[Plura-list] Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands
Cory Doctorow
doctorow at craphound.com
Fri May 3 05:31:44 EDT 2024
Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/
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I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel *The Bezzle*! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY and TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER. Next is Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour
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I'm coming to Tartu, Estonia!
May 8, 6PM: Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, "Overcoming the Enshittocene,"
University of Tartu Library (Struwe 1)
May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, "AI, copyright and creative workers’ labor rights"
Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building (Lossi 3, lobby)
May 10, 3PM: A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation
(University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037)
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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.
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🍥 Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands
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.
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🍥 Hey look at this
* Reject Definitions of Antisemitism that Encompass Protected Speech https://www.aclu.org/documents/reject-definitions-of-anti-semitism-that-encompass-protected-speech (h/t Naked Capitalism)
* Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/message-congress-curbing-monopolies (h/t Naked Capitalism)
* The Age of Cloud Capital https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-age-of-cloud-capital
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🍥 This day in history
#20yrsago Senator Franken? https://www.salon.com/1996/02/10/franken/
#20yrsago Musicians don’t understand copyright, but they don’t like the RIAA suing their fans https://web.archive.org/web/20040502072815/http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/pdfs/PIP_Musicians_Prelim_Findings.pdf
#15yrsago Warner Music to Warner Music: You are pirates! https://memex.craphound.com/2009/05/03/warner-music-to-warner-music-you-are-pirates/
#15yrsago Britain’s secret spy-on-every-call-and-email plan already well underway https://web.archive.org/web/20100106082536/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6211101.ece
#10yrsago The business/markets case for limits to copyright https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/r-street-paper-calls-for-shortened-copyright-terms-and-examination-of-international-treaties/
#5yrsago AOC endorses Elizabeth Warren’s Big Tech breakup plan https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/3/18528234/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-big-tech-break-up-plan-elizabeth-warren-endorsement
#5yrsago Strange codes from the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/04/27/rare-and-strange-icd-10-codes/
#5yrsago In 2008 “synthetic CDOs” destroyed the global economy, and now they’re back https://www.ft.com/content/9c33cea0-6ceb-11e9-80c7-60ee53e6681d
#5yrsago Fentanyl execs found guilty of racketeering, face 20 year prison sentences https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/02/health/insys-trial-verdict-bn/index.html
#5yrsago “Smart” doorlocks have policies that let landlords and third parties spy on you https://onezero.medium.com/americas-favorite-door-locking-app-has-a-data-privacy-problem-f19169a8ab2e
#5yrsago Chinese urbanization has left 25 million vacant homes in rural villages https://web.archive.org/web/20190502215749/https://www.sixthtone.com/ht_news/1003928/25-million-homes-vacant-in-rural-china-due-to-migrant-workforce
#1yrago The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have A Point https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/03/paranoid-style/#eat-bugs
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🍥 Upcoming appearances
* Wordfest (Calgary), May 3
https://wordfest.com/2024/event/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2/
* Massy Arts (Vancouver), May 4
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/solo-reading-cory-doctorow-the-bezzle-tickets-876989167207
* Tartu Prima Vista Literary Festival, May 5-11
https://tartu2024.ee/en/kirjandusfestival/
* Tim O’Reilly and Cory Doctorow on “Enshittification” and the Future of AI, May 14
https://www.oreilly.com/live-events/tim-oreilly-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification-and-the-future-of-ai/0642572001651/
* "Finding the Money" screening (LA), May 15
https://www.laemmle.com/film/finding-money?date=2024-05-15
* Media Ecology Association keynote, Jun 6-9 (Amherst, NY)
https://media-ecology.org/convention
* HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY)
https://www.hope.net/talks.html
* American Association of Law Libraries keynote, (Chicago), Jul 21
https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/
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🍥 Recent appearances
* Come sfuggire al “Merdocene” e costruire un Internet migliore (Torino Biennale Tecnologia)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5NC2EZCYBg
* Show Me The Money Club (The Rideshare Guy)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCETi3XqSds
* NUOVO BARETTO UTOPIA
https://videoteca.kenobit.it/w/azRmQBCenVwjSRz9WCp8JS
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🍥 Latest books
* The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
* "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
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🍥 Upcoming books
* Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025
* Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025
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🍥 Colophon
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025
* Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Latest podcast:
Precaratize Bosses https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/28/precaratize-bosses/
This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
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"*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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