[burningChrome]

To some degree it already is.

I recently built a pretty simple static site. I wanted to know how bad the search engines were out to lunch. I chose an industry and domain, then built something simple using a template. Then I did what you should never do with SEO. Keyword stuffing, geo tagging and stuffing, using duplicate content and then copying material directly from high ranking sites in the same industry.

NONE of it was penalized and the site within a week or so was on the top two pages for dozens of specific searches I very deliberately abused SEO in order to achieve.

Nobody is awake right now at wheel. Not long ago, my site would've been buried in a matter of hours. Now? I'm rewarded when I purposefully manipulate the SERPS for some research and get listed on the front page.

If people think AI is going to make this better, they're in for a rude awakening. Its only going to get worse as more people realize how easy it is to manipulate the search engines to get your stuff ranked higher and take advantage of it. There doesn't seem to be any checks on the validity of what the AI is serving up - making it ripe for abuse.

[rurp]

That's a really interesting experiment. I've been pretty down on Google for a while now but that result is even worse than I would have expected. It's shocking how little Google cares about their core product. Same for Microsoft/Bing, but at least for them it's not a core competency.

[eitland]

Not only that but even for topics not abused to death by SEO, Google still manages to include absolutely irrelevant pages.

It seems like they have had some system for years already which includes an absolutely unhealthy amount of pages that in their algorithms view are similar to the thing I ask for without being the thing I ask for.

My go-to example is when I search for a construct from a JS framework that a previous dev used and Google gives me lots of results that seem superficially relevant but when I open them I think half or more of the results at the first page are about other, similar frameworks.

This is extremely annoying because they manage to hit a spot were the results are close enough that I often have to read a bit before I realize it.