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Robert J. Berger

@pluralistic coined yet another great new word describing the dystopian era we are living in:

The Enshittocene

Google reneged on the monopolistic bargain

"A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.”

pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-

pluralistic.netPluralistic: Google reneged on the monopolistic bargain; The Bezzle excerpt (Part IV) (21 Feb 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

@rberger @pluralistic BH&G and Real Simple used to be brands with value. I assume those websites started going downhill in 2022 after Dotdash acquired Meredith.

@rberger @pluralistic What is also interesting is that Google seems incapable of dealing with spam, yet miraculously seems about to downrank and even hide articles that are negative towards it. Iʼve been running a few searches which Iʼll shortly put on my blog, though it has been a censorship machine for ages (Google Plus was a great place for it).

@rberger @pluralistic My post, if it's of interest. I included references to Cory's post as it was directly relevant:

jackyan.com/blog/2024/02/is-go

Background: from what I can work out, Semrush (not something I use, so I cannot confirm) hallucinated in December and told its users that my name was trending. Now there's a ton of crap (allegedly 8,000 references) about a Google algorithm called jackyan and how I'm an SEO expert, written by LLMs. Google ranks this shit ahead of legitimate stuff.

Jack Yan: the Persuader Blog · Is Google hiding content critical of itself—while losing the spam battle?For a while I enjoyed getting some of the hits from the unwary searching for my name in association with the misinformation that Semrush allegedly generated. After all, it’s my name, and I should enjoy the hits for Google SEO jackyan in order to set the record straight, rather than have the unscrupulous among SEO

@rberger @pluralistic Thank you—this whole thing has taken me by surprise. I had been wondering why I was getting visitors who had made some strange searches.

@jackyan @rberger @pluralistic That’s 🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌. You’re going to need a unique middle name now.

You could hire some SEO pros and sub them out, be the thing GOOG wants.

Congratulations on being a textbook case of GIGO-LLM-LOL though.

You’d think, given how many predicted this would happen, that if Google could have prevented it they would have. Their search utility collapsed immediately. LLMs are bad at answers. Pageviews are good for Ads. Where will Google go? Pay for rank?

@skry @rberger @pluralistic Love what you wrote. Iʼve little doubt that Google search is a pay-to-play platform now!

@JizzelEtBass @rberger @pluralistic I head to @Mojeek with Yandex as a fall-back now. Youʼre so right, Google basically prioritizes junk. Most of the spam we get on email comes from Gmail, too. The Google name should be synonymous with spam.

@rberger @pluralistic

Yeah, some of us remember "Don't Be Evil", and how it was the coolest thing to work for Google. What a freaking disaster the company has become.

@rberger @pluralistic this "state of product review" article linked in the enshittoscene piece is amazing for its thoroughness and subtle anger: housefresh.com/david-vs-digita

"Private equity firms are utilizing public trust in long-standing publications to sell every product under the sun

In a bid to replace falling ad revenue, publishing houses are selling their publications for parts to media groups that are quick to establish affiliate marketing deals"

How Google is killing independent sites like ours
HouseFresh · How Google is killing independent sites like ours - HouseFreshAnd why you shouldn’t trust product reviews from big media publishers ranking at the top of Google.