- Unlike SEO, the 'news' association for publishers comes with a standard of authority.
Imagine if it took ten minutes for OP to get their site listed and showing articles on the headline carousel. Now imagine how easy that same process would be for the waves of fake news blogs to spread misinformation. It's far from perfect but the process is not that quick and not that easy for newcomers for a reason.
People commonly lament that the Web has changed, it's dominated by big brands, it's not weird anymore, etc. I think this is a big part. Google has made these changes in an effort to address some legitimate problems around spam, black/gray hat SEO etc. But they likely have some less user-centric incentives as well ($$$) and either way, Google SERPs have become more boring and less relevant.
There might be an opportunity for disruption emerging because of this. Google knows its search engine isn't very good anymore! That is why they're increasingly trying to pitch their service as a recommendation engine with special AI sauce, not an index of the Web. But frankly as this article demonstrates, what Google wants to recommend comes from a smaller sandbox and often is not the most interesting stuff out there.
If someone can come up with a distribution mechanism which solves the problem of helping the user discover All The Content minus the spammers, scammers and fake news, they will be able to deliver more relevant information than search or social media can today. Google being large actually gives them an in-built disadvantage here because no matter what algorithm they develop, it's going to be everyone's first priority to reverse engineer and game.
I wish there was a way to detect people attempting to game the algorithm, and just ban them indiscriminately. That's the only way. It probably requires AGI, though.
Just like the old saw, "you're not stuck in traffic, you're the traffic", if you're doing SEO beyond making your page lightweight and useful to people, you are a part of the problem.
It won't solve fake news issue; people could still make nice and fast sites full of lies. But at least low-effort "content marketing" spam would hopefully disappear, not to mention comment spam and all the other content that exists solely to push useless sites higher in SERPs.
This is, unfortunately, an overly simplistic model. Everything can be manipulative if done to an extreme extent.
There's no individual thing that you can easily draw the line at. The question is where do you draw the line, and what combination of factors is ban worthy.
> Google knows its search engine isn't very good anymore!
And
> That is why they're increasingly trying to pitch their service as a > recommendation engine with special AI sauce, not an index of the web
We provide some content discovery tools (Discover, News), but those are offshoots made possible by our core mission and competencies: organizing the web’s information and making it accessible to users (yes we really say that, though frequently with a wink and a nod). We don’t try to be an index of the web, but instead as the best place to find out anything.
For a high-level read (and some in-depth coverage, like the rater guidelines) on what I’m taking about, consult this page: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/web-use...
Google shifted from being a web search engine to a promoter for big media companies. They should start advertising the company as such instead of lying to consumers.
Are all of the news article pointing to the blog source ? Yes (well not even that actually). But the rest of the web, the reddit, the facebooks, the twitter, the everything points to the news article on NYT, Fox, ...
You admitted you don't have a longitudinal view. Results really are less accurate, less relevant; we're not hating on G.
Google appear to have decided to target people who don't know what they're looking for (accuracy and relevance aren't so important), and target natural answers to natural questions rather than focused, targeted search (which was what made its name).
It's like if Nike switched to making clogs but they looked just like their traditional trainers.
Now, that's sorta fine, but it's tiresome as hell to have to alter search settings every.. single.. time.., why am I logged in again? And, still not find what you're looking for, but instead some curated set of mass media pages that only have a cursory relationship to your keywords.
You can read whatever guidelines you like, but "clogs" aren't going to work like "trainers".
Yeah, whatever their intentions, sometime in the '07-'09 time frame they very obviously changed things in a big way and appeared to simply give up trying to separate spam from small-time sites, and just down-ranked the lot. The search results for certain types of queries are somewhat better now, as a result. The search results for other types of queries have gone from "pretty much perfect" to "totally useless", though. Anyone who's been a heavy user of Google for a long time has noticed this.
Finding a needle in a 3ft haystack is one thing, finding it in 3 miles of hay is another.
I feel it's not Google getting worse for some queries but the internet is just so much larger now, and the evidence is that the other major search engines don't bring back that same simplicity and ease of finding high quality technical information from smaller sources that I also remember from the late 2000's
I think the others don't go against this trend because they also don't want to spend more money fighting spam to try to salvage a use case / usage pattern that is at this point so old that a lot of Web users have never seen it work, and that many users even back then didn't use effectively.
Those of us who relied on it heavily disagree strongly with the notion that Google only improves their search, though. For me it's much worse today—to the point of being entirely useless, in fact—for a significant percentage of queries I'd like to try against it, and noticeably worse though still usable for a bunch of others. It is definitely better at sending me to Wikipedia and at finding local restaurants or whatever, though, which is the kind of thing that probably constitutes 95+% of all queries against it (throw in people typing "example.com" into search rather than the address bar and it's more like 99%), so I'm sure their metrics look great.
To take a quote from Jeff Bezos, "The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it." Metrics are important, but metrics definitely aren't everything.
"I don't find my search results very useful."
"Yes you do! Look at these numbers!"
I see the flip side of this as an admin of a small website. 10 years ago I used to get search engine traffic to articles based on queries about subjects of those articles. Today, this is just gone. I can't find my own damn website without explicitly using its domain name. Even if I search for a specific subject and go though multiple pages of results. Google thinks that one-paragraph summaries from content farms are more relevant that an edited multi-page essay from a website that existed for over a decade.
Additionally, the article mentions another thing I've noticed. Google is obsessed by how frequently the website is updated. So, what if I spend extra time to write, verify and edit all my content? From what I cant tell, this reliably gets you ranked lower than website that crank out garbage in huge quantities.
It is possible for this to be true and for the koolaid at the plex to be true - as the answer is highly dependant on what the end user is searching for.
I'd say that a decade or so ago, the mission stated was actually being done - somewhere around the panda and penguin updates, the results changed a lot - and in the war to destroy spam and seo, google also killed a lot of good sites by burying them in the results.
I get that around that time there was also a lot of pressure from multiple groups to censor the results even more.. and so veering from the mission of organizing the web and delivering what the user is looking for was somewhat hijacked by gov bodies, powerful groups like the mpaa and such - and maybe it was larry paige? that was supposed to be the adult pulling the reins?
Whatever the multiple causes, there was a time when people could find all kinds of things with google and even google shopping.. then things started to change and change a lot they have.
Today's google is a homogenized, censored and curated skewed view of the world that is damaging those who trust google to show them what is on the internet.
Not for all searches mind you. For many searches it is the best version of the best ever search engine. As far as being a yellow pages of the future, you guys have nailed it.
I have no idea what the wink and nod is supposed to mean ("organizing the web’s information and making it accessible to users (yes we really say that, though frequently with a wink and a nod)" - but if it means, wink wink - we used to show a lot of stuff and now use a bait and switch hiding being esoteric "algorythms" that curate via 'user testing' - results - blah blah.
Please. The algorythm has been made to censor in many ways. It may be too complicated to explain, and trade secrets may be the real reason you don't show it - but whatever.
Please, for people in the main areas of the inside - it is disingenuous to be spouting the kool aid like it's some kind of truth.
It may be mostly true, but the 10% or 15%? of what is hidden completely and the xx% that is downranked into 'might as well not exist" - can you imagine if a few people got together and convinced the world that they have the actual true holy book and yet it was selectively censored by 12% - it might be true, but not really true..
and yet we are here today where big G is trusted by millions - and they have already targeted the next billion to acquire - and it appears people on the inside are repeating this false mantra like they are some kind of prophets of perfection.
As things continue to be censored more and more, big G becomes more and more like the yellow pages, with some 'trusted sources' thrown in for added content.
You've crowdsources a yellow pages that can be updated daily instead of once a year. You've selected some trusted sources about a few topics and point people to them.
You do not make the web accessible to users, only some of it. You do not make "best place to find out anything." - you provide the best place to find some select things that other people have made or given you updated info about.
The worse part of this whole thing is that the trust built up years ago by the brand has gotten a lot of people to convince a lot of other people that "just google it" is the way to find truth on the web, and you have taken over default search and find on most devices hijacking other possibly less censored options. You have hampered the abilities of many to share by making ideas and speech disappear.
However, I am glad that someone who works at google has said something. The silence from the G men / women / ts is more mocking. I wish Matt C had never left the plex and communication channels he shared.
remember when google would put a notice at the bottom of some results with something like 'some results not shown due to dmca, we have been forced by law to hide some results, see this chilling effects page about how this hurts...
now google hides more things itself.
and yet the same old lines are spewed "we index and give users access to find things on the web".
Come on, how much of the web is actually available to the end users through google and how much is not?
You could publish an article and if your website was indexed and users searched for something related to your article, it would appear in relevant search results. You could actually get traffic that way and bootstrap your audience without being one of the select few established websites with millions of visitors.
Page rank slowly eroded that into the broken model we have right now.
>Now imagine how easy that same process would be for the waves of fake news blogs to spread misinformation.
Imagine you could publish good content on your website and actually get visitors without becoming a vassal to Twitter, medium.com or whatever is popular at the moment. O horror! No, we can't have this stand. We need to centralize and control everything because someone might, gasp, get incorrect information from the internet.
Also, what about non-news subjects? This shit is affecting everything on the web, including product reviews, analytical essays and even educational content.
A world with only one kind of news source curated by the elites is a horrible, dystopian place. I'd rather read fake news from time to time; at least it would keep me doubtful and suspicious. People should never stop questioning things.
Just because something is popular doesn't make it true; it may be slightly more likely to be true but it's also a lot more dangerous if it's not.
And that's especially true because sometimes, the mainstream narratives are not right. The obvious old example is the Iraq war one with 'weapons of mass destruction'; this was all incorrect, but I can see any alternative news site saying so getting banned for 'fake news' because of it.
Does that mean all narratives are true? Of course not, you've got nutcases and conspiracy theorists as well, and fake news will exist too. But sometimes the mainstream/elite held view is wrong (or a lie/propoganda), and other outlets should be able to call them out on it.