What is behind these eerie, uncanny valley search engine results?
June 18, 2023 8:52 AM
More and more, I'm finding bizarro search engine results that make me feel crazy. Recently, I was looking up whether it would be ok to eat ground beef that had gone a tiny bit brown on the outside. (I know it is, and knew that then, but I have OCD, so just play along.)
I found page after page of results for what to do if your beef goes brown on the inside and stays red on the outside - mostly those weird sites that write basically the same sentence in 40 different ways under multiple headers like a schoolkid trying desperately to pad out an essay. I found not one result for beef going brown on the outside but staying red on the inside - you know, the way it actually happens in real life. I ended up making meatballs with it while feeling completely insane.
Another common thing is trying to look up a phrase like "simple shortbread recipes" and only finding results without the word "simple", no matter how hard I try to shoehorn it in. What is happening?
I found page after page of results for what to do if your beef goes brown on the inside and stays red on the outside - mostly those weird sites that write basically the same sentence in 40 different ways under multiple headers like a schoolkid trying desperately to pad out an essay. I found not one result for beef going brown on the outside but staying red on the inside - you know, the way it actually happens in real life. I ended up making meatballs with it while feeling completely insane.
Another common thing is trying to look up a phrase like "simple shortbread recipes" and only finding results without the word "simple", no matter how hard I try to shoehorn it in. What is happening?
This issue is completely separate from what people now insist is called “AI”.
A few years ago Google decided to weigh content “length” extremely high in their search ranking algorithm. So high, that the “quality” of the content basically doesn’t matter.
If your page has a literal perfect answer for a query that’s only a paragraph in length, it won’t get anywhere near the top results and no one will ever see it.
However, if that answer is diluted into 12 paragraphs of borderline gibberish, perhaps it will rank well.
The easiest way to see this in action is by searching for answers for NYTimes crossword puzzles. Hundreds if not thousands of words are used to convey useful information that is literally a sentence in length.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 9:22 AM on June 18, 2023
A few years ago Google decided to weigh content “length” extremely high in their search ranking algorithm. So high, that the “quality” of the content basically doesn’t matter.
If your page has a literal perfect answer for a query that’s only a paragraph in length, it won’t get anywhere near the top results and no one will ever see it.
However, if that answer is diluted into 12 paragraphs of borderline gibberish, perhaps it will rank well.
The easiest way to see this in action is by searching for answers for NYTimes crossword puzzles. Hundreds if not thousands of words are used to convey useful information that is literally a sentence in length.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 9:22 AM on June 18, 2023
I apparently wrote the same answer to shadygrove’s question.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 9:25 AM on June 18, 2023
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 9:25 AM on June 18, 2023
Are these all cooking-related? Because the cooking internet is fucking awful. Basically, the people who run these sites understand that a whole lot of people, many of whom aren’t particularly savvy, search for recipes or other food-related stuff, and so if they can game the search algorithm, they’ll be able to charge top dollar for the dozens of ads they have on the page. Because, if you’ve ever clicked through to one of these, you’ll know that they exist as ad-delivery vehicles, not as actual content.
I get the sense that search results about celebrities are similarly useless, although I don’t search for celebrities anywhere near as much as I search about food.
I’ve essentially adopted a Web 1.0 solution, which is to only click through to sites I recognize. If I have a good question, I’ll look at Serious Eats or Bon Appetit first, and only go to Google if I can’t find something there. And if I do google, I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting content-farm ad sites. Sites made by real people tend to have quirky domain names like Joe’s Virginia Kitchen or Meals by Mandy, as opposed to groundbeeffoodsafetyfacts.com. Say what you will about food blogger house style, but it makes it easy to spot one. And likewise, if you click through and the first sentence isn’t about how Grandma first started eating ground beef while Grandpa was stationed in Belgium during WWII, click the back button. Any sort of Wikipedia-style list of facts is a red flag: “2.6 million people eat ground beef every day”.
Don’t ever use the word “simple” in a recipe search. For one thing, legit food bloggers don’t like to think of their recipes as simplistic, and on the occasions when they do, their concept of simple is different from yours. Search for “six ingredient” or “45 minute” or “no bake” instead.
For things like food safety questions where the answer isn’t immediately obvious just from looking at the search results page, just post a question here or on Reddit or Twitter. It won’t take much more time and the quality of answers will be superior.
I would imagine other topics are similar and it’s just a question of learning the tricks.
posted by kevinbelt at 9:31 AM on June 18, 2023
I get the sense that search results about celebrities are similarly useless, although I don’t search for celebrities anywhere near as much as I search about food.
I’ve essentially adopted a Web 1.0 solution, which is to only click through to sites I recognize. If I have a good question, I’ll look at Serious Eats or Bon Appetit first, and only go to Google if I can’t find something there. And if I do google, I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting content-farm ad sites. Sites made by real people tend to have quirky domain names like Joe’s Virginia Kitchen or Meals by Mandy, as opposed to groundbeeffoodsafetyfacts.com. Say what you will about food blogger house style, but it makes it easy to spot one. And likewise, if you click through and the first sentence isn’t about how Grandma first started eating ground beef while Grandpa was stationed in Belgium during WWII, click the back button. Any sort of Wikipedia-style list of facts is a red flag: “2.6 million people eat ground beef every day”.
Don’t ever use the word “simple” in a recipe search. For one thing, legit food bloggers don’t like to think of their recipes as simplistic, and on the occasions when they do, their concept of simple is different from yours. Search for “six ingredient” or “45 minute” or “no bake” instead.
For things like food safety questions where the answer isn’t immediately obvious just from looking at the search results page, just post a question here or on Reddit or Twitter. It won’t take much more time and the quality of answers will be superior.
I would imagine other topics are similar and it’s just a question of learning the tricks.
posted by kevinbelt at 9:31 AM on June 18, 2023
For Google, if you absolutely insist on having a word in the results, double quote it. Google in particular is very good about playing dumb on the full list of search terms.
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 9:46 AM on June 18, 2023
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 9:46 AM on June 18, 2023
Part of it is grifters using AI to generate SEO content and drive clicks to their sites
I mean...this has been going on a long time, long before the AI/LLM floodgates opened. For a while people would copy/paste Wikipedia articles to create ad driven spam sites, and when Google (et al) caught on to that, there were content mills like TextBroker where someone could very cheaply commission a ton of wordy, low-quality (but theoretically unique and human-written) articles from freelance writers to pad out an SEO driven website.
posted by Pryde at 12:04 PM on June 18, 2023
I mean...this has been going on a long time, long before the AI/LLM floodgates opened. For a while people would copy/paste Wikipedia articles to create ad driven spam sites, and when Google (et al) caught on to that, there were content mills like TextBroker where someone could very cheaply commission a ton of wordy, low-quality (but theoretically unique and human-written) articles from freelance writers to pad out an SEO driven website.
posted by Pryde at 12:04 PM on June 18, 2023
As a complement to kevinbelt's excellent answer (" For things like food safety questions where the answer isn’t immediately obvious just from looking at the search results page, just post a question here or on Reddit or Twitter. It won’t take much more time and the quality of answers will be superior. "), I also use .gov or .edu limits on any search that might have a useful government-provided answer:
"ground beef" "brown" "outside" site:gov
"ground beef" "brown" "outside" site:edu
posted by kristi at 7:29 PM on June 19, 2023
"ground beef" "brown" "outside" site:gov
"ground beef" "brown" "outside" site:edu
posted by kristi at 7:29 PM on June 19, 2023
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posted by shadygrove at 9:07 AM on June 18, 2023