• ssj2marx@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    AI, ads, and useless google add-ons can all literally be switched off - that’s basically the value add of any given Google alternative. What’s harder to beat is SEO.

    I think the only way to beat SEO is with a dedicated “anti-SEO team” that manually flags shitty/generated websites to be downranked. It would take a lot of labor and it would be impossible to do in a purely neutral way, but something human-run would be preferable to any automated system which everyone would quickly figure out how to “game”. A vote system to get mass reports on good/bad results might help but you would still need the upper tier of people making sure that brigades and bots aren’t constantly fucking things up.

    • blindsight@beehaw.org
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      5 months ago

      idk. Google used to automatically highlight pages that you landed on then stopped your search, which indicates you got a good result. They basically scrapped that, though, since their advertising arm wanted people to spend more time searching, running more queries, to get more ad impressions. Google literally sabotaged their own search algorithm to increase “engagement”.

    • tehmics@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      It’s not scalable. Sure you could have humans comb through the most common 1000 or so results, but there’s got to be billions of unique searches every day

      • ssj2marx@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        Yeah but downranking one AI-generated page downranks it from all search results, and you could come up with rules like downranking specific service providers or companies that are repeat offenders. I don’t think it would be easy but I think it’s the only way to get something better than what we have with techniques that currently exist.

        • tehmics@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          The amount of man hours this would require would bankrupt even Google. You’d be better off building a new index of whitelisted sites