I’m kind of conflicted about this. On one hand it’s dangerous that the public’s access to information is so tightly coupled to a single organizations decisions, and I can see the danger in Google making a change like this.
On the other hand, clickbait and SEO gaming has gone on so long that using a site like Google has become significantly less useful to actually finding information, and if a site like Kotakus traffic is down by 60% as a result—is that due to Google being dangerous, or Kotaku having a pile of garbage content meant to game the system and bring in traffic?
For what it’s worth I’m using Kotaku as an example because the article used Kotaku as an example—I have no actual opinion or evidence around the actual content on that particular site.
It’s an example of why monopolies are harmful. They create distorted economies that don’t serve consumers. Like ecosystems overcome by a monoculture, monopolies are inherently less resilient, less functional and prone to sudden disruption.
How exactly would it be any different without Google / SEO. Parsing of website content to determine topics would be a shit show historically, or ridiculously computation heavy now that LLMs could conceivably do a decent job at classifying content. So Google created a way for sites to tag the kind of content they have. Pretty much any search engine would need the same kind of mechanism.
And content providers are always going to be incentivized to be the top search result, which means targeting search algorithms. That’s just the nature of the beast.
If there were multiple SEO implementations, that just means more work to target multiple algorithms. And the content owners with more resources, hundreds of developers, would ultimately win because they can target every algorithm.
I really don’t see how Google as a “monopoly” changes these basic fundamentals.
If there were multiple sources of traffic, the pressure to optimize to one source would be lower, and the disruption caused by algorithm changes would be muted. Which would mean more interesting content less driven by a narrow set of metrics
On the other hand, clickbait and SEO gaming has gone on so long that using a site like Google has become significantly less useful
That’s the same old game of “whack-a-mole” that every search engine since the beginning of the internet has had to play.
Search engines try to provide useful results to keep users trusting them enough to keep coming back, and advertisers keep trying to use SEO to manipulate themselves to the top of the search results
When a handful of monopolies decide that no factchecking will be seen by anybody, anymore,
and only profitable-to-their-dictatorship disinformation will be seen,
then humanity will not have any means of countering that:
it will be too late.
We are “the frog dropped into the slowly-heating pot of water”.
People pretend that monopoly is “maybe” harmful, economically, but it is an existential-threat to countries, and with globalization, now to civil-rights as a valid-category.
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Google search has enshittified far faster than I ever thought possible. It used to work like magic. Too bad capitalism dictates that usefulness has a ceiling.
I’ve switched to Kagi recently and honestly it’s better than Google ever was. You can assign weights to sites to see more or less of them in your results, it automatically cuts the listicle crap out, it has various built in filters for specific things like forums or scientific studies.
Downside: it’s $10/mo. But I’m at the “I’d rather pay with money than data” stage of my life. Especially if it actually makes the experience fucking usable again.
There was something bad with Kagi.
TL;DR; “AI bad, they made some t-shirts, and the owner says some stupid crap sometimes.” 🙄
As long as the results remain the best and they don’t screw me over, I’m happy to keep paying for them.
But lets be honest, even Duck Duck Go is better than Google these days. It’s fine if folks don’t want to pay for search, but you’ll have a better experience avoiding Google, either way.
You’re linking to a halfhearted attempt at an exposé written by someone who acts unreasonable towards any attempts at clarification.
I’m gonna keep it real with you, I’ll take “weirdo CEO and optional AI tools” over “corporate entity so powerful that society has literally warped around it, whose primary business model is psychological manipulation” any day of the week. The other search engines are so poor at what they do that they’re not viable options.
This sort of thing is why Google’s monopoly on the internet is so dangerous.
Because they are making so that we get less results that are just cheating the system to show up at the top?
SEO is a bastardization of a useful tool, solely meant to game the system artificially
SEO is only feasible in the first place because we have one dominant search engine instead of a bunch of equally-prominent ones with different algorithms that would need to be optimized for differently (and maybe even mutually-exclusively).
Copy paste.
There are a ton of them, the problem is none of them are as good as google.
I hear there are good pay ones, though I have never tried one.
I can usually find what I need on google pretty damn quick, although I have seen the end page more than once
Well, yes, but in a broader sense, they have way too much of a stake in the control of global communications altogether. Even just a hiccup on their servers or slight change to their system has a global impact, as obviously evidenced here. The world is dangerously reliant on a centralized private company for daily functioning.
Such a powerful entity shouldn’t be controlled by private parties and needs to be governed in a way that the benefit of the people is kept paramount.
Because they are making so that we get less results that are just cheating the system to show up at the top?
No, because they are failing to hide low quality search results. Something the would invest more money in if an alternative search engine existed.
There are so many websites now that just shouldn’t exist at all. And they wouldn’t exist if Google didn’t send tons of traffic their way.
What websites do you think shouldn’t be allowed to exist here?
You find what you search for, shitty companies game the system with SEO because they are shitty and it’s the only way for them to get access.
Google is trying to make that harder for them to do.
Why is them making SEO harder a bad thing?
If there were more search systems/engines there would be a wider variety of ways search results are optimized. Meaning SEO would have a greater level of diminishing returns. Having a single player creates a single point of weakness in search.
There are a ton of them, the problem is none of them are as good as google.
I hear there are good pay ones, though I have never tried one.
I can usually find what I need on google pretty damn quick, although I have seen the end page more than once
to be fair, they specifically target the way google ranks these websites. If google would rank them with less impact of what the website “bastardizes”, this could be generally less of an issue in the first place.
Because they down ranked sites blatantly shoveling shit for the sole purpose of gaming their algorithm?
Good. Websites are spammy garbage now. I can’t fucking believe how shitty the experience is when I’m not using a browser with uBlock origin.
If this is a way to punish that, punish away.
Who wrote this? I’m supposed to be upset that a bunch of big websites are lower on Google results? Why should anyone besides their shareholders care?
Edit: Oh, he co-founded the website hosting this article. So he does indeed have a vested personal interest.
