Today’s links Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands: “Site reputation abuse” goes beyond third party content farms. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands (permalink) Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy “search engine optimization” business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad): https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation It’s nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false: https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you’d have to make (and the number of ads you’d have to see) to find a decent result: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan Google’s antitrust case turns on…Pluralistic: Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands (03 May 2024)