The “content pruning” is being done for SEO purposes.
Dark Arc
link
fedilink
English
121Y

That’s really disappointing honestly, I “grew up” reading CNET; I don’t read it much anymore, but the articles they’re deleting are likely the ones that initially got me up to speed with technology.

jordyjor
link
fedilink
17
edit-2
1Y

I’ve been trying out Kagi lately, a paid search engine. Not sure whether I’ll stick with it or not. I do like it though. I’ve been so tired of pages of pages of ads and nothing else in Google. I’ve had this inexplicable feeling for years that there’s gotta be more internet out there than the ad-ridden SEO hellscape Google shovels on you.

@rglullis@communick.news
creator
link
fedilink
English
51Y

So far I am happy with Brave Search, but I completely agree with the sentiment. I think that any ad-based business stops worrying about end-users once they reach a certain size and they only way to avoid this is by ensuring that customers can vote with their wallet.

jordyjor
link
fedilink
21Y

I’ll have to give Brave a look, thanks for the recommendation. And agreed. In general, I’ve been making more of a concerted effort lately to get away from things that are supported via ads. Either making use of open source software when convenient, or moving to paid services. I just hate that insidious feeling of constantly being advertised to.

@rglullis@communick.news
creator
link
fedilink
English
21Y

Brave gets a lot of hate because of its ties to crypto, their recent moves really do not help much, but overall I am a fan. The browser feels designed to be a true user-agent, all of the crypto-related features are opt-in and it’s the only system where the user gets a share of the advertising revenue.

It seems that a lot of content creators (especially the popular ones) feel like that Brave is hijacking “their” ad dollars, but honestly to me it seems that their model is right: the ad dollars don’t get to the creators directly, they go to users and the users can choose which creators they value most. This to me seems more fair and also gives people the power again to “vote with their wallet”.

In my ideal world, people would use be using Brave, collecting $5-$10 worth of tokens every month and redistributing them to creators they like. This is what I’ve been doing since 2019 at least. If the majority of Brave’s millions of active users did the same, the internet would be a lot saner and less algorithm-driven than it is today.

I’ve been using kagi and am loving it so far. My only problem is that it’s forcing me to recognize how often I use search. I’m already almost at my 1000 searches and I still have 15 days left 😭

Storksforlegs
link
fedilink
English
22
edit-2
1Y

The new Google Search results:

“Here’s some ads and some AI generated crap. Take it or leave it. P.S. you smell.”

@floofloof@lemmy.ca
link
fedilink
English
461Y

Red Ventures, a private equity-backed marketing firm that owns CNET

Ah, there’s yer problem.

AutoTL;DR
bot account
link
fedilink
English
151Y

🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

Click here to see the summary

In the memo, CNET says that so-called content pruning “sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results.” Stories slated to be “deprecated” are archived using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and authors are alerted at least 10 days in advance, according to the memo.

These metrics include page views, backlink profiles and the amount of time that has passed since the last update,” the memo reads.

A comparison between Wayback Machine archives from 2021 and CNET’s own on-site article counter shows that hundreds — and in some cases, thousands — of stories have disappeared from each year stretching back to the mid-1990s.

Red Ventures, a private equity-backed marketing firm that owns CNET, didn’t immediately respond to questions about the exact number of stories that have been removed.

Red Ventures has applied a ruthless SEO strategy to its slate of outlets, which also includes The Points Guy, Healthline, and Bankrate.

In the wake of that revelation and resulting errors on AI-generated stories, Red Ventures temporarily paused the content and overhauled its AI policy.

Meanwhile google isn’t even worth using anymore…

Scrubbles
link
fedilink
English
911Y

SEO is ruining the internet. Give me results for a search, let me choose the sort order optionally. Bring back Boolean operators, or at least make AND and OR work again.

@bpalmerau@aussie.zone
link
fedilink
English
221Y

Ah, the corporate enshittification of search.

Google: “No”

nick
link
fedilink
211Y

I feel like shitty sites getting too good at SEO has largely made google useless. That’s why you had to append “Reddit” to get any useful info that wasn’t from some SEO scamsite.

spoiler

asdfasdfsadfasfasdf

Tinister
link
fedilink
61Y

I’d settle with making “verbatim” search the default without having to switch to it every time.

Scrubbles
link
fedilink
English
61Y

I’m sick of searching for three specific nouns and getting results back that only has maybe one of them

Create a post

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

  • 1 user online
  • 144 users / day
  • 275 users / week
  • 709 users / month
  • 2.87K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.09K Posts
  • 64.9K Comments
  • Modlog