Google wants to rediscover the web of yesteryear. The search giant has made adjustments to try to bury “poor quality” sites that rely very aggressively on SEO… and AI.
Accused for many weeks of bringing up poor search results, Google has finally decided to take the bull by the horns. In a blog post dated March 5, 2024, the company announced that it wanted to optimize its search results so that you see “more useful information, and fewer results that seem designed for search engines.»
Google’s stated desire is to “provide the most relevant information”, and to reduce the number of sites “poor quality and not very original» in its search results. The company is also seeking to strengthen its fight against spam and “its new practices» which spoils web browsing.
An (ambivalent) crusade against AI
If the word is never explicitly mentioned, this new crusade by Google is indeed targeting sites completely doped with artificial intelligence which produce content en masse with seductive titles and irrelevant content. “Today, methods of creating content at scale are more sophisticated, and it is not always clear whether content was created automatically or not.“, explains Google, taking as an example “sites that claim to provide answers to popular questions, but do not provide useful content“.
If you have browsed the web a little in recent months, you have surely noticed the proliferation of this type of sites created using ChatGPT and which produce hundreds of contents per day, to surf the trends of the moment without ever bring added value. These sites “created for search engines, not humans» are now in the sights of Google… which nevertheless participated in their birth and their growth.
A few days ago, accusations were made against the company which allegedly paid press outlets to publish AI-generated content and Google’s policy regarding AI-generated content is to highlight “thethe quality of the content, rather than the way the content is produced“. The company’s attitude towards AI is therefore ambivalent to say the least, not completely condemning the use of automated content creation methods while trying to filter out the most obvious abuses. A balancing act that the company has clearly not yet managed to carry out.
Source : Google
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