When search engine optimization becomes a target, content suffers. If Google changed their algorithm to only rank websites with high quality content instead of keyword-stuffed content, we’d see a great improvement in the quality of the internet.
The real kicker is how you even decide what quality is. A one line script that updates a driver may be a solution to your issue. A four page walkthrough that rambles and gets you to your answer but only after an hour is still a solution, but is it better quality? The issue is that you can’t quantify quality. Even if you managed to for something like programming, you couldn’t apply that same logic to horticulture. The issue is that quality isn’t something you can stick in an algorithm.
Right, quality is not something that is easy to figure out algorithmically. But adding arbitrary rules like “content length” or “time on page” directly ruins quality by incentivizing content manipulation.
Search engines were returning shit more and more, before LLMs even existed.
So they were enshittifying search engines in advance, so what? AI wasn’t born yesterday.
When search engine optimization becomes a target, content suffers. If Google changed their algorithm to only rank websites with high quality content instead of keyword-stuffed content, we’d see a great improvement in the quality of the internet.
The real kicker is how you even decide what quality is. A one line script that updates a driver may be a solution to your issue. A four page walkthrough that rambles and gets you to your answer but only after an hour is still a solution, but is it better quality? The issue is that you can’t quantify quality. Even if you managed to for something like programming, you couldn’t apply that same logic to horticulture. The issue is that quality isn’t something you can stick in an algorithm.
Right, quality is not something that is easy to figure out algorithmically. But adding arbitrary rules like “content length” or “time on page” directly ruins quality by incentivizing content manipulation.
Then someone targets them for pushing their biases because they are deciding quality.