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
    1581·
    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
      57·
      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.

        • Dojan@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Thinking back it’s not the most accurate translation.

          “Snygg” doesn’t have a great equivalent in English. You can call people “snygg” and it’s somewhere between handsome and sexy, but it’s not gendered at all. Men and women can both be “snygga.” Clothes or objects with an aesthetic appeal (like photos or paintings) can also be “snygga” and something can be “snyggt” done. I don’t think you can use the word with animals though, like if you call a dog “snygg” it sounds wrong.

    • Billiam@lemmy.worldEnglish
      271·
      1 year ago

      Google, the Search Engine company, to improve its capacity to search optimally.

      There’s your problem- Google isn’t a search engine company, it’s an analytics company that uses searches to generate data to sell to advertisers. Think about this: what are the goals for a “good” search engine? Results that are:

      1. Fast- get users to their results as soon as possible.

      2. Accurate- get results that users want to see, and minimize what they don’t.

      Immediately, it becomes apparent that the goals of a “good” search engine are literally the exact opposite of the goals of a “good” advertiser:

      1. The faster users leave a search page, the less time they spend looking at ads which advertisers are paying to show.

      2. Users want to see what they are searching for, which is probably not what’s being advertised.

      Advertisers want to maximize the amount of time you spend looking at their ads- in other words, advertisers want you to look at content they want you to see for as long as possible.

      Given that, is it likely that Google will ever “improve”?

    • BURN@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      I don’t even think Google is always the driving force behind these. Once someone found out how to game the engine it was over.

  • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
    903·
    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
      201·
      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.

      • oKtosiTe@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        Would you then class the pages upon pages of generated, useless content I get for most Google searches nowadays as “black hat” SEO?

    • cybersandwich@lemmy.worldEnglish
      172·
      1 year ago

      I highly recommend kagi.com.

      Its paid search, but it has the best results I’ve gotten from any search engine without any extra hassle. I pay for the 300 searches for $5/month.

      The only complaints people have had about it is the cost, but I’m so happy with it I’ll happily jump to the next tier if I blow through these searches.

      anecdotally, I find myself searching less and reviewing the results more. It’s less cluttered and the results, even 4 or 5 down, feel so much more valid/accurate/useful.

      • ansik@kbin.social
        11·
        1 year ago

        I’m extremely happy with the results on Kagi. Setting up my own ‘page-rank’ with their search customizations is a godsend to get rid of any unwanted sites and promoted the sources I know I’ll come back to.

        I’m a bit turned off the pricing though, especially since last month I blew through 1000 searches before the end of last month so currently back to Google, but frustrated by every second search or so.

          • ansik@kbin.social
            3·
            1 year ago

            Thanks! Replying so I remember to check them out tomorrow, but I’ll probably eventually relent and get unlimited too. With how much I apparently use it, probably worth it in the end 😅

        • cybersandwich@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          This is my second month with them, but I have managed to stay under the 300 so far. Admittedly, I dont have it on my phone where I do quite a few searches throughout the day–but those searches are usually not-important or I want them to be tied into the google services (like maps). I should set it up though to get a true count of my web searches.

          But I 100% find myself going to kagi for anything I really want an answer to. I can’t think of a single time where I’ve had to fall back to google or bing (which I found myself doing all the time with duckduckgo and ecosia). Like I said, if I end up needing to spend $10+/month I’d gladly do it. I get more value out of kagi than I do half of the services I play for.

    • evatronic@lemm.eeEnglish
      81·
      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
        8·
        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

  • exussum@lemmy.worldEnglish
    441·
    1 year ago

    They could have taken those articles out of the sitemap and get the same results.

      • exussum@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        People who make decisions like this don’t know what a sitemap is. They probably think CNET is an app.

        I don’t know about that – if they have any good tech leadership, it’d combat that type of thinking. Hopefully.

  • Savaran@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    1 year ago

    Jokes on them, now not only is there no reason to search for anything, but there’s no reason to go their site either.

  • Gramba@kbin.social
    18·
    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
    153·
    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
      15·
      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
      4·
      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)