New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search
Finally some recognition that search is, in fact, getting shittier. For years, people have been writing about how Google seems to be little more than a product-surfacing engine, and while, hey, everyone needs to buy stuff sometimes, there have been bizarre SEO tactics used in the last couple of years - for example, using a well-known/noted site to create all sorts of bogus pages full of ads and affiliate links, or generally destroy its reputation by pumping it full of AI-generated bullshit - that Google says they're going to clamp down on.
People are on notice, Google writes: the changes take place in a couple of months. But while that's the reasonable, good-corporate-citizen thing to do, I would've been much happier had Google gone full scorched earth, and immediately downranked (or outright denylisted) offending sites. Not fair? Fuck you. Imagine if all these sites were immediately removed from Google's indices, allowed back in, say, a year. Imagine how great that would be. The web is now full of awful, low quality content, and with generative AI taking off in the last year or two, it's getting worse very, very quickly. To be blunt: if you're going to fuck around to try to make a few quick bucks, you're taking part in poisoning the commons. I have no sympathy for your financial tricks. You have no place in a healthy net.
Google is not ‘just’ a platform. It frames, shapes and distorts how we see the world
Much has been written about how, for most of us, Google fundamentally shapes how we spend our time online. Arguably, that's less true now than it was ten or twenty years ago - I think a lot of people see their starting point as an unlocked phone, rather than a web browser. Long term, I'm not sure that's healthy, and despite what Google's done to search since its inception, I'm still at least a little bit hopeful in the web as a medium. Certainly less so than when I was younger. But the fundamental difference is that capital hadn't got its shit together in 1998. Or, at least, online was seen as the domain of nerds. Who wants to advertise to them?
I'll be clear: I welcome Google's changes, because if done right, they really could improve how we see things online. At the very least, aggressively punishing sites for filling their domains with sludge could make things better for people who are actually making pages for others, rather than Google's crawlers and indexers. This is what Google claims is their guiding principal, but it's soft to the point of being meaningless. Because fundamentally, most of the garbage was about signalling to Google that the site should be placed near the top of the results, and it was never meant for people, and despite their so-called guiding principal, all that trash got sites upranked anyway.
It was trickery. It was deceit. And it's been making it harder to use the web, worse, been making us actively dislike it. Now _that's_ insidious. _Remember when the web was fun?_ Nostalgia's great. But a sense that a great creation is no longer useful is really dangerous, because for all its issues, the web is still, by and large, a medium for billions of people worldwide.
A few weeks ago I read Mark Fisher's "Ghosts of My Life", based on some stuff I'd been reading online about hauntology. Hauntology - the idea that our culture is haunted by lost or unrealized futures - is the sort of philosophy that seems to fit neatly with a lot of what I've been feeling since my late 20s. A sense that this ain't it. One of my friends told me once, candidly: I love my husband, our pets, and our life together, but everything else feels kind of empty, and if I knew this was all there was when I was 17, I probably wouldn't have tried so hard to stay alive, to get better.
"Ghosts" wasn't my favourite book. Despite the many strong reviews, I felt like like it occupied a strange space, hovering between a popular non-fiction book, and a series of sociology papers. I'm sure a lot of this can be traced back to the fact that a lot of the essays were originally written by Fisher for his k-punk blog in the 00s. It has that 00s blog kind of feel. But I couldn't sink my teeth into it. The genuinely interesting ideas kept getting related to experimental cinema, the 90s British electronic music scene, and a handful of favourite writers.
That's all right. Not everything is for me. But I'm happy to take another hack at his work. I've ordered "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?", which explores the current sense that capitalism is the only viable political system, despite thousands of years of (admittedly deadly) counter-examples.
I'm reminded of the famous Ursula K. Le Guin quote, which talks about how change always starts somewhere (and maybe implicitly, by the small art and actions of the individual):
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
To see just how deep we are in this abyss, do a search for Charles Le Guin, Ursula's husband. One of the top results says,
Le Guin is Professor Emeritus of History at Portland State University, where he taught for over thirty-five years. Send simple, comforting meals with Home Chef.
Home Chef? What the hell? Turns out the "obituary" is hosted on a site called "Trucknet Enterprises". Yeah. Stuffing unrelated content after obituaries. That's where we are right now. Online is going great.
What does the future look like? I'm not sure. But I want to get back to a point where the future is a genuinely exciting thing, rather than full of exquisite new ways to shackle the populace and keep them docile. This needs to start with action, and because I'm soft, squishy, and extremely non-violent, my action will need to take the form of willful counter-creation: writings hidden in Geminispace, websites that sell nothing, words and code that don't aspire to change the world in any kind of grand way. Just, make things and give them away. There are people I knew growing up who are full of fire, who teach, organize lecture series, make anti-capitalist podcasts. And that's great. But I'm less sure of myself. I don't like centering my physical self on camera, putting my disembodied voice out there on a podcast. And I certainly don't see the outcome of my life as the devotion to direct action. Instead, I see it closer to this: you don't have to say yes; you can say no; and you can make a life for yourself outside of the twin pillars of passivity and consumption. Create things not for sale. Be good to people. And you know, those are pretty powerful ideas. I feel like that's an excellent kind of life.