Google all at sea over rising tide of robo-spam It was a bold claim by the richest and most famous tech founder: bold, precise and wrong. Laughably so. Twenty years ago, Bill Gates promised to rid the world of spam by 2006. How's that worked out for you? Gates' failure is hanging particularly heavily on Google right now. It's not so much the email version; Gmail's Report As …
"Two problems: AI is very resource-intensive and this risks joining cybercurrency in the business of boiling the oceans in an exponential megawatt orgy. The other is that there is no way to win, as AI spam develops the equivalent of antibiotic immunity. "
There's a third problem: given the ruthless nature of online commerce, such automation would almost certainly become weaponised to kill off competition.
All Ad providers (such as Google) which distribute ads to websites have to KNOW there customers, both up and down stream.
By KNOW, I'm talking legally speaking. Exactly as a bank has Know your Customer rules, so should the Ad Slingers.
They need to know, who is providing the ad they are placing, AND the owner of the websites where they are placing the ad.
They then need to be held responsible for providing details to authorities when bad actors place spam/malware ads. And be held responsible for placing ads on dodgy sites.
The legitimate sites will have no problem with this, the legitimate ad providers will have no problem with this. And most customers will have no problem with this.
Bring this in, and the profit will dry up for the AI Spam Site slingers, and they'll move on to the next scan, and we'll get a much better search function back and maybe the whole ad business might get a little bit cleaner.
But I guess they'll lose profit so no chance it will ever get implemented...
A little bit of word soup towards the end of that article... could do with some editing perhaps?
As it is, any change that would meaningfully improve the ability of humans to discover and access useful content would be a massive disruption to almost all of the big players on the Internet today - from hosting through to search and content generation. They are financially and legally locked into the current system, and as more and more people are noting, it's making general access to information increasingly difficult.
Sure you can block the ads, Google services and the scripts - but in the process you have lost the ability to discover anything outside of a tiny, pre-existing bubble. It's like refusing to visit the public library because there's an advert on the bus shelter outside.
So any proposal for changes (and there are a few) have to not only solve the problem of replacing the ad model for search and content, but also solve the reason why anyone would make the step over to another system that - in the short term at least - would represent an inconvenient, tiny niche of the world wide web.
"like refusing to visit the public library because there's an advert on the bus shelter outside."
It's far more than that, though. The library that was once a small selection of high-quality books carefully curated by a librarian has now expanded and expanded. There are far more high-quality books than there used to be, but there is also far far far more junk material, easily a hundred books full of plagiarized cut-and-paste, nonsensical hodgepodge, outright false information for every high-quality book. And the vast majority look like books on the outside but inside the covers are simply catalogues of stuff to buy. And because the publishers of these books will make more money the more their books are accessed, they give the librarian bananas* to promote their book.
The librarian, who used to have the capacity to carefully curate every book, now has no possibility of knowing which books are good and which aren't. But also, his incentive is no longer to highlight the best book for each visitor based on their requests, it's to get as many bananas as he can, so he will steer visitors towards incentivised books. Even combining that with a desire to get good books for his visitors (so they keep on coming), the librarian is left with a best-guess system which is mostly based on what the book cover looks like (and publishers, realising that, now start to design their covers to make them more attractive to the librarian's selection).
*That's the image that comes to my mind when I say "librarian", and if you think I'm monkeying around you'd better not say it out loud :)
There's an argument that users, in sufficient numbers, can ultimately do a better job, but, of course, the pages have to get in front of eyeballs first and the users' "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" would have to be reasonably objective, which might be a fly in the ointment - not to mention that getting their opinion in-context would mean mandating content on the pages or adding features to browsers.
There is, I think, another, perhaps more fundamental, flaw on the horizon. The purpose of advertising is to get the attention of sufficient numbers of appropriate people for long enough to deliver a commercially-significant message. How do you do that when there is a seemingly infinite number of billboards, most of which are advertising other billboards? It's not just the increasing uselessness of search engines, it's devaluing the advertising market itself. That's great for magical food supplement market, but it's not going to help flog soap powder and the latter, ultimately, is where the money is.
Whereas there are things Google can do about that, to a greater or lesser extent they break the funding model for the Internet - and, indeed for Google itself. That may not be a bad thing and you could argue that's it's broken already, but we don't have any alternative lined up - and particularly no alternative that could fund search in the absence of its being directly coupled to advertising. And without search there is no content to speak of because we can only speak as we find.
We've already seen what happened to the print media when its advertising went elsewhere. We may be about to see what happens to the online advertising industry when content disappears.
Yes, but even when I am searching for adverts, ie there is a specific product I want to buy, and I want to find people who sell it, the garbage search results mean I am unable to find the product, and therefore they don't get the sale.
Remember that advertising is only viable if it leads to people buying the product you are advertising.
In the early days of the internet, before search engines were any good, we relied on curated 'internet directories' and some were very comprehensive. You didn't need to have every site in the directory because sites linked to other sites (it's not called 'the web' for nothing). Was it more or less egalitarian or centralised than the current search engine system? A bit of both, arguably,
The closest we have to a large internet directory today is Wikipedia, in that most articles have a lot of relevant links and sources and it's all curated in such a way that a link-heavy article-light version could be created very easily. It has it's own version of the spam problem of course, but a healthier ethos/motivation for dealing with it
I reckon I could get by quite easily with Wikipedia alone if required. Not ideal but I could. Now that I think about I mainly now use Google (successfully at least) for queries that ChatGPT (etc) could answer, or for shopping, in which case I want the high high paying ads Google is incentivised to push to the top. Maybe the apocalypse is halfway done already.
I'm tempted to start a wiki of just good quality links on whatever subject, and open the editing up only to trusted people.
Of course the problem with that is that I'll get bored for a week, leave it for nine months, find that nobody else has bothered to do anything because I lost interest and that half the links are now dead anyway.
Yeah... might wanna rethink that one.
Does anyone remember using Yahoo back in the days when its search function was secondary and it was mostly used for its manually created and curated directory structure of sites organised by topic?
Maybe its time to go back to the future, either by Yahoo going back to its roots or a freshly funded more ethical player to enter the market place
As part of my research in to LLMs* I created an AI generated tech advice website. Then submitted it to Google AdSense - they rejected the site claiming it was "low quality content".
It does however show up in the second page of search results for one topic that ChatGPT chose to write about.
* Possibly motivated by a friend going on a rant about Google results being filled with junk lately, and me responding that it seems like a problem I can contribute to.
And I'm using my own mail server, so I don't have anyone prefiltering what I see.
Whether that's because of stuff like SPF/DMARC, because of measures I've taken as far as avoiding making my email address more widespread, or because there are genuinely fewer spammers than there used to be is unknown.
I can't help but wonder if spammers have been moving away from email towards stuff more widely used by younger potential marks, like social media or messaging platforms. I imagine spammers are like other advertisers and they want the 18-49 crowd or especially 18-30 and you just won't find them using email nearly as much as they were even 10 years ago. My girlfriend's 17 year old niece views email as some quaint technology you're forced to use once in a while, kind of like us older people see snail mail.
I see email like that, and I'm in my fifties. I remember when I looked forward to opening my email box and seeing messages from friends, or sometimes potential friends who'd seen my address via online activity.
But those days are long gone. Now, my mailbox is about one-third business, two-thirds spam. Opening it is a chore, not a pleasure.
My cell phone doesn't ring for any number not in my contacts. I've had to add a few numbers like the number my doctor and accountant call from but it works pretty well. They mostly don't even bother leaving a message, the few times a week they do I can see the transcript so I'm able to delete it without listening. I haven't had to answer a spam phone call in years.
That's been, basically, the backstop of every proposal since we started talking about spam. "Over time" people will come to recognise and promote good content.
It hasn't worked yet. I don't see what's changing except for the worse - there is a rapidly rising tide of gunk that will quickly drown out smaller entrants, and eventually even the big players, by sheer volume.
No manual system can hope to keep up for long (and "reputation", like "reporting", is a manual system).
Frankly, at this point I see little hope for the Web as we know it. When we try again, we should learn from this experience. Web 3.0 should eschew paid advertising entirely in favour of direct payment for content. Sad but necessary.
with their 'stuff'.
suddenly, my favourite YouTube channels are nowhere to be seen. When I do find them where are the latest posts? For years, they were always at the top. No more. Now I get a selection of articles that I have read sometimes months ago. The new stuff is relegated to a small panel often out of sight on a laptop screen. WTF Google! What the hell are you trying to do?
Just stop FSCKing around with your search and display algorithms. Remember KISS? You seem to have forgotten that big time
As for Google search... I've never been a great fan but recently it has become useless. pages of sponsored results before I get to anything worthwhile... Again... WFT.
I WILL NEVER BUY ANYTHING FROM AN AD STUFFED IN MY FACE. Just like the flyer for the Pizza place down the road that gets put through my door almost weekly, it goes straight in the trash. If I want a Pizza then I'll buy the base and make it myself.
Yours GOM.
What if the advertisers had to pay a sum for every time their message appeared rather than when a link was followed?
Initially this would seem a positive gold-mine for the platforms, but then the advertisers would want to be much more discriminating about where their links appeared. As opposed to bloody everywhere, relevant or not.
Local news sites seem to be the worst at obfuscating content with crap adverts. Surely someone, even Shirley, recognises that this discourages viewers?
he can sell a product that contains a lower proportion of toxic crap but is more expensive depleting his margins, or he can source cheaper product that is more than likely to kill the customer, reducing his market share, and potentially permanently depleting his revenue stream not mention attracting unwanted attention to his activities.
The AI generated crap that search engines now pop up swamping anything remotely relevant will eventually destroy the search engine user base and the engine owner golden goose. Some of the top search results now rank with Talkie Toaster's fixation with toast. Query the Zilog Z80,000 cpu and you get an advert pushing a Ginko biloeba supplement.
Actually faster to type zilog.com or wikipedia.org :) and take your chances with the site's search facility although some site's search facilities are completely broken - presumably their users search the site with google.
Online Yellow Pages style business directories might have a second life if carefully maintained by the owners. As an example if I wanted to install a heat pump hot water system I would expect my search of such a directory would only return local businesses that could supply and install the system - not a dodgy brothers outfit on another continent nor a redirection to an online vendor of manhood enhancing pharmaceuticals.
Probably relevant is I understand Yellow Pages didn't (originally?) have a revenue stream from the directory's referrals to the listed businesses - only for the listings (renewed annually.)
I run a handful of niche and low traffic websites. Over the years I've dabbled with including ads - doubleclick, adsense, etc. I never received a penny from them, so I don't bother any more. I've also tied paying for adverts, for sites that actually sell things, but never saw any uptick in sales, or visitors. Certainly nothing that made the costs worthwhile. I'm therfore firmly of the opinion that, unless you are a high profile, high traffic website, the only people that benefit from adverts are the brokers, I.e. Google..
Google have built themselves an unassailable moat. Barriers to enter the market are now too high. The problem is the amount of money that is invested in a company to start it up and maintain. This money is provided by companies that just want to make more money. Nothing wrong with making money per se, but when it is the only goal, with no intention of improving the community, or society in general, then there needs to be push-back against that. You've heard the expression "money talks"? Well, it shouldn't (and this is part of the problem with politics too, but that's another story). There is a corollary to money that is beginning to appear above the parapet, and that is the environmental cost of electricity. Users are not considering the amount of electricity that gets used in performing their searches, it is an infinite resource to them, but it is becoming an issue to the point where some areas are rationing this commodity to data centre providers, particularly where AI is part of the underlying traffic.
At some point there has to be some manual process to break what is effectively a feedback loop. Everything nowadays is about automation. We've reached the stage where automation has gone too far.
What should be done now is to encourage new entrants into the search market that have access to the domain name registries, as opposed to relying on search engine results. This to enable them to contact registrants to kick-start alternatives to Google. Yes, I do know about Domain Tasting and Domain Kiting. That's another thing: anything involving entry into "The System" using bulk sign-up with a free exploitation period needs to be outlawed. Perhaps new entrants can pick up the "Do No Evil" mantle from where it was conveniently forgotten about...
This is basically following a couple of the suggestions mentioned as "no hopers", but where's the fail? Work from a large enough set of self-curated feeds and anything that's genuinely interesting will be mentioned by one of them and interesting new out-links can be added to the feed. No need to keep the bubble static.
Kagi's no-ads search results and down-rating spammy sites seems to be working pretty well too. Well, it's working for me. YMMV.
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