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mostlysignssomeportents · 19 days

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Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

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 the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

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lapis-maid · 1 year

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i love language and i love this term so much

the source is here, and the original JPN post is here

it's a very good post about the author, a Japanese artist, dealing with harassment from western antis over OMORI fanart, and learning about "proship" discourse, written as an informative piece for others to learn from, and as a warning of how to deal with potential harassers

it also sometimes hits raw as fuck like here

#antis #proship #western discourse #proship discourse #shipping discourse #omori #fandom harassment #'feelings yakuza' god what a good term #i think people should really read this article so i'm mostly just using Actual Tags to hopefully get it seen by people #gotta abuse that SEO baybee

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whumpetywhump · 1 month

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Are You Human, Too? - Ep. 3, 14 & 15

The only thing that Human Shin and Robot Shin have in common: wanting to protect Young Hoon

#are you human too #kdrama #abuse of power #physical abuse #punishment by proxy #emotional abuse #concern #protective friend #bromance #seo kang joon #lee joon hyuk #whump #kwhump #asian whump

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wannaeatramyeon · 10 months

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Hii!! I wanna ask regarding jake and samuel. Are they half brother?? Because I remember reading a chapter where samuel keeps saying gapryong kim is his dad or maybe he's just desperate??!! I just want to know your thought tho

Jake Kim + Samuel Seo: Bro

"Bro why you being like this?"

"Stop following me around."

"Bro cmon."

Samuel whirls round, "STOP calling me bro, I am not your bro."

Hurt creeps over Jake's face, "Maybe not by blood but-"

"Not by anything, now fuck off."

"Bro..."

Brad and Jason watches the two of them. An odd routine they seemed to have picked up ever since their conversation on the pier. Jake trailing after Samuel like a lost puppy and Samuel being pricklier than ever.

"10,000 won on Samuel throwing the first punch?" Brad offers.

"No frickin way," Did this bald idiot take Jason Yoon for a fool? "That's as good as guaranteed."

#again me being extra to say no they are in no way related #sammy saw a pic of his mother with gap and thought that was his dad #but it was actually cos she wanted the pic with someone famous #sammy's dad is an aircon tech #and was absent for years while he was abused by his mum :(#lookism #samuel seo #jake kim #lookism fic #wannaeatramyeon

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crayonfears · 20 days

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hey just letting you know that I’m the person you wrote the 2 comments 🥲 btw I was wondering how you would describe the childhood of the jangbros? because the show didn’t did them really justice and I think your opinion will be really interesting 🙏

hi there, friend! so happy to see you again! sorry it took me a while to answer this. i've just been so busy haha

my thoughts on jangbros' childhood really depends on my mood 🙈 you're right that the show did them no justice at all - and a part of me is disappointed that two integral characters were left so underdeveloped; another part of me is actually delighted that that's the case since that means my ass can just jump in and fill the gaps as i please hehe MY canon now.

personally, i like to play around a lot with how they met, when they met, and how that would affect their dynamic/relationship. this is something you'd get to see in my next fics which, hopefully will be finished soon - i won't spoil anything now hehe 😉

if you want to stick close to canon, though. i like that they first met on a hunting trip. han seok said the gun scared him, which is most definitely a lie, though i like to think that he pretended to be scared for han seo's sake - a way to show, 'hey, we're so alike, right? you got nothing to be afraid of me for 🤓' han seo didn't know at all what was about to hit him rip. another thing that i also cling onto from canon is han seo's drug abuse. i wish they'd developed on it more than just a throwaway line and those callous reactions from cha young and vincenzo ;; i would've loved to know how he broke away from it - if he ever did at all. my personal hc is han seok's got him sober, mainly because he'd be the kind to think drug use is dirty, beneath them - ironic since he's making drugs that'd get people addicted smh - and well, how would han seo feels anything han seok does to him if he's doped out of his mind?

ahh but that's too far from their childhood now. another thing i'd love to know is the kids han seok murdered in his youth. was there another reasons beyond him not liking the look of them? my shipper brain has some ideas haha, perhaps they showed too much interest in han seo, or any interest at all. maybe han seo showed interest in them so han seok had to cut it right off at the bud, showed han seo that there could only one person han seo was allowed to look at. yandere!han seok, my beloved haha

i also like to think about han seok patching han seo up from the wounds he himself caught. them in the bathroom of their massive villa, han seo sitting on the sink and trying not to flinch at how rough hyungnim is being with his wounds. the same hands that hurt him now working to fix him up. the push and pull that han seo kept han seo coming back no matter how much han seok has hurt him. i think han seo would learn better as he grew up but still, his child's mind could only see how kind his hyungnim is being, makes him forget all the hurt.

there's also that period of time where han seok was in the US and han seo's all alone in Korea. did they keep contact? han seok has shown han seok with so little monitoring on han seo - which i thought was so bizarre considering han seo's han seok's fall guy. i like to imagine han seok as so clingy, the kind to text every day and micromanage han seo's every decision even with an ocean away from them. he had to have away to keep himself in his dongsaeng's psyche; so he wouldn't forget him. but if they didn't keep contact, then what would han seo be like during those years? would he have grown out of the abuse han seok inflicted on him? i like to think that he did - han seo grew up to be such a brat, rolling his eyes and making devil horns behind han seok's back; so maybe he just grew to be a little less afraid of han seok in those years apart than he would've had they stayed together.

anyways, this sure is all over the place haha. i'm not even sure i answered your question. i tend to ramble a lot when talking about these two. let me know if you want me to specify anything, or if you wanna know more about them. as i said, i'm always down to talk about these two losers 🥰

#ask #the-ace-friend #jang bros #jang han seo #jang han seok #honestly the bulk of jangbros childhood is all in my head haha #i've had so many aus of them #canon seems secondary at this point but it's nice to refer back to every once in a while just to have a look at the two's characteristics #like han seo's drug abuse; how he seemed a more timid person in that hospital flashback - how was he really as a kid?#han seok was also fucking insane in his youth: like killing his own father; killing four fucking kids before that #that's bonkers! he seemed more tamed in his adulthood in constrast #it's so interesting too that he collected watches from his victims #wish they'd shown him take the guy's watch in the container scene after he killed him #that would've been so iconic #the showrunners do be forgetting about their own characters' characterizations sometimes smh #*crayonspeaks

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helianthus21 · 3 months

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#jang han seo #jang han seok #vincenzo #my edit #video edit #it's a hard knock life #this hurt #abuse cw #made this at midnight ahjsj #this hurts more the more you watch it😮‍💨

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autistichanseo · 1 year

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This is a long one !! sorry!! here's some true brothers angst thinking (with comfort at the end) for you guys though <33 (also read the tags after reading this if you do read this maybe cos I go on another mini ramble lmao)

Thinking about maybe when Hanseo and Vincenzo live together in Malta, since all Hanseo’s ever known is getting abused (both physically and verbally) and hurt over any mistake he made no matter how small, he automatically assumes Vincenzo will do the same to him (of course he would, that's what he “deserves”, right?).

So he tests the water with Vincenzo a bit.

To see what Vincenzo’s limits were, what to avoid doing to not get hurt, what the unspoken rules were (after all Hanseok had plenty).

It starts with small things, not tidying up after himself, breaking a plate “accidentally”, leaving milk out to spoil (also “accidentally”).

But Vincenzo doesn’t hurt him.

He helps Hanseo clean up the plate he dropped, checking to see for any possible injuries. He casually tells him to remember to put his things away when they’re all over one of the rooms. He only ever lightly scolds him (it was more a reminder than anything) in a light tone to make sure to not leave out the milk out next time for too long because it’ll spoil, but it was fine, that they could just ask a maid to add milk onto the grocery list.

It both confuses and scares Hanseo.

It meant he didn’t know what would set off Vincenzo, and he couldn’t handle the anxiousness that clawed at him whenever he was around him because of it.

Plus he was apart of the literal mafia, who knew what he and his mafia family (that also lived on the island) would do to Hanseo when angered?? He had seen first hand all of the various ways he toyed with Hanseok, and couldn't forget what Vincenzo had done to him before he joined his side, so who knew what methods he'd use when angered?? He needed to find out what to avoid, and fast.

Vincenzo starts noticing and asks if somethings wrong and why he's been avoiding him, to which Hanseo was terrified (and slightly relieved) that this was when the other shoe would drop and Vincenzo would shout at him or hit him.

But that never happened.

When Hanseo told him nothing was up, that he was struggling to sleep a bit lately so because of that he's just been a quite tired recently and out of it, Vincenzo seems to buy it and offered to get him a therapist, as after all it makes sense he’d be restless after everything that happened not too long ago in Korea. He ruffles his hair and leaves and Hanseo is just left shocked.

Why was he being so patient with him?? Hanseok would’ve hurt him at so many points in this test, why didn’t Vincenzo? (“Any other person would’ve by now right?”)

Was he toying with him? Making Hanseo more and more relaxed around him so that a real punishment would sting more and Hanseo would blame himself for it?

No, he shakes off that thought immediately. His hyung wouldn’t do something like that. It had to be something else.

He needs to know when the other shoe will drop. So he escalates things. Better to know now than fuck up later and have his hopes ruined.

So he keeps “forgetting” to go to his therapy appointments. He “tripped” and broke one of Vincenzo’s prized art pieces, he refuses to move his things or clean up after himself. He goes out to drink almost every day and comes home at like 3am, sometimes blasting loud music when Vincenzo's sleeping.

Anything. Anything for the second shoe to drop.

And eventually, Vincenzo can’t take it anymore, but it didn’t go as Hanseo expected it.

Vincenzo and him get in a huge argument, Hanseo’s refusing to listen (the shoe has to drop now right?) and Vin just exasperatedly like “why are you doing this?” but he isn't shouting at him or upset, just… concerned?

What??

Why wasn’t he mad??

As Vincenzo is asking him to explain why he was being like this Hanseo can’t bottle it up anymore and just bursts out with “because you won’t hurt me!!! why wont you hurt me??? just get it over with and scream at me for screwing up or slap me or anything! just do something so I'm not always anxious around you and... scared everything’s going to- I don’t know, straight up collapse at any moment or something!! just tell me what your rules are!!”

And that's when Vincenzo realises.

Oh.

His heart sinks. Because he now knows exactly why Hanseo’s doing this.

He’s trying to figure out what Vincenzo would hurt him for.

He thinks Vincenzo is going to hurt him eventually like Hanseok did.

Oh.

It takes Vincenzo a moment to process this and it's suddenly silent and Hanseo thinks this is when the other shoe has dropped.

He’s filled with fear once again, but this time it spills over any sort of relief he could’ve gotten at finally “finding out what Vincenzo’s limits were” because Hanseo can’t read Vincenzo’s face right now. He associates that unreadability with the unreadable expression Hanseok would have on his face before hurting Hanseo.

He's bracing himself to get shouted at or hurt so he goes back into Hanseok-mode and takes a step back, starting to cave in on himself as he's about to try to apologise and take back what he just said.

Thankfully, Vincenzo realises this and immediately snaps out of his head to reassure Hanseo. "Hanseo... I'm not going to hurt you... I was never planning on ever laying a hand on you. Ever. Nor was I planning to ever shout at you."

And Hanseo is just.

Stunned.

He doesn't know what to say so he's only responds with a meek "Why?"

For Vincenzo to be like "what Hanseok did to you wasn't normal or even okay in the first place, and you'll never get any of that horrible treatment from anyone again." (Vincenzo will make sure of that).

And Hanseo's just. speechless.

He can't figure out what to say or do so he's just there, starting to tear up like "hyung..."

Because this is when Hanseo realises that for the first time in his life, he's truly, truly safe now.

Because now he has a home, and he didn't just mean the island they lived on, but Vincenzo himself. Vincenzo was home to him, and he was more of a home to him than any fancy villa Hanseo had had before could've ever been.

Yeah, he'll be okay now.

After all, no matter what happens, he has his home to go back to.