If you go back to the original development and surrounding white papers that made Google the default search engine of choice, you’ll discover they weren’t bulletproof by any stretch. We had “Google Bombing”, Googlewashing, and other spamdexing techniques for most of Google’s existence.
But I might argue that Google had - for a time - created a virtuous cycle of reinforcing intentional traffic trends and linked search results, such that certain search results and domains considered “trustworthy” got more and more traffic while the junk was increasingly confined to the back end of the search log. Of course, YMMV - there was a strong English Language bias from day one, a lot of the “preferred” results were corrupted through corporate buyouts and manipulations, and Google had its own political agenda that would cause certain information to be particularly hard to find. But by and large, if you searched for “that horse with the white and black stripes that lives in africa”, you got back a bunch of useful links about Zebras. And - at a high level - that’s what Google was supposed to do for its user base.
Post-2018, the corporate heads at Google shifted their metrics for link results from “most popular” to “most recently popular”. Even ignoring the AI results (which I personally think the reaction against is overblown), this has been what’s royally fucked their returns. Now, when you go looking for the “white and black stripped horse”, you get back whatever is currently trending on social media. This reinvents the capacity for Google Bombing and other result manipulation techniques, which Google had ostensibly solved by moving away from its reliance on site self-descriptions. Add to that, the increased demand for revenue in exchange for prominence on the result feed makes non-profit sites like Wikipedia fall farther and farther down the search rabbit hole.
I don’t think this is a natural decay of internet content. This is an effort to undermine the improvements in search result optimization that Google had historically made.
If you go back to the original development and surrounding white papers that made Google the default search engine of choice, you’ll discover they weren’t bulletproof by any stretch. We had “Google Bombing”, Googlewashing, and other spamdexing techniques for most of Google’s existence.
But I might argue that Google had - for a time - created a virtuous cycle of reinforcing intentional traffic trends and linked search results, such that certain search results and domains considered “trustworthy” got more and more traffic while the junk was increasingly confined to the back end of the search log. Of course, YMMV - there was a strong English Language bias from day one, a lot of the “preferred” results were corrupted through corporate buyouts and manipulations, and Google had its own political agenda that would cause certain information to be particularly hard to find. But by and large, if you searched for “that horse with the white and black stripes that lives in africa”, you got back a bunch of useful links about Zebras. And - at a high level - that’s what Google was supposed to do for its user base.
Post-2018, the corporate heads at Google shifted their metrics for link results from “most popular” to “most recently popular”. Even ignoring the AI results (which I personally think the reaction against is overblown), this has been what’s royally fucked their returns. Now, when you go looking for the “white and black stripped horse”, you get back whatever is currently trending on social media. This reinvents the capacity for Google Bombing and other result manipulation techniques, which Google had ostensibly solved by moving away from its reliance on site self-descriptions. Add to that, the increased demand for revenue in exchange for prominence on the result feed makes non-profit sites like Wikipedia fall farther and farther down the search rabbit hole.
I don’t think this is a natural decay of internet content. This is an effort to undermine the improvements in search result optimization that Google had historically made.