I presume they made the change because their search results were filling up with blogspam, and there was no algorithm that could detect a high-quality review from a spam one.
So what do you think would have been the right approach?
If there was a solution to this problem from the search engine's point of view 5 years ago, which I do not stipulate but let's roll with it, there isn't one now. ChatGPT can overcome basically all detection techniques when combined with the current amount of efforts already largely successfully avoiding detection, and it will continue to get better. There are no signals for random unattested web content that will separate what we want from stuff constructed to look like what we want but with embedded motivations or content we don't.
A web of trust may be inevitable, but it's not like that can't be attacked either, especially past the first hop. It seems inevitable that slowly but very surely our trust is going to get pulled in much, much more tightly than it is now. I don't see much that can be done about that, even in theory. It was a historical accident that we ever could trust random websites to not be 100% focused on their own interests, simply because the tech to do that wasn't there yet. Now it is, and we will be entering a world where we can not trust any free resources, whether we like it or not.
Or paid ones, really. If you think a company is trustworthy, that means a) you believe it cares about losing you as a customer, or b) you believe the company has the obligation or the luxury of acting with integrity (or the people working there do).
Especially with news media, none of these things are likely to be true. For paid news I’d just expect less typos but not more integrity.
And nobody said they were obligated to. So I don't know what you think you're responding to.
I assume it's OK to ask people what they think a solution should be, though?
Seems like a pretty natural, conversational follow-up, if you ask me.
Presumably if you know a situation well enough to criticize, you have at least some ideas of what alternatives might or might not be better. Or can elucidate why you think there might not be any better ones.
Or do you think the entire act of asking questions is "just wrong", to use your phrase?
Try it: https://www.google.com/search?q=macbook+m3+pro+review+-affil...
Reviews financed via affiliate links are just camouflaged ads. So Google should offer a filter to remove all of them.
I add similar qualifiers to almost all of my searches. They make the web feel like it's 2010 again.
https://kagi.com/lenses/0MqOTt5t5MajrIkHAqHEgDeoKzF1a4TS
(Can’t share example results since Kagi doesn’t let you share results from lenses)
Of course Google will never provide this because their incentives are also misaligned, being the biggest online advertising company.
Apple uses algorithmic ranking by story, and pays news sites by article views. It is basically all spam. If you block the spam sites, their stories still show up in your feed with a note that you blocked the site.
Instead, they should let people structure their feeds by news organization, like podcast apps do. They should steer you back to reading the sources you’ve opted into, and mix in a bit of stories from related news organizations, not stories with high content similarity, or high “trending” scores.
(As far as I know, Apple News+ is the only product still operating in the paid news aggregator space, but if there’s another one, I’d love to hear about it.)
It's solidly...okay. It's very good aggregating everything I want, and for the most part it's able to avoid things that I'd absolutely not be willing to overlook, but it has some quirks in terms of the filters weirdly not working for me on fairly benign topics (no matter how much I try, I can't get it to stop showing me content from various sports like soccer, basketball, and golf despite the only sport I care about being baseball). They seem to really hype their AI features in the app, which is a little weird because I don't care how they aggregate behind the scenes and they shouldn't need AI to be able to filter articles they literally already tag as "golf" when I have "golf" listed in my filters as "never show", but it's not annoying enough that I've bothered trying to find an alternative yet.
The contempt for one’s users is such a defining feature of this era of late-stage tech.
Doesn't this immediately turn into the kind of problem TFA is bemoaning? Once a news organization gets traction (opt-ins in this case) on a platform, they'll inevitably start selling space in their feed to one or more crappy aggregators. To the C-suite this looks like free money, since somehow they always manage to convince themselves that the brand damage from it will be minimal or at least manageable.
It sucks.
Users' respect for Apple is matched in magnitude by Apple's disrespect for users.
In the one hand, Google paid good quality websites more money for trash content and engagement bait than quality content. So they adapted to that new market reality.
Meanwhile, the real money maker - Search - gradually got filled up with lower quality content and now it’s imploding.
Google buying DoubleClick has a lot of parallels to what happened with Boeing.
In that scenario, the search engine could show an empty page plus their screened ad network results.
Perhaps a link for querying Reddit or other social media.
For the most profitable/contested review queries, some combination of algo and paid humans for feedback/curation.
I really hope for them it does exist because otherwise Google is screwed.