this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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It's really frustrating how much blatantly AI-written shit is at the top of every Google search nowadays.
Like, you Google "how to install a door" and you find an article that's like
"Here's how you install a door. Installing a door is really easy when you know how This guide will tell you how to install a door on ten easy steps. The first step in installing your door is to pick a door at the store." It repeats the title of the article everyother damn sentence, and takes FOREVER to get to a useful point. And sometimes they give flat out incorrect advice.
Then, you check the urland it's something like "techbuiz.com" and you've never even heard of this shit before, why the hellisit the top indexed result?
This isn't a problem to do with the reddit blackout at all, it's the enshittification of Google algorithm. They sell those top slots to the highest bidder, it's no longer about who actually has relevant information about the thing you searched for, it's about who had just enough matching keywords AND gave Google money to put up top.
Of course Google blames other sites, like reddit. It makes up all kinds of bullshit to obfuscate what they are doing, and sin e they have a proprietary algorithm nobody can prove that they are doing what I described above. But it's so blatantly obvious that they are that it's nearly insulting that they keep pretending they aren't.
Random vaguely relevant confession: Every time I see "RDR2," I misread it as R2D2.
We all do.
At that point YouTube is might only be the next best thing for that...
…where you run into a problem similar to the one described in the original comment. You’ll get twenty minutes of useless filler because the youtuber wants to make their video long enough to monetize, while also advertising themselves because they want you to become a follower.
It may not be AI generated text, but the end result is the same: an annoying waste of time. Good luck finding a quick, direct answer to a simple question.
Idk, maybe that’s the case for ppl covering popular games, but droves of the videos I’ve searched up for old/obscure games are short and to the point.
Also, while annoying, at least with YouTube the item you’re looking for is SOMEWHERE in the video. Google just fails to provide even breadcrumbs that the user can follow to an answer most of the time now.
Google used to punish sites that used more than 3.5% keyword density, but it seems that they stopped doing that at some point. It's interesting that with every update to their algorithm their results have become less reliable, yet more profitable for them. By interesting I mean frustrating.