It’s Not Your Imagination — The Internet is Getting Worse
Anyone who has used the Internet for longer than a couple of years will remember when search engines used to return useful results for things other than TV show or movie titles. You used to be able to type in, say, a Windows error message and find an explanation or even a solution within the first ten results.
That happens with much less frequency these days, and earlier this year I encountered two articles that encapsulated exactly how bad the Internet and search has gotten lately.
The first was a report on APM’s Marketplace: Google Search may be the most powerful arbiter of internet content.
This piece is an interview that host Kai Ryssdal did with The Verge writer Mia Sato on her article describing current Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices (how webpages arrange and order themselves in order to land higher on the list of Google results for a given search request) has resulted in webpages becoming very similar and generic while also containing loads of unhelpful and irrelevant information.
“One example is if you’ve ever Googled ‘How to change a tire,’ you click on an article, and there are five different sections. They each have a little subhead on top that says, ‘What is a tire?’ ‘Why do I need to change the tire?’ You know, all of these things, they’re questions that you might be searching for on Google in the first place, is to try to get Google to notice the page.”
The primary audience for web-pages is no longer human beings… it’s Google. Pages are being written to attract Google’s attention first, as if something isn’t listed high on Google’s search results page, it might as well not exist.
The second article that caught my notice was from 404 Media titled Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find.
“Google search really has been taken over by low-quality SEO spam, according to a new, year-long study by German researchers.
“The researchers, from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, set out to answer the question “Is Google Getting Worse?” by studying search results for 7,392 product-review terms across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo over the course of a year.”
In short, spammers are using AI to game the system. Spammers are using AI to create pages and pages of content that is designed to get to the top of Google’s search results. Google (and Bing and DuckDuckGo) and turning to AI to filter out these results, but as always, the bad guys are usually one step ahead.
Taken these two articles together, what is the end result of this? More and more of the Internet is simply garbage. And it’s garbage that isn’t even intended for human eyes to read it. It’s homogenized nonsense that exists solely to trick a search engine into promoting it and an unsuspecting person to click on it.
It is interesting to remember what the Internet was like before Google became so dominate. Other search engines existed (Yahoo!, Altavista, Lycos, etc) but they existed alongside other ways of traversing the web. Web Directories were a big thing; Yahoo’s search engine was used as a way to look through their own Yahoo! Directory. A directory was like an old printed Yellow Pages (if you’re old enough to remember those). You could click through categories of topics and subtopics looking for web pages dedicated to specific interests. You could click on the topic of “Movies” and then under that would be a category like “Science Fiction” and then under that individual films like “Star Wars” or “Blade Runner” and under that you could get a list of websites dedicated to those films.
These categories were generally not programmatically generated. Website owners would submit their websites and a moderator would determine if the website was a good fit for the categories and whether the content was appropriate.
Web-rings were also used to help viewers find related websites. Owners of related websites would band together to promote each other. When a reader got to the bottom of a webpage dedicated to, say, Doctor Who, they would find a link to the next Doctor Who website in the chain. That page would contain a link to the next website and so on.
Would going back to that type of human-powered curation provide more helpful results to actual humans? I think some form of human intervention needs to be involved if we’re to escape from this AI-on-AI nonsense-spewing. Whether that can possibly scale is another question. But until we figure this out, get used to the Internet continuing to get worse.
