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by ethbr0 1582 days ago
This feels like the underlying issue. Google may have stayed the same, or even slightly improved.

But the web, in the sense of quality:crap ratio, has gotten substantially worse.

This flood seems like the ultimate manifestation of turnkey hosting solutions.

Imho, we could do worse than reviving an idea from email's early days vs spam: negligible per-use charging. The idea was to tax emails at $0.0001 (or somesuch). Insignificant for actual users, but financially decimates high-volume, low-value spammers.
2 comments
Jiro 1582 days ago
The web is like that because content farms are optimizing the pages to be found by Google and Google doesn't know how to filter them out, so we really can't treat it as a problem independent of Google itself.
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Lascaille 1582 days ago
It isn't so much that 'google doesn't know how to filter them out' but there's nothing left after having filtered them out.

Nobody is producing real content that isn't behind a paywall.

There's nothing to find.

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Gigachad 1582 days ago
There is real content being drowned out by autogenerated SEO crap. I tried looking for rice cookers which didn't have non stick coatings, they do exist and some blog posts which talk about them but the top results are all stores which have just a generic category for rice cooker but generate 200 duplicate pages with the title changed to exactly match whatever your search term is. So it says "Ceramic rice cooker" but shows their generic listing of PTFE rice cookers.

Google search is constantly improving but the SEO spammers are improving faster.

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willis936 1582 days ago
I know this isn't true because I've used google for nearly two decades with good results. That information hasn't evaporated, it's just buried.
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ethbr0 1582 days ago
Fair. The fact that Google exists + the fact that Google serves a huge amount of traffic + the fact that Google is unable / unwilling to filter out content farms = incentive to content farm.

If there were no Google though, we'd likely have the same thing.

So I guess the only reality that avoids incentivizing them is one where (1) there is a massive traffic generator & (2) that massive traffic generator severely disincentizes content farms.

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Avamander 1581 days ago
In theory proof-of-work with increasing cost based on subjective untrustworthyness might work.
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