THIS IS MY OPINION, NOT HARD FACT, EXCEPT FOR THE FIRST-HAND OBSERVATIONS: For those who are interested in internet search results, the recent change to Google's algorithm has been shocking. Sometimes Google only lists 2 pages of search results whereas in the recent past it was dozens of perhaps hundreds. Now 30 websites or even 24 are listed. Sometimes less. And most of them are irrelevant to the search query!!
Reddit is the top-ranked site for Google. Reddit is a forum. A huge site on all manner topics and discussions but often the discussions are frivolous and silly. Just a list of wisecracks and often not very informative. A platform for budding comics.
Featuring Reddit.com as the font of all wisdom is going to certainly lead to irrelevant search results. But it isn't just Reddit. Google now features website in search results which do not hit the search term on the head. They are at best obliquely relevant. Poor basically. Google knows this but it doing nothing about it an apparent act of self-harm.
Why is Google doing this? It looks like a massive backward step for Google.
For me it IS a massive backward step for Google which now incorporates AI into its search engine. To me it looks like a failure as AI is not adding to the quality of Google's search engine but detracting from it.
CAVEAT: If you are testing Google search its results vary massively between being logged on and logged off and if you have set for personal search. When I am logged off from Google and personal search if off, the search results are better. This may be a bigger factor than I had realised.
I have been trying to figure out what is going on as these changes have buried or effectively destroyed hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of smaller websites as they are no longer listed at all by Google. They've become invisible. As Google dominates internet search at around 85% of searches, if a site is effectively delisted by Google is is consigned to a black hole of everlasting oblivion.
Working on these websites become almost pointless as so few people visit them. Some hits are possible by promoting your site on social media but it is a poor substitute to being ranked on page one of a Google search.
The reason for these apparently destructive and backward changes is mostly to do with AI which is so much more efficient at web search.
Ask AI - such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini - for details about a topic that you are researching and it will do the work that you would have done in one hour, in 30 seconds. And write it up for you; nicely packaged often in bullet lists unless you instruct it otherwise.
Game over for search engines and listed websites.
People these days are asking AI for answers and details and even for full articles which they copy and past. Or they ask AI to create an image or a full video. These products are proving very popular on social media.
At lot of the internet content (information articles) are now written by AI. There are big dangers as AI becomes incestuous, feeding on its own information which was stolen from millions of websites. The quality takes a nose dive.
But the guys who run Google realised that Google search has almost become redundant. These days you hardly need Google search as you can get all the info you need from ChatGPT or other AI bots.
And as almost no one goes beyond page one of Google search results why list more than 3 pages? The Google guys and ladies realised this and that's why Google search has changed dramatically. The effective internet has SHRUNK bigtime.
The victims are website owners who've seen visitors drop by up to 90%. This means a loss of Google Adsense revenue which in turn means less commission for Google.
Google features Reddit.com as it is a forum and you can't replicate the form format in an AI bot's response. It relies on real people.
Personally I feel despondent about all these negative changes as I see them. My sites are almost dead. What I am doing here is a waste of time but I am bored so it occupies me!
I feel that the current journey of dramatic change of internet search is going to end badly. And I feel that more websites other than mumsnet.com should sue the AI bot owners for compensation as they have scraped the internet like a trawler scraping the bottom of the ocean for fish. Billions of dollars of it.
Website owners need to get together in large numbers and protest. Revolt against the injustice of these arrogant and unfair actions by the masters of the internet.
Perhaps Google is also very concerned about being sued by the American authorities for being a monopoly. They want Google broken up. Perhaps Google is paving the way for that.
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