this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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without watching the video - google search is falling apart because there's a lot of shit content, a lot of bad articles being written.
and there's a lot of bad articles being written because there's a lot of authors that just want to make money from advertising, without actually caring about the content. in other words, it's advertising's fault that the quality of content is dropping. and ironically, it's mostly google's fault that advertisement on the internet got so big as it is today.
Not quite. It’s largely because a manager decided that an important metric for Google to be better at was “how much time users spend on the results page” which turns out you can game by just making the results worse so users have to stay there longer. Management made a decision to focus on metrics that are counter to what users would actually want because… well, here’s a better article that explains it:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
It's especially frustrating as the whole point of the Google search page was that it was designed to get you out on your way as fast as possible. The concept was so mind blowing at the time and now they're just like nevermind let's default to shitty
The bean counters move in and company focus shifts to money. It's not new.
My dad told me a story back in the 80's about outfitter (camping equipment) stores. A few started selling clothes on the side. The profit margins were much higher on clothes. So that section kept getting bigger until it was a clothing store with a outfitter name. People stopped shopping there, and they'd go out of business.
Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
The bigger reason is that most sites use Google AdSense for showing user ads. Most SEO bullshit sites are basically just empty content as a pretext to show said AdSense ads. Google will rank up these websites because they directly make them money via the revenue cut they take. Simple as that.
Forget the content. Ads in general are ruining basically everything they're allowed on. It's a fuckin cancer.
I have to agree with you, jiveturkey.