvious about it that users get pissed off and switch search engines.

    • new_acct_who_dis@lemmy.worldEnglish
      151·
      1 year ago

      I do SEO as my day job.

      I’ve only ever done white hat, and it’s all about content relevance to user intent, creating a site that loads quickly and functions in an intuitive way, and is coded so that search engines can easily understand the site.

      Of course the goal is almost always to get you to buy something, but all it really is is best practices for online publishing.

    • evatronic@lemm.eeEnglish
      61·
      1 year ago

      Google ‘search’ is just a clown face for one of their advertising strategies.

      It also has a bunch of decent knowledge tools built in, if you know how to use them. I use the stupid calculator thing more than I should; it’s like a cheap wolfram alpha.

      • quicksand@lemm.eeEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        Literally used that to subtract 37 today. Could’ve done it myself but you type it in Chrome and it previews the answer for free. Such an easy check. I don’t wanna support Google but they are at least pros at subtraction, and God knows you can’t criticize that

  • Gramba@kbin.social
    12·
    1 year ago

    I wonder if this is why so many sites now started including previews of new content on old content pages. It’s made trying to google by date range completely useless because google now thinks a 12 year old post is brand new because there’s a preview of a new post at the bottom when they re-index it.

    • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      I’ve already noticed this being a problem. I search for a specific issue that’s recent. Set the search as past year or month. See a search result that looks relevant and the date on it (according the search engine) is recent. Click on it only to find its a 5yo article.

  • oforgetaboutit@kbin.social
    102·
    1 year ago

    This is because of Google’s monopoly on search. If there were more search engines, then sites would just focus on making high quality articles instead of trying to play with the monopolists policies

    • gamermanh@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      …what?

      If there were multiple search engines (there are) then SEO would focus on whichever were most popular

      I’ve literally done work where SEO included making sure Bing was also optimized for, and I know others who have also done so

      More engines would make SEO harder and longer as we assume each engine would search differently, but SEO will creep into any engine that gets popular for the obvious reason of people wanting their content seen

    • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      I don’t think they’re necessarily so much the number of search engines that currently exist (there’s already currently several) but rather that not enough people use the alternatives that Google had the monopoly. (Also helped by Google actively railroading users into its products and suppressing the competition)