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Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

> I'm confused about how or why this is a new policy.

My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT.

> The real problem is the financial incentives that make this kind of spamming profitable in the first place.

Yeah, but the financial incentives exist on both ends. There's a gross symbiotic relationship between Google and SEO spammers, because Google also owns the ad network the spammers put on their page. If Google puts ad-laden SEO blogspam as the top result and a user clicks it, the user sees a bunch of ads from Google. Everyone wins: Google, the SEO spammers, and advertisers. Well, everyone except the user, but who cares about them?

My guess/hope is that ChatGPT has made someone who actually cares about the quality of search results actually step in and say things have gone too far.

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You're totally right about that symbiotic relationship. We were aware of that risk in the early days when AdSense launched, we saw some very innovative and gross exploitation and created some policies to rein it in. But ultimately if Google makes a buck coming and going, they will do that.

Wasn't there a big story last year in the wake of the DOJ antitrust investigation about Google manipulating search quality to boost ad revenue? I can't put my hands on a reference now, in part because Google is so bad at search these days I can't find anything more than a few months old.

> Wasn't there a big story last year in the wake of the DOJ antitrust investigation about Google manipulating search quality to boost ad revenue?

This is the email chain you are looking for:

* https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417581.pdf

> Google wins

Define "wins". From what happening right now, it seems that google may lose much more than it earned by aligning with seo spammers

Maybe they need to start locking employee stock options for 100 years to prevent them optimizing short-term gains?

Google's only taking the greedy approach. Spam sites on top, spam sites use google adsense, people click spam sites, they click google ads.

It works great, until it doesn't. But that's a problem for the next CEO.

iunno, I used to rank pretty well for things in my country like "$company's tech support number". Unlike every $company, my page had a nice clean URL like whatever.tld/Tech-Support-Number-for-$company and I'd just list of their phone numbers with a few paragraphs about how $company is shit. Maybe 50kb total.

Meanwhile $company's page was company.tld/234897234982-029823749823742-2340823492 and 3 pages down was a phone number if your browser didn't choke on the javascript.

For ISP ones, I recommended people print a copy so they can call if they can't get on the internet, which kinda backfired when a major ISP changed their tech support number (!) and it redirected to a toll-free squatter's sex chat line.

Turns out $company really hates it when you call their call (cost) centres.

I had maybe 50 pages for our different oligopolies and averaged $500/month revenue on adsense, so GOOG's cut was $250/month.

Today, for one $company, the first 9 results are different pages from $company.tld, each unhelpful with a phone number in their own way, and they don't run adsense!

> locking employee stock options for 100 years

This is just a ban by another name. Besides, options are not the massive tax incentive that they used to be. The problems are locked into the nature of being publicly traded companies. If you want to do government search policy, do government search policy.

Because ChatGPT is dependent on good search when it searches the web? Or because it completes with Google when it provides a good answer without searching? Or what do you mean specifically?

I would say the latter. For software dev questions, my Google searches and Stack Overflow visits have fallen off a cliff since I started paying for ChatGPT.

Ironically, I probably would have paid the same amount to Google for ad-free, old-style (accurate) Google searches, but no, they just wanted to keep cranking that ad dial up every year so that ship has sailed.

At this point, I'm enjoying watching the old guard of search scrambling to find a life jacket.

Stackoverflow visits fell[1] off a cliff since GPT became popular.

Google is getting destroyed by the chatbot workflow because it is no longer the start of a browser session and clickthrus (the things that earn the high sponsored link rates) are falling as more users get their queries answered faster with less effort.

[1] https://x.com/altimor/status/1853893158368928124?s=46

Are they, though? Inaccurate info is pretty common from LLMs.

Inaccurate info exists everywhere. StackOverflow contains inaccurate, outdated, incomplete info. Caveat Emptor wherever you are.

LLMs are like a knife. It is a tool that can hurt you if you misuse it, but it also has the capability to save LOTS to time if you use it well.

A knife's function is deterministic. LLMs are not.

They routinely misinterpret the information they've ingested and confidently spit out incorrect statements. Worse - they confidently spit out incorrect statements in ways we cannot anticipate.

This isn't comparable to a person. This isn't comparable to human intelligence. This isn't a problem that can be handwaved away by saying "people are sometimes wrong too!"

StackOverflow has been dying a slow death since longer than before ChatGPT. Sure, ChatGPT is helping to accelerate it. The real data (leave aside social/community for a moment) issue with SO.com: Many answers don't age well. So, you have an answer from 8 years ago with 65 upvotes, but now the lang/lib was updated in 2023. A newer, more relevant answer is waaaaaaay down and only has one upvote. Personal note: I still pine for the old days when Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood were at the helm. They really knew how to build and sustain a vibrant community.

> My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT.

ChatGPT doesn't even fulfill the same function, to say nothing about the poor reliability inherent to the way it works. In no sense is it a real competitor to Google.

This is absolutely not my experience. My googlefu has gone to shit. I can no longer have some sense for what I’m looking for and find it. Something I know exists, I just don’t know the terms of art to pull up the wealth of knowledge. I used to be able to do a half dozen searches, and finally on page 4 or 5 finally find some clues as to the terms I need. Now, there is no page 4… like ever. Clearly not many people were going past page 3 so they stopped serving that content.

Now I use chatgpt for these kinds of queries, and it feels like using google circa 2004.

I know this is a small edge case, and ultimately I need to use google to crosscheck, but it hints at the rot that has taken over at google, and represents a potential shift. If I could get good reference links from chatgpt, I may be able to stop using google for an increasing number of my queries.

All the developers I work with have stopped using Google search entirely in favor of ChatGPT. Even my wife prefers it after seeing how bad googles results are and full of ads.

> My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT.

My guess is it's because a bunch of articles about it have been posted to hn recently.

> My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT.

Bingo. I always chuckle when people here say Google has lost it, and become incompetent. Well, they all make the mistake of assuming that they’re trying but failing, rather than that it’s deliberate simply due to boring economics.

Now look at how quickly decades-long problems, so big they have an entire cottage industry built around it, suddenly be cleaned up. Incompetence? Nah.

Of course, this does nothing to convince regulators and not even average HN user that innovation is harmed by these dominant players. Someone’s gotta think of the poor mega-corps.

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