Google announced this week that it does making some changes to address the issue of spam content appear in searches. Users have been complaining more and more that the search engine has been flooded with low-quality content created purely to play with Google’s search algorithms, rather than providing real information.
These changes would have been helpful to Seth McDaniel about a year ago. Then her newly adopted rescue dog, Fella, was throwing up and she didn’t know why.
“And then I was googling it, every website I could find would say, ‘Oh, it’s a terrible thing when your dog throws up,’ and then I’d go on and on about how horrible it is. like all over your carpet and for the dog,” he said.
It was a lot of what he calls “word vomit,” about dog vomit. McDaniel works in marketing himself, so he knows this trick.
“The more keywords that are relevant search phrases that people might be searching for on Google, the higher your article will appear,” he said.
This is the art of search engine optimization or SEO. Google’s search algorithm takes into account factors such as relevance, authority or how often a site is linked, according to Chirag Shah, a professor of information science at the University of Washington.
“There are all kinds of tricks that SEO plays, you know; some of them are desirable, some of them are just misleading,” he said.
On the bright side, for example, there would be a reputable news organization optimizing a headline. On the not-so-good side, there would be AI-generated content aggregated from other sites to steal their clicks, according to Garrett Johnson, a professor of digital marketing at Boston University.
“The problem is that generative AI makes it easier to produce long-form content,” he said.
Now, Google says it will demote websites that produce, say, thousands of “articles” a day. It will also penalize sites that buy and reuse recently expired domains or those that sell space to spam.
Google still dominates search, but ChatGPT is a threat, argues Scott Kessler, technology analyst at Third Bridge.
“The search market may look very different in a couple of years,” he said.
The dog’s owner, Seth McDaniel, came up with a solution. He started adding “Reddit” to his queries to find answers written by humans.
“And the first response that came up was, ‘Oh, I’m probably hungry in the morning.’ And that makes the stomach acids, you know, go up or whatever. And I thought, ‘Oh, well, I’ll just feed him first,'” she said.
Check this out: The vomit issue with the dog and the word has been resolved.
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