Tag: Google

Google Search – Getting Lamer, Worse, Dumber, Shill…

In March, Gisele Navarro watched Google Search traffic to her Web site, HouseFresh, disappear. HouseFresh evaluates and reviews air purifiers. Her husband, Danny Ashton, launched the site in 2020, when the pandemic created a spike in demand for air purification, and at its peak the business had fifteen paid contributors. (Navarro and Ashton also work together at NeoMam, a content studio that Ashton founded.) Google traffic to HouseFresh had been slowly declining since last October, but the recent drop was far more dramatic—from around four thousand daily search referrals, or click-throughs from Google results, to around three hundred. The site makes money from affiliate fees, taking a small cut when a reader follows a link from HouseFresh to purchase an air purifier online; less traffic means less revenue, and the site can now only afford to pay one full-time employee. Navarro told me, “We are living our lives like Google is gone for us.”

The drop in traffic to HouseFresh has coincided with internal changes to Google’s search function. In late 2023, Google rolled out a series of algorithm modifications; with a “core update” in March, it made those changes permanent. HouseFresh reviews previously ranked highly on Google searches for air purifiers, but lately its articles have been buried below recommendations from brand-name publications—Better Homes and Gardens, People, Architectural Digest (which is owned by Condé Nast, the parent company of The New Yorker). Navarro even noticed Rolling Stone, the music magazine owned by Penske Media, recommending anti-mold humidifiers. To her, it seemed as if media companies were making a grab for affiliate revenue without the expertise that her own site had worked hard to cultivate—and it looked as if Google was rewarding them for doing so. HouseFresh followed Google’s guidelines for search-engine optimization, or S.E.O.s—the company suggests that Web sites “provide original information” and demonstrate “experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness”—but this no longer seemed to have any effect. “There are people who feel that Google is obfuscating the truth,” Navarro said. “It’s lying to our faces, or gaslighting.” She began publishing articles on HouseFresh about the decline in search traffic, with headlines such as “How Google Is Killing Independent Sites Like Ours.” The articles got more search traffic than the reviews did.

Is Google S.E.O. Gaslighting the Internet?
Leaked documents provide a glimpse into the inner workings of Google Search—and contradict the company’s public
Kyle Chayka
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/is-google-seo-gaslighting-the-internet

AI Hallucination – Definition, Example of

In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also called confabulation or delusion) is a response generated by AI which contains false or misleading information presented as fact. This term draws a loose analogy with human psychology, where hallucination typically involves false percepts. However, there’s a key difference: AI hallucination is associated with unjustified responses or beliefs rather than perceptual experiences.

For example, a chatbot powered by large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, may embed plausible-sounding random falsehoods within its generated content. Researchers have recognized this issue, and by 2023, analysts estimated that chatbots hallucinate as much as 27% of the time, with factual errors present in 46% of their responses. Detecting and mitigating these hallucinations pose significant challenges for practical deployment and reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios. Some researchers believe the specific term “AI hallucination” unreasonably anthropomorphizes computers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence)

As an example, Googling to find a movie with three actors, Rainn Wilson, Kevin Hart, and Jason Statham, and Google says they were all in Crank, when only Statham was:

movie with rainn wilson kevin hart jason statham

Rainn Wilson, Kevin Hart, and Jason Statham star in Crank, a 2006 action movie that ends with Chelios breaking Verona’s neck in a helicopter. Some critics say the movie is better than expected and powered by a great performance from Statham.

Google Job Training

Google recently made a huge announcement that could change the future of work and higher education: It’s launching a selection of professional courses that teach candidates how to perform in-demand jobs. These courses, which the company is calling Google Career Certificates, teach foundational skills that can help job-seekers immediately find employment. However, instead of taking years to finish like a traditional university degree, these courses are designed to be completed in about six months.

Google didn’t say exactly how much the new courses would cost. But a similar program Google offers on online learning platform Coursera, the Google IT Support Professional Certificate, costs $49 for each month a student is enrolled. (At that price, a six-month course would cost just under $300 — less than many university students spend on textbooks in one semester alone.) Additionally, Google said it would fund 100,000 needs-based scholarships in support of the new programs.”College degrees are out of reach for many Americans, and you shouldn’t need a college diploma to have economic security,” writes Kent Walker, senior vice president of global affairs at Google. “We need new, accessible job-training solutions–from enhanced vocational programs to online education — to help America recover and rebuild.”

slashdot