AI spam is winning the battle against search engine quality

We know Google search results are being hammered by the proliferation of AI garbage, and the web giant's attempts to curb the growth of machine-generated drivel haven't helped all that much. It's so bad that Jon Gillham, founder and CEO of AI content detection platform Originality.ai, told us Google is losing its war on all …

[steelpillow]

I have this mad idea

A search engine which offers a button extension on your browser toolbar, so users can click to recommend a site. No site is added unless it is either rtecommended in this way, or is linked from a recommended site. Right-click > Report is also there, so that AI- etc. generated shite gets nipped in the bud.

I know, I know....

[Andy Non]

Re: I have this mad idea

I guess you aren't being serious based on your icon. Click fraud is a big issue, so a button on browsers is just fodder for more click fraud. Many years ago didn't something like what you suggest actually get tried out? Web of trust or something?

In the end I can see search engines being so bogged down with spam and scams they will become unusable, just like many of the public USENET forums of old.

[Pascal Monett]

There is only one solution to oppose scams and malware : intelligence.

Check the link. If it goes anywhere you're not familiar with, don't click.

Nobody is going to offer you millions to just click something. Sorry, that Nigerian billionnaire does not exist. Play the lottery, you've got better chances.

No one you know is sending you an attachment you should open. If someone you know does send you an attachment without you expecting it, contact the person and make sure it was meant for you. In every other case, trash the mail. It's a weapon.

It is so fucking simple, and yet so many are still caught by this.

Sometimes I dispair of Humanity.

[stiine]

I beg to differ

There's another response ... see icon.

[AI Hater]

Re: I beg to differ

This is the solution we need.

[lglethal]

Whilst your absolutely right about scams and Malware. That's not what's on discussion here, spam is.

And Spam comes in lots of different types. The most destructive from my point of view, are the a$$holes who scrape legitimate sites, repost the content (with minimal modification to avoid easy detection), and then use SEO to get there links higher up the search list then the original site.

The original site owner loses clicks, which means they will probably go out of business and stop posting articles that are of actual interest. Eventually we'll end up with AI copying AI to the point where you can't get good writing, and interesting viewpoints.

The Bastards behind that sort of spam really need a good kicking...

[heyrick]

Start by kicking Google. This is a problem largely of their own creation.

Why? Simple. Instead of having websites to provide useful content, or to sell actual things, they slowly turned into sites that used paid embedded advertising for financial support. Is it in any way surprising that a few years later we started to see websites appear whose entire raison d'être was to carry adverts to make the owner money? And now, we're seeing the next logical step, using AI to rip off content to make a site superficially good enough to warrant being found by a Google search, but in reality it exists just to punt adverts to make money.

It's a lot like the adverts in Android apps. Once, you had little embedded adverts at the top or the bottom. Then along came full page adverts. Then full page with video. Then full page with video that can't be skipped until some time has gone. Then full page with time delay video that leads to another full page with a time delay and a static GET button. Just yesterday I saw one for, I think it was Alibaba where the close button was fake as was the "Not interested" button, tapping anything would toss you into the app store.

Google make their money on the adverts and probably count this fakery as a successful click, so they won't give a shit, it's all money to them.

As long as our "guardian of the internet", major mobile OS and browser creator, and prime advert flinger are one and the same, this situation will only get worse. But who has the money and resources to wrestle Android away from Google and try to make a less shitty ecosystem? It's a serious question, because my most recent Xiaomi phone has small amounts of advertising stuffed into the system apps now (like the file manager).

The real scourge is not spam, or AI, it's everybody being beholden to the quick and easy cash offered by embedded adverts. It's that that is shittifying everything.

[MachDiamond]

"The original site owner loses clicks, which means they will probably go out of business and stop posting articles that are of actual interest. Eventually we'll end up with AI copying AI to the point where you can't get good writing, and interesting viewpoints."

What I see a lot is along the same lines as answers to questions received by politicians. They substitute a proper answer with something completely unrelated. For example: I will get a call from a number I don't know and look it up online. A raft of hits on DDG will be for businesses that have nothing to do with the telephone number. I seem to always get a bunch of specialist medical offices or ambulance chasers that specialize in going after rouge debt collectors. I suppose a lot of unknown numbers are debt collectors trying to get people to answer but the attorney's web page won't have any of the numbers listed that I've tried via DDG when I filter a search just to that firm's web site.

With AI, I expect companies can analyze common search terms and create traps so a search for "wedding photograph city" will include a link to whatever they are selling regardless. If fact, the more popular the search parameters, the greater the chance that the first several pages will be complete spam. Just hope you aren't trying to find an "urgent care" office when you are injured or a plumber when the loo gets blocked. Unless you are really good with regular expressions, you may never find either. I remember when we used to post those number next to the phone. Where do we put that printed list now?

[Mike 137]

"going after rouge debt collectors"

So I guess those debt collectors are in the pink.

[katrinab]

The problem isn't so much scams and malware, it is a lot of garbage websites that give the wrong answer to your question.

For example, you search how to do x in Excel, and it hallucinates Excel functions or function arguments that don't exist.

[MachDiamond]

"No one you know is sending you an attachment you should open. If someone you know does send you an attachment without you expecting it, contact the person and make sure it was meant for you. In every other case, trash the mail. It's a weapon."

The scary thing is even companies that should know better will still send real emails with links to their customers. Before I dropped Paypal, I can't count how many times I tapped them on the shoulder to tell them that their official email looks no different than spam and a better approach would be to not include any links. Did they really want people that were so clueless that they couldn't type the company URL into a web browser and click the tab for the latest news? If all companies that legitimately wanted a customer to log into their account to verify something just sent an email asking them to do that with no links and no dynamic content, scammers would lose a lot of hooks.

As far as people I know sending me links, they've pretty much learned that if they don't tell me they are sending me something in advance, it just ends up in the trash. Anything I send is always in follow up to something we've talked about. Files I send to customers come from my domain and I point that out to them so if they see something claiming to be from me and the URL isn't my domain, they shouldn't open it without talking to me first. The probability is 99.999999999999% that it's a phishing attempt as I don't send things via any outside service. That might change in the future, but I'd work really hard so it didn't.

[John Brown (no body)]

...and then there is the disconnect between the InfoSec department and Marketing/Sales. InfoSec draw up rules, employees get trained what to do and not do, how to be more secure etc, and Marketing/Sales and HR are sending internal and external communications blindly ignoring everything, sending out "rich" emails breaking every guideline InfoSec are trying to enforce. And people then wonder why the run of the mill staff are confused over what is allowed and not allowed.

[sarusa]

Gee that's strange...

Kagi doesn't seem to have any problem identifying and removing most of the AI generated spam.

It should be pretty easy, really, when you have the entire f@!$ing web cached like Google does. A site that just pops up out of nowhere with tens of thousands of garbage pages and links to other sites that just popped up out of nowhere with hundreds of thousands of similar garbage pages? Yeah that's probably spam. Individual spam results are also pretty damn obvious to any human reader, why can't an LLM go 'this looks sus'? Google has DeepMind for goodness sake. Okay, yeah, I just asked ChatGPT 3.5 to identify 5 pages as spam or not and it IDed all 4 spam sites and correctly said the one legit page was legit. Even if it fumbles on some pages, if a single site's pages are mostly IDed as spam or mostly IDed as legit that should be effective.

Of course there are some savvier offenders, so those will still sneak through. But I think the big reason is that Google just wants you to have to click through more bad results so it can serve up more ads.

And of course Kagi also lets you mark individual sites as spam, never show me anything from this domain ever again. Which Google used to let you do, but no longer does because... yeah, more bad results for more ads.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Gee that's strange...

"And of course Kagi also lets you mark individual sites as spam, never show me anything from this domain ever again."

I've done that by using my local host file to 127.0.0.1 a bunch of the more abusive domains, but they've been finding ways around that. It just managed to bite my backside when a training seminar being offered through the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) needed doubleclick to pass the video. Yeah, I'm not going to bother changing my hostfile to watch the seminar and then put it back. When I couldn't get the video to go, I tried to find the source by doing into the developer tools with Firefox and that's how I spotted the doubleclick pass through. The player was a clone of YouTube's UI, but I didn't find the video on YT via the YT web site. I never have high expectations for the US government doing anything in a same way as everyFreakinBody else on the planet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Gee that's strange...

Pi-Hole!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad reputation

Yeah, this is one way people can prune some of the crap down. DNS filters should be standard issue by now.

That said you would still be wading through Googles crap search results, the pages just wouldn't load. Google made it's reputation system on flawed assumptions and market incentives. They keep crawling random domains and heavily weight "new" content, so the turd domains float to the top.

Don't weight crawling new and low reputation content, instead reward established sites that publish good content instead of punishing them, and don't even crawl or index the content farms.

[sarusa]

Re: Bad reputation

Exactly - ip/domain filtering doesn't save you from Google putting them front and center. It just saves you when you click the link and get blackholed, well crap, gotta go back and try again.

[sarusa]

Re: Gee that's strange...

Yeah, the problem is that Google still shows you the obvious spam sites as search results. Then you click them and oops, blackholed. You've still wasted your time.

[Michael Hoffmann]

Ai feeding off AI

So the hyped-up LLM glorified search engines called AI will trawl all the AI scam/spam and feed on itself.

In an ever increasing cycle of increased energy usage. until we become a second sun and then we can name Mars "Tatooine".

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Ai feeding off AI

Yep, The Race to Bottom(tm), accelerated by the power of A.I LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Root cause

If the site has no add content, and links to non-ad sites, then is is probably not spam. The root cause is 90% ad-monetisation. The other 10% will be scam & shite pusher monetisation.

Pretty easy to do, but requires a search engine with a hitherto unknown, non-ad funding model.

[Richard 12]

Re: Root cause

Any page with more than ten adverts in total is spam.

There you go Google, I fixed it.

[vtcodger]

Search Engine Quality

Search engine quality? Interesting concept. As Gandhi once said about Western Civilization, it might be a good idea.

But, where are the profits?

[FF22]

Not interested

There's a fundemantal misunderstanding here in that Google is somehow interested in making organic results better or even just good, but is unable to do that, and is hence losing.

That's not the case. Google is actually completely disinterested or even counter-interested in making organic results better. What they care about instead is how many ads they can show, and how much money those make for them. Until their revenue starts dropping - or even just stop increasing, as it has been doing every year anew, over and over - they have no incentive to make the organic search results better.

Actually, they are even interested in making the organic result as worse as possible, because that means that no one (no web site) will get a free pass and be able to appear for free on Google's result list for relevant results, but this will be a privilege only for those, who actually pay Google, through ads.

Ads will be kept relevant and organic search results irrelevant, which automatically increases demand and also prices for ads on Google's pages, while at the same time also makes it impossible for other sites to earn money through competing ads shown by them.

[Andy Non]

Re: Not interested

A counter argument would be that as Google's search results turn into an open sewer, folks may be less inclined to use Google search and hence will be clicking on fewer ads, generating lower revenue for Google. When sites become too enshitified folks tend to start avoiding them, rather like X/Twitter. Facebook also has a credibility problem with all the shite in the feeds. (I quit both X and facebook due to all the crap)

[FF22]

Re: Not interested

As long as people find the things they were looking for on Google's result pages, they won't care whether they found it in paid ads or found it through organic results that appeared for free. However, for Google it matters whether people find things through ads or organic results, because they earn on the former, but not (or not the full sum, if the page is using Adsense) on the latter.

That's why they're interested or even counter-interested in keeping their organic results also as relevant as their ads. Even if they show relevant hits ultimately, it makes more sense for them to rank irrelevant ones higher, because that increases ad engagement, and the number of ads shown to people as they have to scroll down to ultimately more to find the organic results they wanted.

Anyone not understanding that rationale needs to read again.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Not interested

"When sites become too enshitified folks tend to start avoiding them, "

Half of people are below average intelligence. There are lots of people out there that don't seem to understand what bookmarks or favourites are and always search for everything. Hell, I've seen people open search on Windows, enter "Google" into Bing, click the first result and only then search for what they are looking for, invariably by hopping between the mouse and keyboard because they still haven't figured out how the Enter key works in a form field.

[Anonymous Coward]

Trouble is

There is a Duopoly in search. It's pretty much just Bing and Google, as most of the "alternates" are just piggybacking on the indexed results of the big two. So the usual market forces apply. There is no real competition happening, and both will focus on fleecing the consumer.

To break the search monopoly you need more than two players in the market. Bonus points if you make one a public entity or a co-op.

The problem is indexing the web is expensive AF, so the only other two operators that are sitting on the resources are the NSA and their Chinese counterparts. Wouldn't trust either of them as far as I could chuck them, but if the NSA built a search engine I would worry about what it was hiding from me, not that it was going to send me 10 pages of links to crap. They probably have my search history anyway so that's no loss.

[katrinab]

Re: Not interested

Firstly, the ads are mostly garbage as well. I do sometimes search for things because I want to buy it, and Google generally isn't much help there.

Secondly, I am very open to switching to another search engine because things have got so bad, and that means another company could do to Google what Google did to Alta Vista.

Thirdly, if a particular place gets a reputation for being mostly scam ads, the big legitimate companies, the ones with really big advertising budgets, won't want to be seen next to them.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Not interested

"Thirdly, if a particular place gets a reputation for being mostly scam ads, the big legitimate companies, the ones with really big advertising budgets, won't want to be seen next to them."

I doubt they look for or monitor stuff like that unless it becomes such an issue that people start talking about it and maybe the media pick up on it and report it publicly on TV/radio etc.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Not interested

"What they care about instead is how many ads they can show, and how much money those make for them."

Even more profitable is their PII business. Ads are just the sprinkles on the icing on the cake.

[Richard 12]

Re: Not interested

The PII business is entirely about selling advertising space. It's just the other side of the coin.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Not interested

"The PII business is entirely about selling advertising space. "

They'll sell your hat if you set it down on their counter, but most "free" online services make their money by selling PII. Ads are a distant second at best.

If you are a big company and you want a job applicant's whole story, you have an account with Google, Spokeo or another Big Data company and for a pittance, you can get an entire dossier. No need to worry about what questions you can or can't ask on an application or in an interview, for less than the cost of a coffee from Starbucks, you can have those answers.

[Rich 2]

Maybe…

…it’s time to go back to how Yahoo! did things when it first started? That it’s, a manually curated list of useful websites ordered by category.

They gave up on this approach eventually because it took a lot of mental effort to maintain and Google started generating much better search results.

Well, one of those reasons is well and truly dead in the water!!

[Rich 2]

Re: Maybe…

Fucking phone! Correction -

“It took a lot of manual effort”. Not mental effort

[doublelayer]

Re: Maybe…

Granted, but the effort is going to be much worse than it ever was. It works for a small subset of things, but there are a lot of topics for which a simple list of curated sites is not good enough. I've recently done a few searches in different topics in which the best, most detailed, and least inaccurate information were found on personal blogs. Manually adding in sites wouldn't have included these because they were small and it's hard to know when a blog stops being useful and either is no longer updated or taken over by a spam campaign. For any niche search, there are likely many sites that are too small for even a large team of curators to pay any attention to.

[Gene Cash]

Re: Maybe…

Unfortunately, the web is a bit bigger than that. Manual curation does not scale. You'd need tons of people, and they would probably want to get paid. That's one of the big reasons why Yahoo! eventually failed If they don't get paid, then how do you know they're not SEO bods and vet them properly?

Who are you going to get to do the curation? Do they hate webcomics and round-file them, like Wikipedia did for a while? Do they get into arguments about what category a website falls into? Is it possible to put a website into multiple categories or do they just shoehorn it into one? How the hell big is the category list and how do you even write a UI to bin things with that?

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Maybe…

"Who are you going to get to do the curation? Do they hate webcomics and round-file them, like Wikipedia did for a while? Do they get into arguments about what category a website falls into? Is it possible to put a website into multiple categories or do they just shoehorn it into one? How the hell big is the category list and how do you even write a UI to bin things with that?"

I'm sure an LLM/AI could handle that much more cheaply.

[sarusa]

Yeah, Google is absolutely doing this on purpose

I've said this for years and never had any actual proof, but Ed's gone through Google emails from a lawsuit and yes... Starting 2019, Google has been purposely degrading their search results to make you click through more bad results so they can show you more ads.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/