#"seo

[prokopetz]

Like, I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but it's kind of bleakly entertaining how over the course of my life my skill set as an online researcher has gone from being:

Hugely valuable in the late 1990s and early 2000s because the discoverability of information in public-facing databases was fucking terrible and nobody knew how to organise anything; to

Effectively useless throughout the 2010s because search engines enormously and rapidly improved and computer literacy was at an all-time high; and

Back to being hugely valuable once again because SEO bullshit and the proliferation of AI-generated content have degraded online discoverability back to pre-2000 levels and computer literacy is in accelerating decline due to mobile devices deliberately obfuscating basic functionality so that app vendors can sell it back to you with embedded advertising.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[datamined]

UH OH Google just lost an antitrust case!

“A federal U.S. judge ruled Monday that Google has illegally held a monopoly in two market areas: search and text advertising.

The landmark case from the government, filed in 2020, alleged that Google has kept its share of the general search market by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance. The court found that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which outlaws monopolies.

The ruling marks the first anti-monopoly decision against a tech company in decades.”

Article by Rohan Goswami and Jennifer Elias

[leslietheluna]

🎉Happy 33rd Puyo-versary!!🎉

I tried to include as many of the ARS trios and antagonists as I could, any more and I think my brain would explode at the prospect of having to do more lineart😭 asjssdhkja

[Here's the rough sketch!!]

[rennyrose]

Since it’s October been motivated to ponder on some vampires and werewolves

[innieseong]

“𝐂𝐨𝐳𝐲 𝐍𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭” - 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝟏

✧꡴ - 𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆 - 𝐛𝐟!𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐛𝐢𝐧 𝐱 𝐟𝐞𝐦!𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫

✧꡴ - 𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐑𝐄 - 𝐅𝐥𝐮𝐭 ?? (𝐒𝐦𝐮𝐭 𝐱 𝐅𝐥𝐮𝐟𝐟)

✧꡴ - 𝐂𝐀𝐒𝐓 - 𝐒𝐞𝐨 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐛𝐢𝐧 (😍)

✧꡴ - 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐓 - 𝟏.𝟒𝐊

✧꡴ - 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 - 𝐒𝐦𝐮𝐟𝐟, 𝐒𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲, 𝐃𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐲 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤 (𝐦𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐱𝐭), 𝐒𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐏𝐞𝐭 𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬 (𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐲, 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐠𝐢𝐫𝐥)

𝐒𝐘𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐒𝐈𝐒 - 𝐁𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐞 & 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐟𝐟, 𝐬𝐨 𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐜𝐮𝐝𝐝𝐥𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐚 𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐞:𝟑 𝐀𝐭𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐭.. 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐚 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧..

✢ - 𝟏𝟖+, 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝; 𝐌𝐈𝐍𝐎𝐑𝐒 𝐃𝐍𝐈

✢ - 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐔𝐑𝐄 𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐡𝐢𝐦.

✢ - @innieseong

✧꡴ - 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄 - 𝐈 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐄𝐄𝐄 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐒𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐑𝐑𝐑 (𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐞 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭) 𝐌𝐔𝐂𝐇𝐇𝐇, 𝐇𝐄𝐒 𝐒𝐎 𝐁𝐀𝐁𝐘 𝐆𝐈𝐑𝐋 𝐁𝐔𝐓 𝐀𝐋𝐒𝐎 𝐒𝐎 𝐃𝐀𝐃𝐃𝐘, 𝐈𝐃𝐊 𝐇𝐎𝐖 𝐓𝐎 𝐃𝐄𝐒𝐂𝐑𝐈𝐁𝐄 𝐈𝐓 😔 𝐀𝐧𝐲𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬, 𝐄𝐧𝐣𝐨𝐲 :𝟑 (𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐦𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 :𝟑)

It was a Saturday evening, A movie night. You were in changbin bed, cuddled up comfortably under the warm covers, the soft blankets wrapping you snugly like a cocoon. The room was lit by the soft glow of the TV across from the bed, casting a comfortable light over the room.

Changbin disappeared into the bathroom, leaving you to wait alone on the bed. The movie was playing, it was the start of “Scream” so nothing scary yet. You found yourself stealing glances at the door every so often as if trying to call Changbin back faster with your impatient gazes.

As if sensing your impatience gazes, Changbin returns, making his way back over to the bed with a small smile. He slides back under the covers, crawling back in beside you and settling in next to you. He adjusts the covers to make sure he’s comfortable before you feel the weight of his strong arms as he pulls you onto his lap, which causes you to gasp.

Despite your shyness, you snuggle back against his chest as you snuggle in. Binnie wrapped his arms around your waist, hugging you close to his chest, your body in between his legs. The warmth of his body seeped through your clothes, making you feel safe and protected in his embrace. His chin rested on top of your head, his breath ruffling your hair gently with each exhale

"You're so cute when you're shy," he murmurs, his voice a low rumble in his chest. He starts to trace his fingers lightly across your stomach, gently caressing your skin under the oversized shirt. His touch is soothing and intimate, sending tingles through your body.

His lips brushes against your ear as he leans in close. The scent of his cologne, mixed with the clean smell of his skin, fills your senses.

He shifts slightly beneath you, adjusting his position to press his hips more firmly against your backside. The warmth of his body radiates through the thin fabric of his pajama pants, making you acutely aware of how close you are.

On the TV, the movie continues to play, the tension building as the characters find themselves in increasingly dangerous situations. But in this moment, snuggled up in his embrace, the world outside seems far away.

As Changbins hands explores your body, one of them suddenly darts up under your shirt, his palm pressing flat against your bare skin. His touch was hot and electric, making you gasp. Slowly, teasingly, he dragged his hand up your torso, over the quivering planes of your stomach, until he cupped one of your full breasts in his large palm, causing you to gasp.

He stays quiet as he keeps his gaze on the tv, as if he doesn’t know what he’s doing. In his head, he was more surprised about you not wearing a bra.. and it turned him on.

His fingertips lightly graze the sensitive skin of your nipple. The sudden sensation sends a jolt of electricity through your body, causing you to arch your back ever so slightly against his touch. He continues to act as if nothing unusual is happening, his attention seemingly fixed on the movie playing on the TV.

But you can feel the way his muscles tense beneath you, the subtle shift of his hips pressing more firmly against your backside. His breathing grows slightly heavier, though his expression remains impassive.

As the movie plays on, the tension builds. On screen, a character cautiously enters a darkened room, the camera angle obscuring what horrors might await. The first scream from the movie rips through the silence. You jump, instinctively pressing closer to Binnie. He chuckles softly, the sound vibrating against your back. "Scared already?" he teases, but there's no mockery in his tone, only affection.

His fingers stroke through your hair, soothing even as they tangle in the strands. His breath is hot against your neck as he murmurs,"I've got you, Y/N.”

And somehow, impossible as it seems, you believe him. Because this is Changbin—your Binnie, the one who sees past all your walls and defenses to the vulnerable heart beneath. The one who holds you when the world becomes too much, who chases away your nightmares with the simple strength of his presence

Binnies other hand trail down your stomach, leaving goosebumps in their wake as they dip beneath the waistband of your shorts. His touch is feather-light, teasing, as if he's exploring uncharted territory. Slowly, deliberately, he skims over the sensitive skin of your lower abdomen before cupping your mound through the thin fabric of your panties.

The sudden pressure against your most intimate area makes you suck in a sharp breath, your hips instinctively rocking forward into his touch. His fingers apply just the right amount of pressure, rubbing slow circles against your clit through the dampening cloth.

On the TV, the movie reaches a crescendo of terror, but neither of you are paying much attention anymore. His other hand pinches and roll your nipple between his fingers, sending jolts of pleasure straight to your core.

His breath is hot against your neck as he leans in to whisper, "You're so wet already, and we've barely even started." His voice is low and rough. He slips his fingers beneath the edge of your panties, brushing against your slick folds. He teases you with shallow strokes, never quite dipping inside, until you're squirming in his lap, desperate for more.

Only then does he slowly push one finger into your tight heat, His phone rings, the soft melody of a choir.

Changbin pauses, his finger still buried slightly inside you, as he glances at his phone. The familiar ringtone echoes in the room, breaking the intense atmosphere.

"Shit, just great." he mutters, reluctantly withdrawing his hand from your panties. He gives your ass a gentle squeeze before carefully shifting you off his lap.

He stands and retrieves his phone from the bedside table, frowning at the unknown number flashing on the screen. He answers the call as he walks over to the window, turning his back to you.

"Hello? Who is this?" His voice is gruff and suspicious, a far cry from the tender seduction from moments ago.

You can hear a muffled voice on the other end, speaking in rapid Korean. Changbins eyebrows furrow as he listens intently, his posture stiffening.

"I understand. I'll be there as soon as I can," he replies curtly, before ending the call.

He turns to face you, running a hand through his tousled hair. There's a flicker of regret in his eyes as he meets your gaze.

"I'm sorry, baby. I have to go out for a bit. It's for work, and it sounds important." He walks over to his closet and grabs his clothes and walks back out.

"Rain check on the movie? We can finish it later if you want. Or... I could just make you cum right now before I leave, if you prefer." A smirk plays at the corners of his mouth, a hint of his earlier passion resurfacing despite the interruption.

You quickly turn your head and lay it in his pillow, ears red as you feel embarrassed. You knew he was trying to lighten the mood and was only jesting.

Changbin pauses in the process of putting on his shirt, a mischievous glint in his eye as he looks at you lying there, a blush coloring your cheeks. He crawls back onto the bed, leaning over you with a playful grin.

"Aw, don't be embarrassed, Y/N. It's cute," he teases, nuzzling his nose against yours affectionately.

His lips find yours in a deep, passionate kiss, his tongue delving into your mouth to taste you fully. One hand cups your cheek, tilting your head to deepen the kiss, while the other slides down to caress your thigh, hiking up your leg to hook over his hip.

When he finally pulls back, you're both breathless and flushed. He presses his forehead against yours, his eyes half-lidded with desire.

"I'll be thinking about you the whole time I'm gone," he confesses, his voice low and husky. "Imagining all the filthy things I want to do to you when I get back."

With a final peck on your lips, He reluctantly disentangles himself from you and finishes getting dressed. He grabs his keys and wallet, giving you a heated look over his shoulder as he heads for the door.

"Be a good girl and wait for me, yeah?“

And with that, he's gone, leaving you alone with your racing thoughts and a throbbing ache between your thighs, counting down the minutes until his return.

𝑪𝒐𝒛𝒚 𝑵𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕 - 𝑷𝑨𝑹𝑻 𝑻𝑾𝑶

✧꡴

✧꡴

[wieqo]

◌❘❙ ⃨̃🪷⬮ Watermelon Sugar ࿔ ཊ

[facts-i-just-made-up]

https://www.google.com/

internet opinion on above website

If I search for how to do something, I only find ads for unrelated crap or AI generated nonsense, or occasionally a question posted identical to mine that nobody has ever answered. If I want info on something, I can look for it in quotes and get an ad for something without any words even related to what I was after. The supreme reigning search engine is almost as bad as tumblr's "nothing on this blog" when I just posted and tagged it with the search term earlier that day. The data wars are over. The advertisers won.

Oh wait, this is the FAKE facts blog. Uh... Google's is awesome!

[semeukedotcom]

divorce selfie!

[singlemoms-posts]

Am I too old to give head?

[prokopetz]

Advisory: that recipe for bacon-wrapped whatever that you found on the Internet is a trap. If it's not AI-generated, nine times out of ten somebody took an existing recipe for prosciutto-wrapped whatever and search-and-replaced the word "prosciutto" with "bacon" because the word "bacon" gets better SEO scores. Store-bought bacon is typically too thickly sliced to substitute for prosciutto in most contexts, and what you're going to end up with if you try that recipe is a soggy whatever covered in half-raw bacon.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google reneged on the monopolistic bargain

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and TOMORROW in SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!

A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.

Google's search results are terrible. The top of the page is dominated by spam, scams, and ads. A surprising number of those ads are scams. Sometimes, these are high-stakes scams played out by well-resourced adversaries who stand to make a fortune by tricking Google:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/phone-numbers-airlines-listed-google-directed-scammers-rcna94766

But often these scams are perpetrated by petty grifters who are making a couple bucks at this. These aren't hyper-resourced, sophisticated attackers. They're the SEO equivalent of script kiddies, and they're running circles around Google:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Google search is empirically worsening. The SEO industry spends every hour that god sends trying to figure out how to sleaze their way to the top of the search results, and even if Google defeats 99% of these attempts, the 1% that squeak through end up dominating the results page for any consequential query:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Google insists that this isn't true, and if it is true, it's not their fault because the bad guys out there are so numerous, dedicated and inventive that Google can't help but be overwhelmed by them:

https://searchengineland.com/is-google-search-getting-worse-389658

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Google has long maintained that its scale is the only thing that keeps us safe from the scammers and spammers who would otherwise overwhelm any lesser-resourced defender. That's why it was so imperative that they pursue such aggressive growth, buying up hundreds of companies and integrating their products with search so that every mobile device, every ad, every video, every website, had one of Google's tendrils in it.

This is the argument that Google's defenders have put forward in their messaging on the long-overdue antitrust case against Google, where we learned that Google is spending $26b/year to make sure you never try another search engine:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-27/google-paid-26-3-billion-to-be-default-search-engine-in-2021

Google, we were told, had achieved such intense scale that the normal laws of commercial and technological physics no longer applied. Take security: it's an iron law that "there is no security in obscurity." A system that is only secure when its adversaries don't understand how it works is not a secure system. As Bruce Schneier says, "anyone can design a security system that they themselves can't break. That doesn't mean it works – just that it works for people stupider than them."

And yet, Google operates one of the world's most consequential security system – The Algorithm (TM) – in total secrecy. We're not allowed to know how Google's ranking system works, what its criteria are, or even when it changes: "If we told you that, the spammers would win."

Well, they kept it a secret, and the spammers won anyway.

A viral post by Housefresh – who review air purifiers – describes how Google's algorithmic failures, which send the worst sites to the top of the heap, have made it impossible for high-quality review sites to compete:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

You've doubtless encountered these bad review sites. Search for "Best ______ 2024" and the results are a series of near-identical lists, strewn with Amazon affiliate links. Google has endlessly tinkered with its guidelines and algorithmic weights for review sites, and none of it has made a difference. For example, when Google instituted a policy that reviewers should "discuss the benefits and drawbacks of something, based on your own original research," sites that had previously regurgitated the same lists of the same top ten Amazon bestsellers "peppered their pages with references to a ‘rigorous testing process,’ their ‘lab team,’ subject matter experts ‘they collaborated with,’ and complicated methodologies that seem impressive at a cursory look."

But these grandiose claims – like the 67 air purifiers supposedly tested in Better Homes and Gardens's Des Moines lab – result in zero in-depth reviews and no published data. Moreover, these claims to rigorous testing materialized within a few days of Google changing its search ranking and said that high rankings would be reserved for sites that did testing.

Most damning of all is how the Better Homes and Gardens top air purifiers perform in comparison to the – extensively documented – tests performed by Housefresh: "plagued by high-priced and underperforming units, Amazon bestsellers with dubious origins (that also underperform), and even subpar devices from companies that market their products with phrases like ‘the Tesla of air purifiers.’"

One of the top ranked items on BH&G comes from Molekule, a company that filed for bankruptcy after being sued for false advertising. The model BH&G chose was ranked "the worst air purifier tested" by Wirecutter and "not living up to the hype" by Consumer Reports. Either BH&G's rigorous testing process is a fiction that they infused their site with in response to a Google policy change, or BH&G absolutely sucks at rigorous testing.

BH&G's competitors commit the same sins – literally, the exact same sins. Real Simple's reviews list the same photographer and the photos seem to have been taken in the same place. They also list the same person as their "expert." Real Simple has the same corporate parent as BH&G: Dotdash Meredith. As Housefresh shows, there's a lot of Dotdash Meredith review photos that seem to have been taken in the same place, by the same person.

But the competitors of these magazines are no better. Buzzfeed lists 22 air purifiers, including that crapgadget from Molekule. Their "methodology" is to include screenshots of Amazon reviews.

A lot of the top ranked sites for air purifiers are once-great magazines that have been bought and enshittified by private equity giants, like Popular Science, which began as a magazine in 1872 and became a shambling zombie in 2023, after its PE owners North Equity LLC decided its googlejuice was worth more than its integrity and turned it into a metastatic chumbox of shitty affiliate-link SEO-bait. As Housefresh points out, the marketing team that runs PopSci makes a lot of hay out of the 150 years of trust that went into the magazine, but the actual reviews are thin anaecdotes, unbacked by even the pretense of empiricism (oh, and they loooove Molekule).

Some of the biggest, most powerful, most trusted publications in the world have a side-hustle in quietly producing SEO-friendly "10 Best ___________ of 2024" lists: Rolling Stone, Forbes, US News and Report, CNN, New York Magazine, CNN, CNET, Tom's Guide, and more.

Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it. The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information. You promised us that if you got to be the unelected, permanent overlord of all information access, you would 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'"

They broke the deal.

Companies like CNET used to do real, rigorous product reviews. As Housefresh points out, CNET once bought an entire smart home and used it to test products. Then Red Ventures bought CNET and bet that they could sell the house, switch to vibes-based reviewing, and that Google wouldn't even notice. They were right.

https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/welcome-to-the-cnet-smart-home/

Google downranks sites that spend money and time on reviews like Housefresh and GearLab, and crams botshittened content mills like BH&G into our eyeballs instead.

In 1558, Thomas Gresham coined (ahem) Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives out good." When counterfeit money circulates in the economy, anyone who gets a dodgy coin spends it as quickly as they can, because the longer you hold it, the greater the likelihood that someone will detect the fraud and the coin will become worthless. Run this system long enough and all the money in circulation is funny money.

An internet run by Google has its own Gresham's Law: bad sites drive out good. It's not just that BH&G can "test" products at a fraction of the cost of Housefresh – through the simple expedient of doing inadequate tests or no tests at all – so they can put a lot more content up that Housefresh. But that alone wouldn't let them drive Housefresh off the front page of Google's search results. For that, BH&G has to mobilize some of their savings from the no test/bad test lab to do real rigorous science: science in defeating Google's security-through-obscurity system, which lets them command the front page despite publishing worse-than-useless nonsense.

Google has lost the spam wars. In response to the plague of botshit clogging Google search results, the company has invested in…making more botshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Last year, Google did a $70b stock buyback. They also laid off 12,000 staffers (whose salaries could have been funded for 27 years by that stock buyback). They just laid off thousands more employees.

That wasn't the deal. The deal was that Google would get a monopoly, and they would spend their monopoly rents to be so good that you could just click "I'm feeling lucky" and be teleported to the very best response to your query. A company that can't figure out the difference between a scam like Better Homes and Gardens and a rigorous review site like Housefresh should be pouring every spare dime it brings in into fixing this problem. Not buying default search status on every platform so that we never try another search engine: they should be fixing their shit.

When Google admits that it's losing the war to these kack-handed spam-farmers, that's frustrating. When they light $26b/year on fire making sure you don't ever get to try anything else, that's very frustrating. When they vaporize seventy billion dollars on financial engineering and shoot one in ten engineers, that's outrageous.

Google's scale has transcended the laws of business physics: they can sell an ever-degrading product and command an ever-greater share of our economy, even as their incompetence dooms any decent, honest venture to obscurity while providing fertile ground – and endless temptation – for scammers.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

[singlemoms-posts]

I mostly try to hide them?

Is my 37yo ass still hot enough?

[mebularts1]

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[prokopetz]

I suppose the thin silver lining to the discoverability of online resources going to shit because of SEO explotation is that all the folks who responded to reasonable questions with snarky "let me Google that for you" links which now lead to nothing but AI-generated gibberish look like real assholes now.