Agree googles machinations have not helped, but disagree with your 90/10 split.
The entire effort of SEO is to either to follow Google's official guidelines, or reverse-engineer how things work to exploit their algorithms. Those whole point of SEO is to score higher on ranking algorithms.
Which is why they typically make things worse for the end user.
Agree it's a coupled problem wrt ranking algorithm. SEO messes with the algorithms, algorithms change to account for it, lather rinse repeat.
More recently though, google make presentation changes not as simple as ranking, which made things worse. Which I think is what GP was referring to.
Sure, interns or outsourced content was there, but those are still humans, spending human-time creating that crap.
Any limiter on the volume of this crap is now gone.
AI writing has no idea what is real or fake and doesn't care.
But the issue is about the volume of misleading information that can be generated now.
Anything legit will be much more difficult to find now, because of the increased (increasing?) volume.
Good insight about Apps.
If sewage gets into the water supply no one is safe. You don’t get to feel better for having a spigot away from the source.
Now powered by AI.
Search results on both Bing and DDG have been rendered functionally useless for a year or so now. Almost every page is an SEO-oriented blob of questionable content hosted on faceless websites that exist solely for ads and affiliate links, whether it's AI-generated or underpaid-third-world-worker-generated.
I feel the same way.
I'm sure some corners of the internet have incrementally more spam, but things like SEO spam word mixers and blog spam have been around for a decade. ChatGPT didn't appreciably change that for me.
I have, however, been accused of being ChatGPT on Reddit when I took the time to wrong out long comments on subjects I was familiar with. The more unpopular my comment, the more likely someone is to accuse me of being ChatGPT. Ironically, writing thoughtful posts with good structure triggers some people to think content is ChatGPT.
After the interview I rewrote the code, and sent an email with it and a well written apology.
The company thought the email and the code was chatgpt! I am still not sure how I feel about that.
Although what am I saying, my current employer keeps pushing us to use AI tooling in our workflows, so I wonder how many employers will really care by then.
I personally don't like using AI - I feel like it takes the fun out of work, and I have ethical issues with it. But I have many co-workers who do not feel this way.
I completely agree!
One wonders: How good could the next generation of AIs after LLMs become at curating the web?
What if every poster was automatically evaluated by AIs on 1, 2, and 5 year time horizons for predictive capability, bias, and factual accuracy?
I hope making software, apps, coding and designing is still a viable path to take when everyone has been captured into apps owned by the richest people on earth and no one will go to the open marketplace / "internet" anymore.
Will smaller scale tech entrepreneurship die?
People aren't really using the web much now anyway. They're living in apps. I don't see people surfing webpages on their phone unless they're "googling" a question, and even then they aren't usually going more than 1 level deep before returning to their app experience. The web has been crap for a very long time, and it has become worse, but soon it's not going to matter anymore.
You, the reader, were the frog slowly boiling, except now the heat has been turned way up and you are now aware of your situation.
If there is to be a "web" going forward, I hope it not only moves to a new anonymized layer, but requires frequent exchange of currency to make generating lots of low quality material less viable. If 90% of the public doesn't want to pay, then they are at liberty to keep eating slop.
EDIT: People seem to be misunderstanding me by thinking I am not considering the change in volume of spam. I invoked the boiling frog analogy specifically to make the point that the volume has significantly increased.