alt Hacker News> I'm confused about how or why this is a new policy.
My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT.
> The real problem is the financial incentives that make this kind of spamming profitable in the first place.
Yeah, but the financial incentives exist on both ends. There's a gross symbiotic relationship between Google and SEO spammers, because Google also owns the ad network the spammers put on their page. If Google puts ad-laden SEO blogspam as the top result and a user clicks it, the user sees a bunch of ads from Google. Everyone wins: Google, the SEO spammers, and advertisers. Well, everyone except the user, but who cares about them?
My guess/hope is that ChatGPT has made someone who actually cares about the quality of search results actually step in and say things have gone too far.
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> My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT.
ChatGPT doesn't even fulfill the same function, to say nothing about the poor reliability inherent to the way it works. In no sense is it a real competitor to Google.
Because ChatGPT is dependent on good search when it searches the web? Or because it completes with Google when it provides a good answer without searching? Or what do you mean specifically?
> Google wins
Define "wins". From what happening right now, it seems that google may lose much more than it earned by aligning with seo spammers
Maybe they need to start locking employee stock options for 100 years to prevent them optimizing short-term gains?
> My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT.
My guess is it's because a bunch of articles about it have been posted to hn recently.
> My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT.
Bingo. I always chuckle when people here say Google has lost it, and become incompetent. Well, they all make the mistake of assuming that they’re trying but failing, rather than that it’s deliberate simply due to boring economics.
Now look at how quickly decades-long problems, so big they have an entire cottage industry built around it, suddenly be cleaned up. Incompetence? Nah.
Of course, this does nothing to convince regulators and not even average HN user that innovation is harmed by these dominant players. Someone’s gotta think of the poor mega-corps.
You're totally right about that symbiotic relationship. We were aware of that risk in the early days when AdSense launched, we saw some very innovative and gross exploitation and created some policies to rein it in. But ultimately if Google makes a buck coming and going, they will do that.
Wasn't there a big story last year in the wake of the DOJ antitrust investigation about Google manipulating search quality to boost ad revenue? I can't put my hands on a reference now, in part because Google is so bad at search these days I can't find anything more than a few months old.