|
Top-level
 @briankrebs I think Google has definitely lost their way, but I don't think we should underestimate the problem of malicious counterparties. Any search engine that attempts "rank" is going to be gamed, and the biggest search engine is going to face the most games. This makes challenging Google on search doubly impossible. It would take an incredible investment to catalog the 'net, and then another incredible and ongoing investment to keep out the scammers. They are tryin' every day. 12 comments
@briankrebs but don't we know a specific ways that this happens? I think it is a common strategy now to set up a page for high search rank, and then to swap it, hot swap it, for a worse site? Given dynamic page creation this could be a very hard thing for Google to track. Essentially how many kinds of users does Google have to be as they crawl the web to detect all of the subterfuge? What if a "good" site is actually putting out "bad" pages for old Android phones? @briankrebs btw, as I've mentioned I think the dynamic nature of the new web is the reason Google has given up on caching. A cache would only contain an image of the page given to the robot. It would increasingly *not* look like what we see when we visit the same place.  Google's strategy changed when Mohammed bin Salman invested in tech starting in 2018. The fossil fuel industry recognizes to keep its wealth, it needs to thwart democracies from enacting penalties for frying the planet. Funding Trump and anti-democracy billionaires' #enshittification is how. @Npars01 @briankrebs @John I did not realize he was a big investor, but it makes sense. This visit (April 2018) was just a few months prior to Jamal Khashoggi being killed (October 2018). @John @briankrebs When they've also removed boolean ops and exact text match options from search, they're definitely making it worse on purpose. It used to be possible to chip away at things, to narrow on what you were looking for. Not anymore. @John @briankrebs Google is well positioned to punish site swappers, but they don't. I still believe they started the avanlache to breaking search by first getting everyone on Google Reader and then taking it away. When blogs died, unrelated human maintained sites stopped providing high-quality links to each other, eventually losing the key sense-making mechanism of the web. (Granted, prople moving to FB is part of the same problem, but Google has also been active in making it worse.)  @briankrebs THANK YOU. Google is trying way too hard to avoid any responsibility in their enshittification. @briankrebs but yes, part of Google's specific problem is one of incentives. They *can't* down-rank pages for excessive advertising. It would be cutting their own throat. @John@masto.host @briankrebs And not to forget they are now in the business of providing the tools to flood the web with cheaply created SEO'd trash themselves. |
Gregory's Server
@John I'll grant you that on the ads side of things. But it's a tough case to make that somehow Google becoming a lot less useful as a search engine is the fault of scammers.