CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search
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.
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.
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.
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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:
Immediately, it becomes apparent that the goals of a "good" search engine are literally the exact opposite of the goals of a "good" advertiser:
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"?
Enshitification has reached google search too :(((
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.
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.
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.
Would you then class the pages upon pages of generated, useless content I get for most Google searches nowadays as "black hat" SEO?
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.
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.
Its paid search
like everything is, you just weren't paying with money
How does it compare to duckduckgo?
I've been playing around with it as well.
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.
They could have taken those articles out of the sitemap and get the same results.
People who make decisions like this don't know what a sitemap is. They probably think CNET is an app.
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.
... stops looking for CNET in the playstore.
Do people actually go to cnet.com still? That website turned to shit like 25 years ago
Only to look at the logo occasionally. Wondering who's idea that was and whether they're still employed or affiliated with CNET.
Only when shared via yahoo! news
Jokes on them, now not only is there no reason to search for anything, but there’s no reason to go their site either.
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.
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.
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
...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
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)
This is an incredibly astute point. Haven't thought about it like that.
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