Google Is Smashing Multi-Discipline Websites to Combat Fake News

Not sure I am buying that this is for "are coming from the urgent need to combat fake news." - maybe it's true, I'd love to see the internal reasoning.

I've noticed for a while that larger sites with lots of info that I run have not been doing so well in the serps, yet smaller sites with only a dozen pages can rank much higher, even though the amount of content is far less, I can see how the 'stay in your lane' thing could be at play in the verticals I pay attention to.

I had been assuming that this is because the 'rank brain' and AI type things they had been touting are all basically failures. You can say it's to combat fake news, it could be to combat sites like 'instructables' and answer sites, (that was a combat things for google a while back right?)

I guess it could be said that fake news sites and spam sites had adjusted to take advantage of the AI things and now they are desperately trying to unfck all that, so a correlation could be true.

Smashing sites that have lots of info may have helped some things for them in the past. However like much of the panda and similar spam fighting things added to the algorithm some time ago... these use a hammer to smash what we don't like things have plenty of collateral damage. Hurting well rounded sites and users who may be looking for more info.

The good thing is that google has censored so much already that it's becoming more and more like the yellow pages and less of a tool for deep discovery. People are looking to other places to find new and cool things. It might be HN, snapchat, some anime forum, whatever.

This is good for people in the long run I suppose. It also shows that human curation is really king IMHO. Google's different departments are a bunch of tails that wag the dog, so it will likely never be what it once was.

This is opening up options for new kinds of search and discover portals which is exciting to me.