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 a

The deterioration of Google

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2024-11-07 10:30:03

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.

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.