<
https://doctorow.medium.com/google-makes-millions-on-paid-abortion-disinformation-7cd4e4b72e28>
"Google’s search quality has been in steady decline for years, and Google
assures us that they’re working on it, though the most visible effort is
replacing links to webpages with lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a
confident habitual liar chatbot:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked
The internet is increasingly full of garbage, much of it written by other
confident habitual liar chatbots, which are now extruding plausible sentences
at enormous scale. Future confident habitual liar chatbots will be trained on
the output of these confident liar chatbots, producing Jathan Sadowski’s
“Habsburg AI”:
https://twitter.com/jathansadowski/status/1625245803211272194
But the declining quality of Google Search isn’t merely a function of chatbot
overload. For many years, Google’s local business listings have been
terrible. Anyone who’s tried to find a handyman, a locksmith, an emergency
tow, or other small businessperson has discovered that Google is worse than
useless for this. Try to search for that locksmith on the corner that you pass
every day? You won’t find them — but you
will find a fake locksmith service
that will dispatch an unqualified, fumble-fingered guy with a drill and a
knockoff lock, who will drill out your lock, replace it with one made of
bubblegum and spit, and charge you 400% the going rate (and then maybe come
back to rob you):
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-locksmiths-may-be-out-to-pick-your-pocket-too.html
Google is clearly losing the fraud/spam wars, which is pretty awful, given that
they have spent billions to put every other search engine out of business. They
spend $45b every year to secure exclusivity deals that prevent people from
discovering or using rivals — that’s like buying a whole Twitter every year,
just so they don’t have to compete:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-a-google-antitrust-case-could/
But there’s an even worse form of fraudulent listing on Google, one they
could do something about, but choose not to: ad-fraud. For all the money and
energy thrown into “dark SEO” to trick Google into putting your shitty, scammy
website at the top of the listings, there’s a much simpler method. All you need
to do is pay Google — buy an ad, and your obviously fraudulent site will be
right there, at the top of the search results."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
