The deterioration of Google
This post announcing the closure of Giant Freakin Robot set me on a bit of a journey into the state of Google.
“The End Of Independent Publishing And Giant Freakin Robot”
GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT isn’t the first site to shut down. Hundreds of independent publishers have shuttered in the last two years, and thousands more are on the way. I’m in communication with dozens of other independents focused on different topics. None of them are doing well. They all expect to be out of business soon.
I went to Google directly, on their behalf, and told them about the problem. The message I walked away with, was that they do not care. Our industry is done.
What I discovered was that web media companies can’t count on any of the traffic coming from Google or Facebook any more. Very few, even one that are frugally run, are capable of surviving on the traffic that remains.
The problem doesn’t seem limited to a few sites. What seems to have happened is that Google tried to “fix” their search engine results by using machine learning to rank sites.
From What we can learn from the Google creators summit for HCU impacted sites:
We know that the helpful content system was a machine learning (AI) system. Machine learning systems are trained by seeing good examples and bad examples. They then work to figure out the characteristics they can consider and how much weight to give them so as to predict whether an unseen example is a good one or a bad one.
But this does not seem to be working properly. Anybody who has used Google for search over the past year knows that it lets a lot of LLM-generated spam through and blogs and small sites have basically disappeared from most results. Those sites have effectively been delisted by the machine learning model and nobody seems to know exactly why.
Some have been hit hard. From “I Drank the Kool-Aid at the 2024 Google Web Creator Summit”:
I’m 44 years old, luckily I don’t have a mortgage, I barely getting by, I’m eating at the food bank now, I had grossed $250,000 last year and I just don’t know where to go from here my traffic is down 97%
Even if your first reaction might be “good riddance” these are all people whose work Google wants to see in the search engine results. That’s why they were invited to the summit.
An exchange on Twitter, which I usually avoid but is where this crowd seems to still be congregating, describing a scene from the summit captured the situation perfectly:
Lily Ray: I’m still stuck on “your content wasn’t the issue.” What?
Morgan: So, so many times they said this. Literally Danny hand picked us because we all create helpful and satisfying content. They just cannot get the algorithm to understand that. They are actively doing query debugging based on examples sent by our group.
Morgan: Literally Danny said he sat with an engineer team with examples of people in the room and said why aren’t they showing up and they did their “debugging process” and couldn’t figure it out.
Morgan: the robots are winning.
The “algorithm” seems to have become a black box even Google engineers can’t figure out
The fact that over a year ago ML experts at Google (El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi at least, if I recall correctly) who have since left warned that LLMs should be avoided because they made products chaotic and hard to control seems relevant.
As is the fact that around the same time others also warned that one common consequence of mass layoffs is they tend to turn internal systems into black boxes because everybody with a deep understanding of them has left.
But, fundamentally, what lets this deterioration continue is that it does not affect business outcomes at Google in any way. They are a monopoly and monopolies are extremely effective at capturing whatever value happens in their vicinity, even if the utility of their products declines.
And, given the political situation in the US, the tech industry monopolies and oligopolies are only going to be strengthened and the actual productivity, performance, and effectiveness of their products will be less and less important to them.
Because they know that most of us will not have any real alternative.