Creative Commons/CC0/Pxhere
Anyone else do this? You’re searching for something online and you go to a page where there’s an introduction, then a ‘Contents’ box dividing up the answer into sections. You immediately leave that page because it’s likely to be “AI”-written or the answer you want is buried within, and it’s quicker to try something else.
If you post stuff like that, you’re not serving the humans. But you know that. You’ve read something on “SEO” and that’s told you that such a structure would please the machines so you would get hits. What you are doing is a disservice to human readers and making the web even more full of rubbish that we’ll find it so hard to wade through that the print encyclopædia and Encarta CD-ROM publishers will be salivating at the prospect of being back in business.
Who needs The Matrix’s war with the machines when there are humans all willing to serve them ahead of their own kind? Hook ’em up and turn ’em into Duracells first, they’ll offer no resistance.
We can indeed trace this back to Google and its decision to allow all and sundry to run advertising regardless of publication (or blog) quality. Prior to that, ad networks had standards. Even the voluntary ones like LinkExchange. If someone else didn’t like you, they wouldn’t host your ad.
A few of us had one solution but the reality is that search engines aren’t very good at filtering out junk—not even my favourites—and “AI” has supercharged the creation of junk.
I can’t even say that the old sites are better (a narrative that would suit me) because the dodgy parties have seized upon this and they’ve bought some old domains to push crypto and other nonsense.
If Mojeek, or someone else, carries out the earlier idea of a focused search that only goes through a human-curated directory (shame Curlie isn’t more updated, but it is the closest thing we have), then they may be on to a winner. It’ll take time to get Curlie updated, but there may be a lot of netizens willing to back this—people power!—and help revive the site. I’m sure there are other ideas floating around out there. Whatever they are, I hope they bring the humanity back.
You may also like
