Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”
He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.
Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.
Anyone who has tried to find anything on Google in recent years knows that Suleyman is 100% correct. Google’s search results have become so bad because website makers play the SEO game, and that means creating content that Google’s algorithm likes – but, and here’s the kicker, what Google’s algorithm likes, is not really what people like. Writing an article to please a computer is entirely different from writing an article to please a human. There are very clear and well-understood and thoroughly studied rules about writing in a way that makes things easy to read, but Google’s algorithm doesn’t optimise for that.
And now “AI” is being trained on this crap content, so that they will also produce crap content. We’re not far away from a future where bots are writing content for other bots that teach other bots to write content for bots. In fact, that future may already be here, judging by some of the style of writing I’ve been seeing even on otherwise venerable outlets.
This is also why so many websites have started posting basic, simple how-to articles. You see stuff like “How do I move my apps on an iPhone?” or “How do I delete a folder in Windows?” or “The best neckband headphones of 2023” all over the place now, even on websites where they clearly don’t belong and don’t fit the audience, not just on content farms – these articles are not designed for readers, they’re designed to catch Google search queries and generate traffic. It must be absolutely soul-crushing and mind-numbing to write stuff like that and optimise it for SEO, but you know – fish’ gotta swim, bird’s gotta eat.
Here’s a little inside hockey for you: on several occasions over the past year or so, both OSAlert as a whole, and me individually, have been approached by serious parties to effectively turn OSAlert into one of those content farms. Some have even tried to get me to write such “content” for their own content farms. Clearly, we’ve never accepted such offers – I’m no cheap date – but the pressure is there, and not everyone can resist. It’s why so many tech websites that used to have a clear identity and tone have become so much more bland and repetitive. They are all tiny cogs in massive content networks now, with their original stated goals and interests shoved to the wayside – all to chase the SEO.
We’ve clearly not yet fallen victim to this – OSAlert is still just me posting news – but that also means we’re not making any money in the ways other tech websites do, and in fact, why we’re not making enough to keep things going without OSAlert’ owner footing the bill out of his own pocket. That’s why I’ve been more active and persistent in promoting our Patreon, Ko-Fi, merch store, and Liberapay, since it allows us to not worry about the financials as much. It always feels awkward to do, but I also realise that if I want OSAlert to keep going for another 25 years, that’s really the only thing I can do.
Because Google has thoroughly ruined every other avenue for websites like ours to make money.
I’m so sorry for the headline.
“And now “AI” is being trained on this crap content, so that they will also produce crap content. We’re not far away from a future where bots are writing content for other bots that teach other bots to write content for bots. ”
Researchers have been warning about this for a while. It is called “model collapse” among other things.
https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-ai-feedback-loop-researchers-warn-of-model-collapse-as-ai-trains-on-ai-generated-content/
https://www.axios.com/2023/08/28/ai-content-flood-model-collapse
+1 appreciate your links, very informative!
In terms of the article, I almost feel indifferent to replacing human SEO spammers with AI SEO spammers. Regardless of who or what makes it, it’s all just spam to me. AI doesn’t fundamentally change how I feel about it.
Maybe we can discuss this “model collapse” in terms of other applications though?
It gets worse. There is a recent trend called “content pruning” which, according to the most recent SEO kremlinology, improves a website’s Google Search ranking by supposedly making the website appear more “fresh” and “relevant”:
https://gizmodo.com/cnet-deletes-thousands-old-articles-google-search-seo-1850721475
There is no evidence this is true, and in fact Google has warned against it, but since some SEO gurus have declared it a fact after consulting the right tea leaves and a analyzing footage of Sundar Pinchai’s eyelid motion, websites are doing it regardless.
kurkosdr,
Having done lots of web development myself, I’ve always taken issue with google’s influence over web design. After you build a website specifically to optimizing for user experience, SEO companies would be brought in telling website owners to change X Y and Z to please the google algorithm and a lot of energy would go towards this end rather than improving the product for users. It’s like user experience and features got demoted behind google optimization. Regardless of whether these SEO tricks worked or not (and they didn’t always work), it is frustrating that one company has so much power to dictate to others how websites must be built.
The site of my former employer was cursed to the bones by The Four Horsemen of the Webpocalypse: SEO, Analytics, Comscore and Google Ads. About 90% of the work done on the site was for these 4 disgraces, while letting the “services” and “features” of the site to rot slowly but surely.
Add to that more egregious stuff like Taboola, Outbrain and the like and the whole picture gets really really ugly.
And that’s the sad state of affairs in web development…
Sobakus,
Haha, sounds familiar! Most website owners had one thing in common: they all wanted more organic customers instead of paying advertisers for clicks. In their shoes I would too. Unlike most web developers, many SEO companies would actually promise more traffic up front with the understanding that it was a slow process. The business model was such that if a website became popular, they would take the credit. If it failed, they were already paid for their work and moved on to the next customer. I could have capitalized on the SEO bandwagon, but I wouldn’t feel good about it.
Then again, if it afforded me a better lifestyle, who knows what tune I’d be singing. Money can corrupt us.
https://money.cnn.com/2013/06/17/pf/money-corrupt/index.html
“we’ve never accepted such offers”
That’s one reason why I’ve been reading OSAlert, and almost no other tech site, since 2001. Thank you, Thom!
drcouzelis,
I miss many of the old tech publications, especially those with regular tech series written by professional tech writers. These come to mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Journal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_(magazine)
The byte.com domain was bought by a company selling detail retainers. Haha, feels both funny and sad.
I guess the same thing is true of journalism in general. The industry has largely been replaced by blogs and highly consolidated news channels that have laid off most of their news staff to become extremely shallow echo chambers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnIQalprvR8
I find this depressing. The companies that lost have little power to come back and those that won have no incentive to. This is the future.
Getting back to osnews and Thom, David, Adam. I do appreciate them as well. I’m sure that they too are feeling the pressure of merely surviving on the brink. It’s tough.
Edit: detail retainers -> dental retainers
I totally disagree. I had the same problems, and I fixed it with stricter browser hygiene; I think the real culprit is social media.
About 2 years ago I got a Chromebook. I started using Firefox for Android on it, without logging in to Google, I use it for all my News readers, RSS feeds, forums, Facebook, and all other social media. Then on my desktop, where I log in to my google account, I just do my R&D & gmail. After a while, my desktop cleaned up, and it’s now like it used to be. All the ‘crap’ is on my Chromebook in Firefox.
I’m sorry I’m not quite sure I’m getting it. What exactly do you disagree with and what symptoms disappeared with “stricter browser hygiene” ? I feel like he problem here is on the content creation side and I’m not sure how the web client can help with that, like it does for simple ads and bloatware js that serve no purpose for users.
BTW something that’s semi-related to the need for SEO: A trend towards fatter and fatter backends (that I have been observing lately). This increases hosting costs and hence makes websites more hungry for ad dollars. I mean, does a news site really need a server-side CMS? Why not render the pages once offline and put them in an S3 bucket or something? Other than a search function (which can be a small independent function or even offloaded to Google) and the forums section (which can be its own domain and is optional), a website doesn’t really need server-side code because it’s not processing any transactions or any kind of user content! And any interactive functionality can be embeds/widgets such as Disqus (which means the work is done by a third-party service). And yet, you see websites jumping into the latest AWS bandwagon, and going microservices this and lamba functions that and also don’t forget the Amazon RDS system which is required by their CMS… and then left wondering why running a website today costs so much.