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Comment by ConceitedCode | Hacker News Reader

I suspect we'll address this by just going back to older ranking algorithms for search. We'll go back to the primary signal of good content being links from trusted sources.

People gaming the content based algorithms will eventually cause their own downfall.

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Ironically this post is doing wonders for its page rank, as people are linking to it in the comments

Now that we have better ML, maybe we could take "link sentiment" into account too.

I don't know how good it was, but sentiment analysis was definitely a thing pre-ChatGPT.

It was pretty basic though, and even a frontier LLM might struggle to infer that OP is a negative-sentiment link, without sufficient context.

I wonder if we ought to be flagging it then? There's already so much uninteresting AI slop observations.

  <a href="https://oneuptime.com/blog" rel="nofollow">https://oneuptime.com/blog</a>

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641348

(By coincidence, see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641829)

rel=nofollow is used to signal that links should not be used by search crawlers for authority calculations on most sites with user-submitted content, including Hacker News.

You basically have to use nofollow for comments otherwise your site becomes a big target for SEO link spam.

This has been the status quo for more than a decade.

In the past SEO blogspam was done by cheap freelancers, and there were several agencies selling the service.

Experts identify blogspam quite easily, but laypeople eat it up and use as reference in conversations and to make decisions.

Google has known about it, has been in contact with such agencies and companies, and has been refusing to do anything about it for the longest time.

> I suspect we'll address this

Who is "we"? Definitely not Google or any other major tech company, they're all actively encouraging this.

> trusted sources.

What trusted sources are there that haven't yet been taken over by AI?

> Who is "we"? Definitely not Google or any other major tech company, they're all actively encouraging this.

Google has been fighting aggressively to replace its search results with snippets, now generated by LLMs, to avoid sending traffic to other websites. If they continue, they will basically lead Google Search to a tipping point where a good competitor can take this market by storm. Microsoft also believed Windows is indestructible and now they have a rude awakening.

The fact is what people really want from a search engine is a single perfect result that answers their query exactly. An LLM does the 'single result' bit, but it's dubious whether or not it's a perfect answer. Most of the time that's probably not very important so long as the answer satisfies the search enough that the user is happy.

Google is trying to turn Search into that product e.g. the single answer to a given search. They could do that now with Gemini, but the ads in the results are what makes them money, and the backlash to embedding adverts into the output of Gemini would drive millions of people to OpenAI overnight. They have to do it slowly. Give it 5 years though, and search engine results pages will be a thing of the past.

> Most of the time that's probably not very important

Well... Maybe, but what's the point of an answer if you can't trust it? For ultra-fast answers for unimportant stuff I keep Cerebras tab open.

What I meant was that it'd a good answer but maybe not perfect. For example, if you ask for a coffee recommendation you might get something that's in your top 5, but not number 1. That's better than getting a page of links where the top 3 have paid to be there, the next 5 are SEO-farms, and then maybe there's a site about coffee that will answer your question.

I don't have a ton of hope just yet because I think it's still an incentives problem rather than a technical one.

I got tired of the increasing AI slop in my YouTube Music feed and switched to Deezer a few months ago. Since then, not a single AI artist I've been able to spot. If a relatively marginal player like that can manage it, why can't Spotify or YTM? My suspicion is simply that Deezer actually actually tries.

It's the same problem with Google and search. Kagi and others have demonstrated that you can produce better results with an infinitesimal fraction of the budget, and Google is still plenty competent where they care to be. This won't start to get fixed until they see a financial incentive to do so.

Maybe it’s that AI music isn’t being spammed as hard at ‘platform I’ve never heard of before’?

That's likely a factor but Deezer reports that's it's 28% of their ingest as of last September. Being a smaller target doesn't account for all of it, or that openly AI "artists" are not being delisted from the larger platforms, nor are they providing ways to filter them out.

https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/09/28-fully-ai-generated-mu...

Spotify 100% rather buy/produce AI music than pay artists. Also they demonetized most of their artists so if they can pump AI songs that sound enough like what you listen to and then stop promoting them they don’t have to pay anyone.

Its not a technical problem.

Its a public good we refuse to turn into a government service for nebulous reasons.

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