Yup I ran into this last week, looking for a wiring diagram of a relatively obscure part.
1st page of results on DDG and Google were both AI ‘blog’ style results of random diagrams unrelated to the part. All the same “loading…” text and I’m pretty sure all generated on the fly as I opened them.
It didn’t even give me the manufacturer’s site in the first 2 pages. And because I got upset and clicked through every result to vent to a co-worker, it decided to give me MORE slop results. I watched the useful info vanish from the results on reloads of the same search term.
Holy crap, I hadn’t considered that we have the technology to create articles on the fly based on search terms.
That could be a serious weapon of war - you get your site to the top through SEO, then show each user personalised propoganda. You show googlebot the genuine page but adjust the page based on what you know about the user.
SEO garbage has been around for much more than a decade. In fact, before Google got really good at search ranking, sites easily gamed the search engines.
Clicks on results have decreased because AI summaries are so good. Or
AI summaries aren’t giving the answers people want so they’re clicking on results.
It’s good for Google to show that clicks are happening because that’s part of how they make their money, their clients need the clicks to survive. It’s good for Google to show that AI summaries are being used because it’s a product they’ve poured a lot of money into, that’s being sold to shareholders as a superintelligence.
This is hilarious. People are searching more because they aren’t getting results they need from AI, which drives ad revenue so Google’s doing great!
Search engines are so significantly worse than they were a decade ago. The golden age of accurate searches is over, now it’s all SEO piss and AI slop.
To give credit to the people trying to make good search, the internet is so much worse than it was a decade or two ago.
Over that time the ad driven internet has encouraged low quality, high volume websites full of articles designed around common search terms.
It started before AI, but now you can drum up an article in seconds it has got much worse.
Yup I ran into this last week, looking for a wiring diagram of a relatively obscure part.
1st page of results on DDG and Google were both AI ‘blog’ style results of random diagrams unrelated to the part. All the same “loading…” text and I’m pretty sure all generated on the fly as I opened them.
It didn’t even give me the manufacturer’s site in the first 2 pages. And because I got upset and clicked through every result to vent to a co-worker, it decided to give me MORE slop results. I watched the useful info vanish from the results on reloads of the same search term.
Holy crap, I hadn’t considered that we have the technology to create articles on the fly based on search terms.
That could be a serious weapon of war - you get your site to the top through SEO, then show each user personalised propoganda. You show googlebot the genuine page but adjust the page based on what you know about the user.
SEO garbage has been around for much more than a decade. In fact, before Google got really good at search ranking, sites easily gamed the search engines.
There are really two options, either
It’s good for Google to show that clicks are happening because that’s part of how they make their money, their clients need the clicks to survive. It’s good for Google to show that AI summaries are being used because it’s a product they’ve poured a lot of money into, that’s being sold to shareholders as a superintelligence.
Bubble is going to burst.