In February, HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro called out publishers like BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone as some of the culprits that publish content about air purifiers despite a lack of expertise — but Google rewards these sites with high rankings all the same. The result is a search results page filled with SEO-first content, designed to do not much more than rank highly on Google.
In a piece published today, she says HouseFresh has “virtually disappeared” from search results: search traffic has decreased 91 percent in recent months, from around 4,000 visitors a day in October 2023 to 200 a day today.
“We lost rankings we held for months (and sometimes years) for articles that are constantly being updated and improved based on findings from our first-hand and in-depth testing, our long-term experience with the products, and feedback from our readers,” Navarro writes. “Our article [previously ranked at #2] is now buried deep beneath sponsored posts, Quora advice from 2016, best-of lists from big media sites, and no less than 64 Google Shopping product listings. Sixty. Four.”
SEO-first affiliate content is being deployed ruthlessly at countless sites.
There is no obvious editorial necessity for Forbes to write articles like “Top 20 Largest Dog Breeds” or “What Fruits Can Dogs Eat?” — until you take a look at the sidebar of these stories, which are filled with dozens of affiliate links for pet insurance that Forbes gets a kickback from every time someone signs up.
Last year, when CNET was discovered to be using artificial intelligence tools to produce dozens of stories, it was SEO-heavy “evergreen” articles it focused on first. In the cases of Sports Illustrated and USA Today’s AI content debacles, it also was product reviews that were being churned out using automation tools.
The aggressive targeting of top Google search spots — with or without AI — by big media outlets affects small sites like HouseFresh the most. A significant loss of traffic for independent publishers is often enough to shutter an outlet entirely.
I want a search engine addon that allows blacklists, specifically ones that block every site that pumps out AI generated stories, preferably crowd-sourced. CNET would be the first one.
I’m sick of the internet at its current state, and it’s visibly getting worse day to day. I don’t even know how to search for shit and recommendations when planning to buy something.This is exactly why people started appending “site:www.reddit.com” to their searches. It was much easier (but not guaranteed) to find organic discussion and reviews of products.
Of course, nothing gold can stay, and this tarnish appeared by way of pigfucker Spez making Reddit worse by allowing corporations to flood the site with bots in the name of boosting MAUs for the IPO. That said, I can appreciate the position Google is in- how do you get to be a search engine of such size that your users can trust your results you deliver to them, filter out SEO spam, and have the whole system automated due to costs?
Or rather, I would appreciate that position, if Google were more interested in quality search results than in spam advertising.
I would guess you could allow people to create custom search blacklists. People could upload theirs and people would vote them up or down.
Kagi is a paid search engine. It allows you to uprank or downrank specific webpages. In that sense it’s very powerful.
I’ve heard of it but I don’t like the idea of having search queries associated with my credit card, even though they say they don’t do that.
Use a searxng instance instead.
Yeah but aren’t they getting enshitified? There was a comment a long ago saying Kagi was looking for more ways to monetize or something
Everything trends that way. Maybe if it was held by a municipality like a public trust or co-op things could be stable for longer
Have a look at marginalia.nu - it’s like a return to the old days
im not aware of what you want, but ceo bullshit is usually made to trick google search. any other engine will be better, even bing is unironically superior to google rn.
Looks like you can do it manually. Build your own Google flavor https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/134847/how-to-filter-out-a-long-list-of-sites-from-google-search
So you want Kagi
Probably the best thing about Verge covering this is simply signal boost, getting the story out to a wider audience.
I’ve been using the internet since before the web existed.
I could swear there was a time that it didn’t suck, but I can’t remember when that was.
Of course, it sucks more now, but…
It sucked back then, but it sucked happily. Now it’s just sad.
Back then it was messy, you couldn’t find anything, but at least everything worked as intended. Hell you could do a whois on something and actually get data back. You could email the netadmin of whatever place you had trouble with. Now it’s just a wasteland of content free corpo sites.
The Internet has been gentrified. Sure, there were some tough places that you had to be careful about wandering into, but there were great experiences. Now it’s this homogenous, cultivated experience.
Although at least your computer doesn’t slow to a crawl every time you go to the wrong Geocities or Tripod page with a million gifs and a custom cursor. Also, would you like to install Bonzi Buddy?
Also, for all of you who lived through the Eternal September, “me too!”
Power corrupts. And those corrupted by power then redirect it to corrupt all they don’t outright conquer.
There was a pre-Google search that was really bad. Then Google raised the standard by optimising for good results. The trick was to stay one move ahead of SEO devs. First people spammed keywords, then people spammed backlinks, etc.
The issue is now that it’s very outdated and the best thing for websites to do is go spam AI articles about everything. The obvious move would be to move websites with higher specificity to the search query up.
The problem is that Google can do that and optimise for fewest actual clicks on links instead of needing to click 3 to get a result. Instead it’s better to click 3 pages with 3 sets of ads then hopefully the “I got what I came for” feeling is in the goldilocks “enough to be interested but not to stop”. This means more screentime, which is more ads that mean more money.
This is peak capitalism guuuys
I dunno, I had this conversation in another thread recently. I was 13 in 2000. The web was a disaster then. Sure, there were good parts, but every website was an outright attack on your computer. Java and Flash were everywhere and they were so easily exploited. I’d go to websites and they’d pop up 100 different windows of hardcore porn, audio on, the whole nine.
But yeah, it’s just a different suck now.
Like you, I was using the internet before the web. The time before monetization. IRC. USENET. GOPHER. IRC replaced my interest in ham radio - I figured: “what’s the point? With a modem, I can talk around the world and don’t need thousands of dollars and a tower in my back yard!” packet radio, which I used to send and receive messages to my parents, evaporated.
Even when the web first came to being, it was special. HoTMaiL, the free html mail client, took off like wildfire. There weren’t even ads, because the ad industry didn’t know what to do with this new medium. Search found relevant interests, people were expressing themselves on ISP-hosted websites, and angelfire and geocities gave a more feature-rich experience.
The initial banner ads were easy enough to ignore. The pop-ups, scareware, and security hell hole that was the early/mid-2000’s was the precipice that the web stepped off and here we are.
But even back in the IRC and USENET days, there were plenty of asshole Nazis and petty arguments and such that it made the internet pretty unpleasant quite often if you didn’t watch where you contributed.
Dude! I see you everywhere! I think you’re singlehandedly feeding the fediverse content! But anyway, yes, there were nazis and trolls, but in my experience, there was a group sense of decorum that we were all in this new utopia together and those folks got flamed by the whole pretty thoroughly.
1995-2010 were the halcyon days. I miss the shit out of the web back then. And I’ve been around long enough that I set up some of the first mail relays and usenet mirrors when I was a teen, besides having one of the largest BBSs in Canada.
Do people who don’t follow this kind of stuff realize how dog shit google results have gotten? I accidentally googled (new phone) a Costco wine earlier and all the links were marketing garbage. DDG gives me actual reviews within 5 results.
Ed Zitron has a scathing piece about that (in the podcast version he’s seething) entitled “The Man Who Killed Google Search.” Worth checking out, it contains some quality righteous anger.
Just listened to it again. Highly recommend. The short of it is more searches == more ads == more $. There’s a conflict between a great search experience (landing not on google) versus the time you spend ON Google.
Great story and just terrible outcome.
Web today is three companies in a trenchcoat. It is bit sad that the innovation of late 90’s has almost disappeared. I do hope Fediverse/ActivityPub would create this next version of free web, which is impossible for companies to control.
I initially thought about installing UBlacklist on Firefox and block the spam, but then I had a thought? Let us do the HouseFresh.com test on Duck Duck Go and see how far up it is?
Apparently, Housefresh.com stands behind world famous Air Purifier reviewers like:
- Best Buy
- popular mechanics
- CBSnews
- NationalGeographic
- PCMagazine
- Rollingstone
- Yahoo
- UsNews
- Forbes
- Choice
- MrGadget.com.au
- CNET
- Amazon
- TopConsumerReviews
- Bustle
- ConsumerReports
- Parents
- Health
- bhg
- thekitchn
- rd
- learnmetrics
- homedepot
- iheartdogs
- telegraph
- msn
- livestrong
- sethlui
- nytimes
- reviewed.usatoday
- popsci
- oransi
- healthline
- seattleweekly
- bestreviews
- thesprucepets
- tomsguide
- gearhungry
- consumertestedreviews
- bobvila
- prevention
- nbcnews
- nypost
- foodandwine
- consumeradvice.in
- news.com.au
- esquire
- gq
- wsj
- verywellhealth
- consumerreports
- moderncastle
- consumeranalysis
- independent.co.uk
- hollywoodreporter
- hgtv
- consumersadvocate
- thehindu
- toptenreviews
- people.com
- popsci
- money
- endadget
- businessinsider
- gearpatrol
- trustedreviews
- digitaltrends
- menshealth
- howtogeek
- techyearlab
- nymag
- livescience
- portugal(what?)
- nj
- iqair
- mashable
- billboard
- prevention
- techhive
- architecturaldigest
- huffpost
- reviewed.usatoday
- realsimple
- techradar
- wired
Well, nevermind guess. I can have either HouseFresh and literally nothing else. Or an ocean of spam, intermixed with the rare human written article that was produced by the main branch of the publisher, rather than its SEO garbage chute.
The web search is a lost cause. No wonder Kagi keeps growing in popularity.
(Also keep in mind, in that giant list? Some of those websites are so GOOD at their Air Purifying review job that they get to be featured more than once, thrice even at times)
Yeah I have been using DuckDuckGo for about a decade. I noticed a drop in quality as soon as the Microsoft Bing partnership. Now it is mostly just a Bing clone. Which is really sad. They were really good and really cared about consumers privacy. I have been moving over to Startpage but have yet to do a full read up on its policies and do a full test of the quality of the search results. Though so far I am quietly optimistic.
I’m using a French search engine called Qwant. I find it gives very good results.
Just gave it a quick test drive it and it’s pretty promising, thanks for the tip.
Not bad eh?
Not until I searched for “restaurant town name” and got as results tripadvisor.com, tripadvisor.co.uk, tripadvisor.ch, tripadvisor.fr *5, … ;)
But in another search it did way better than duckduckgo. So it’s not perfect, but definitely good enough to try as main search for a while :)
Well fair enough lol. It is a lot tidier though for news search!
Merci, je vais l’essayer
You could find stuff, it was often a very tedious process though. You searched for: thing XYZ doesn’t work and found a lot of of forums with posts of people who had the same problem and with a bit of luck you found a two years old entry with an answer that actually worked for you. Now it’s 20 results from the company that created the product you have a problem with but offers no solution at all.
Might try this
Really need to start using DuckDcukGo exclusively
Duck Duck Go is also complete trash these days, just in different ways.
Another alternatives
Kagi Searx Startpage
Wha?? Duckduckgo is great. I love it. Get to know their bangs. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
yeah I tried it and it was incredibly lacking. Any advice on alternatives?
I sadly have none. I suffer with DDG and Google and my life is hell.
Same bro, same, for simple shit I usually end up using Perplexity to avoid the garbage articles.
I’ve been using Qwant and been loving it.
looks interesting, thanks
Seems like a combination of building a proper webring and then setting YaCY loose on it is probably the path forward.
Make a search on Bing, then make a search on DuckDcukGo. Compare the results. You’ll find out that DuckDcukGo is just a front end for another site that provides links to business affiliates.
Well damn what engine search CAN I use then?
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I’ve been using Kagi for a few months and I’m liking it so far.
A search engine that specifically requires an account is pretty sus
How else are you supposed to pay for it?
We need Yahoo back. Just a bunch of categories, where anyone can put their site under the right category.
The Internet is so big nowadays that you pretty much need to have some kind of algorithm. A list of all websites in “the right category” would have way too many items in it most of which would be useless. We live in an attention economy: lots of people want as many people as possible to pay attention to them, but everyone’s attention is obviously limited.
No I don’t know how to fix this.
Isn’t the head of Google search, Yahoo’s former head of search?
