TITLE: You’re Not Imagining It, Google Search Is Becoming Unusable
https://www.themarysue.com/google-search-is-busted/
EXCERPT: According to a recent German study, “Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines,” there is “an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity,” with practically every search engine online falling “victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns.”
In other words, content is getting worse on Google as spammy content marketing approaches populate Google searches. Increasingly, “the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms” has grown vague and blurry. This will become far more problematic as AI increasingly dominates the internet, the study predicted.
“Many searches have been taken over by low quality, trashy SEO content,” 404 Media reported on the study, “and lots of it seems potentially AI assisted or AI-generated.”
This study took a particular focus on SEO-oriented spam content for product reviews on search engine results pages (SERPs) for commercial search engines like Google. 7,392 product review queries were studied, and the report found that “the majority of high-ranking product reviews in [SERPs] use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam.”
This study took a particular focus on SEO-oriented spam content for product reviews on search engine results pages (SERPs) for commercial search engines like Google. 7,392 product review queries were studied, and the report found that “the majority of high-ranking product reviews in [SERPs] use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam.”
In other words, awful content is constantly being pushed in Google’s direction, and there’s a high likelihood that you, the user, are going to run into this garbage at one point or another during a Google search. Even though Google is trying its best to clean up Google Search, the company can’t fight an army of ne’er-do-wells spamming their way to the top.
Given the study acknowledged a sizable amount of social media complaints that “search engines are becoming less and less capable of finding genuine and useful content” for various search queries, there’s more room to study whether Google Search can effectively serve users content om, say, emergency first aid or reproductive rights. Still, this report suggests Google Search is dying to a thousand paper cuts inflicted by random people, companies, and bots who sit in front of their screens all day, spamming the internet.
TITLE: Each Facebook User is Monitored by Thousands of Companies
https://themarkup.org/privacy/2024/01/17/each-facebook-user-is-monitored-by-thousands-of-companies-study-indicates
EXCERPTS: The data examined by Consumer Reports in this study comes from two types of collection: events and custom audiences. Both categories include information about what people do outside of Meta’s platforms.
Custom audiences allow advertisers to upload customer lists to Meta, often including identifiers like email addresses and mobile advertising IDs. These customers, and so-called “lookalike audiences” made up of similar people, can then be targeted with ads on Meta’s platforms.
The other category of data collection, “events,” describes interactions that the user had with a brand, which can occur outside of Meta’s apps and in the real world. Events can include visiting a page on a company’s website, leveling up in a game, visiting a physical store, or purchasing a product. These signals originate from Meta software code included in many mobile apps, their tracking pixel, which is included on many websites, and from server-to-server tracking, where a company’s server passes data to a Meta server.
The Markup has written extensively about the Meta Pixel and how it has been used to surveil people as they dial suicide hotlines, buy their groceries, take the SATs, file their taxes, and book appointments with their doctors. Website owners can configure the pixel to track user website interactions such as searches or filling out a form, sending each action to Meta, even if the user doesn’t have an account on Facebook.
“This type of tracking which occurs entirely outside of the user’s view is just so far outside of what people expect when they use the internet,” Caitriona Fitzgerald, Deputy Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told The Markup in an interview. Fitzgerald said that while users are likely aware that Meta knows what they are doing while they are on Facebook and Instagram, “they don’t expect Meta to know what stores they walk into or what news articles they’re reading or every site they visit online.”
TITLE: The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/16/the-tyranny-of-the-algorithm-why-every-coffee-shop-looks-the-same
EXCERPT: I grew up with the idea that the world was flat. In the early 00s, in the US, there was a growing mainstream awareness of globalisation, the notion that the world was more interconnected and therefore felt smaller than ever before. The major culprit for this idea’s popularity was the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and his 2005 book The World Is Flat. His argument felt like common sense: flatness meant that people, goods, and ideas flowed across physical space faster and more easily than ever. It was a turbulent moment in history, but even 9/11, and the wars that followed, drove home a certain visceral lesson that the US wasn’t so distant or separate from the rest of the planet. The world is flat was an ambivalent idea: you can consume plentiful products manufactured in China, but what happens in China might also affect you personally.
Friedman wrote about various “flatteners”, forces that were knitting the planet closer together, particularly digital technology. Just as highways interconnected the US, the fibre networks of the internet created “a more seamless global commercial network”, Friedman wrote, and “helped to break down global regionalism”. Not only were industries and economies being flattened in the new globalised order, but culture was trending that way as well. The nascent internet exerted a pressure to share, and it connected individuals on a microscopic level in the same way that countries and corporations were being connected. Social networks only came to the fore in the years after Friedman’s book, but they accelerated these trends. YouTube, founded in 2005, allowed anyone with a powerful enough internet connection to upload and share video clips. Instagram followed in 2010 and created a larger culture of sharing snapshots from newly mainstream iPhone cameras.
Globalisation has also led to a more mundane and pervasive flattening of individual experiences. In the US, I use the same devices, access many of the same social networks, and connect to the same streaming services as an internet user in India, Brazil or South Africa. Friedman’s prediction of increased international competition has resulted in only a few overall winners, which profit hugely from their monopolisation of the internationalised digital space.
For more than a decade before The World Is Flat, cultural theorists such as the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells were already describing how globalisation breeds sameness and monotony, and charting the declining importance of physical geography. If geography was becoming less significant, then zones of transportation and movement mattered more. In 1992, the French philosopher Marc Augé wrote a book titled Non-Places, which studied the sensory experiences of highways, airports and hotels: zones that had become reliably similar the world over. They lent a distinct, paradoxical sense of comfort to the modern nomad, who belonged to the placeless zone. In non-places, “people are always, and never, at home”, Augé wrote. The book’s introduction narrates a French businessman driving to Charles de Gaulle airport, zipping through security, shopping in duty-free and then seamlessly boarding his plane.
The procession to the flight and then the numbing experience of flying itself involves a kind of stripping-away of the self and surroundings until everything becomes smooth and uniform. It’s a recognisable feeling – that slight separation from reality that happens when the plane takes off, or the clean burst of anonymity when opening the door of a hotel room for the first time. Augé describes “the passive joys of identity-loss”. Even the magazine the fictional businessman reads on the plane references “the homogenisation of needs and consumption patterns” in the “international business environment”.
“Globalisation takes place only in capital and data,” the literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has written. “Everything else is damage control.” We talk about politics, culture and travel becoming globalised, but on a more fundamental level, Spivak is correct that what really flows across the planet are various forms of money and information: investments, corporations, infrastructure, server farms and the combined data of all the digital platforms, sluicing invisibly like wind or ocean currents between nations. We users voluntarily pumped our own information through this system, turning ourselves into flowing commodities, too.
This homogenisation is not just a phenomenon of our own moment; it is a consequence of changes that happened long before algorithmic social media feeds, and is just as likely to intensify in the future. After all, each time a grand flattening is announced the world somehow finds a way to get even flatter.