The last 25 years of Google’s history can be boiled down to a battle against the Google bomb. Is the search engine finally losing to its hijackers?
  • towerful@programming.dev
    5·
    10 months ago

    I feel like the newest trend of hijackers are AI blogs/articles.
    I’ve noticed it with searching for some DIY tips. Trying to find some opinions on Vinyl emulsion Vs standard Matt emulsion. All I seem to find are strange-to-read “articles” with the same “information” repeated in multiple paragraphs, none of which is actually useful. Some of it straight up contradictory.

    Like, this article just reads really badly. Maybe it’s just bad writers trying to reach a word count.
    https://paintersworld.co.uk/painters-advice/what-is-vinyl-matt-paint
    But it’s not just DIY stuff I’ve seen that with. There are so many search results now that just read like AI copy

    • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
      1·
      10 months ago

      Like, this article just reads really badly. Maybe it’s just bad writers trying to reach a word count.

      A good way to tell bad writer vs. AI apart is to look for utterance purpose; basically asking yourself “what is the author trying to convey through this odd word/sentence/paragraph?”. Humans - even when not proficient in a language - are rather good at that; while LLMs (“AI”), as complex as they are, are just chaining words.

      If you do it with your link, most of the time you notice that the author is 1) trying to share some piece of info, and 2) promoting his store. That was likely not written by AI, but by a human being; it reads a lot like a verbose piece of advertisement because, well, it is one.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    A writer for the site, interviewed under the pseudonym Michael Hugedisk, told Wired in 2007 that their three-person team linked to a webpage selling pro-George W. Bush merchandise and was able to make it the top result on Google if you searched “dumb motherfucker.”

    Alex Turvy, a sociologist specializing in digital culture, said it’s hard to map our current understanding of virality and platform optimization to the earliest days of Google, but there are definitely similarities.

    Alice Marwick, a communications professor and author of The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media, told The Verge that it wasn’t until Myspace launched in 2003 that we started to even develop the idea of internet fame.

    In 2004, he won a competition Google held to google-bomb itself with the made-up term “nigritude ultramarine.” Since then, Dash has written extensively over the years on the impact platform optimization has had on the way the internet works.

    Blogger still works, but without Google Reader as a hub for aggregating it, most publishers started making native content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and, more recently, TikTok.

    On top of it all, OpenAI’s massively successful ChatGPT has dragged Google into a race against Microsoft to build a completely different kind of search, one that uses a chatbot interface supported by generative AI.

    The original article contains 3,695 words, the summary contains 218 words. Saved 94%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!