Forbes as a whole basically sold its soul for clicks. It used to be one of the three top business magazines depending on your preferences. After the web became dominant, at some point after Malcolm Forbes died, you ended up with a ton of blog writers--with plenty of biases and axes to grind--and essentially advertorial content.
The same thing happens every 3-5 years. HowStuffWorks, About.com (now like 10 different domains), many IAC acquired properties, RedVenture sites, even random sites like LiveStrong.com will be wildly prominent when the domains historically aren't relevant or authoritative for a given niche.
Even recently, sites like CNN were using subdomains with affiliate offers managed by third parties(1). These sites weren't being de-ranked algorithmically-- someone at Google would have to apply a manual action to remove them from the SERPs. What incentive would there be to do so if a prior agreement was in place?
Google doesn't really care about discoverability for smaller domains that may have good content. They are either being risk averse (avoiding potential spammers, junk AI content) by favoring trusted domains, favoring brands who are likely to spend on display or search ads, or maybe a combination of these.
1) https://searchengineland.com/google-begins-enforcement-of-si...
It's really frustrating. I currently want to buy a mattress and a refrigerator. The results for those are so awful as to be useless.
Mattresses have been especially bad for a long time. For refrigerators, you can look at consumer reports and wirecutter--and you can reasonably do some evaluation at your local big box appliance store. I wouldn't buy based on a random web search though.
A lot of classic software essentially worked more like a database. In the last 10-15 years it's all moving to an algorithm.
Here is what I mean. Photos apps used to let you search through your photos using filters.
The same kinds of things are happening on the web which already happened to apps (desktop and mobile).
In the modern world, some marketing company wants to tell YOU which of YOUR photos you wanted, so they can sell you some prints, harvest your data, or something.
I would like any apps that have to do with collections of files, photos, music, etc to be more of a deterministic DATABASE and less of a nondeterministic algorithm.
> A lot of classic software essentially worked more like a database. In the last 10-15 years it's all moving to an algorithm.
You just described what I missed about the older software. Older software gives users control over sorting and show data in a tabular format. Modern software sorts data with an algorithm, with ads mixed in, and shows data in a card format, making it a lot less usable.
I get flashbacks to the exodus of Digg, when the admins basically said "Look, we get a lot of junk content and a lot of common source content so we are going to start fast tracking the common source content from trusted providers"
We all know how that went over.
>The same thing happens every 3-5 years. [...] Google doesn't really care about discoverability for smaller domains that may have good content.
What's galling is that (ostensibly) they used to care. So much for "organizing the world's information" and "don't be evil".
It's not just Forbes that is using this strategy. Many traditional media sites, including CNN and USA Today are running the same type of content. And of course they'll not report on this issue, which might just well be why Google is doing this, a kind of kickback for traditional media.
One of the best things about Kagi search (https://kagi.com) is you can ban domains from search results. Forbes was one of the first I entered!
You can do a similar thing for Google with the uBlackList extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia...
and pinterest; scourge of the web
I had honestly forgotten it existed until you mentioned it. Thanks, Kagi!
In Turkey, all searches hits to newspaper sites. Its like a sad joke. Related page is full of repetitive garbage where information is hidden somewhere.
Very good article. Not clear to me why Google has let parasite SEO become so successful. Possibly they are starved of human generated content kept to a certain quality level. But it's very strange to see sites leveraging a legacy brand to expand far beyond their expertise. Forbes is the most prominent example.
On why Google allows bad quality results nowadays:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Also discussed on HN earlier
One of the commenters on wheresyoured seemed insightful: "wonder if organic search results being worse generates more ad clicks, as the ads are more likely to be more useful than the actual search results".
Since there is no competition and people will keep using Google whatever happens, might as well push the ad-filled garbage site than the ad-free handwritten blogpost. The former probably makes them more money, everything else humanity holds dear be damned.
Complacency? Google has such a dominance in search that their name is used as a verb. Combine that with their culture of automating everything to an extreme degree. And the end result seems to be: search that is just good enough that people keep using it and requires little human fine tuning/curation making it cheap at scale.
Not to mention how flawed the current search tool really is. If you search for something, page 1 shows results from page 7 to some infinite number. But click on that large number, and you find out that the last page was page 3.
That was there for many years
Because Google makes money through all this. These move ads. That's all they care about at this stage. I had stated a few years back Google is dying. It will take a while and it's going to be painful but we will get over this soon. 20 years is a good run.
I miss the days of a searchable internet
"So we have $29M in annual revenue on an average of 3.4M searches per month in 2021." Is this real? That averages out to 40m searches, so .75 per. It seems insane to get close to $1 per search. I figured the return was closer to a penny or even a fraction of one.
When I did search (AdWords) for Thomas Cook, a now defunct but then major travel agency, we'd pay £10 or more to Google for a single click sometimes. (Full story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21046731)
Seems likely that the articles in question include affiliate links to the products they're advertising
if they are doing affiliate marketing than it's realistic
Many types of sites get ~$1 per visitor from search engines. Quite possible, yeah.
Actually googling some of the terms from his post and seeing Forbes up there is oddly surprising, even after reading it all.
Is this an US thing? This has to be an US thing, right? How come I've literally never seen this in the EU?
I usually search in English and find SEO spam somewhat often, but never from these brands.
Just searched "best pet insurance", am inside Europe. Forbes is #1. I distinctly recall seeing this from time to time. Interestingly they're also the #1 for pet insurance on duckduckgo.
For me in the UK "best pet insurance" is squatted by The Telegraph and "best cbd gummies" has Forbes top and The Independent second.
I assume all media companies that have a "trusted domain" and are already involved in aggressive SEO are using this as a revenue generator.
The sites that turned exclusively into link farms like about.com could be whacked by Google eventually and everyone was happy. But if they try that with well known media brands there will be cries of censorship--whether it is collateral damage to some genuine journalistic content, or Google "taking away" a revenue stream.
About 10th in the UK with that search, so probably this isn't across every geography.
Damn, didn't realise that Forbes Marketplace was run separately to Forbes itself. Knew it was always a parasite SEO operation, but the idea of it being a separate company entirely (and how much they tried to hide the fact) is really interesting here.
But yeah, it's still crazy that this site is even allowed in Google, and that they've shown no signs of cracking down on these types of parasite SEO schemes.
It's coming for all the old "legacy" web names with strong domain ranking and decades of backlinks. Private equity is snapping them up as fast as possible, loading them with ads, and bleeding the brand dry.
Right. I get offers for my decades-old domains every day or two now.
So, Google can kill their whole business if they simply stop giving Forbes unfair prioritisation in the search results.
Sure, and Google and FB have killed businesses before by changing algorithms. But what is fair prioritization? Non-trivial Q.
Cory Doctorow article nails it https://doctorow.medium.com/the-specific-process-by-which-go...
It is Google "do no evil" to blame.
he really never misses
This is such a big story and yet most of HN just doesn't care. It should make the WSJ though.
It isn't exactly news, though. This isn't a Forbes issue, or a Google issue. Pretty much every single large company is actively being ruined by parasites. We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices. When that inevitably fails, every single part of the company including its name is being torn apart and sold piece by piece, until nothing is left but an empty shell with a lot of debt.
We're intentionally ruining our economies and praising the people doing it. If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
> It isn't exactly news, though.
It's exactly news. It spots the issue, dives into it, exposes the source of it, and details the structure of how it came into existence. That's what news is. That you're not surprised by it is not material.
> we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
Ironically you are the one who characterized this article as "not news."
> If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
Implicit in that statement is that only the "Western world" has that "short erm shareholder value" ethos. I'd say that is quite debatable.
>We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices.
There is a line where you really do need to compromise on quality and even reputation to keep costs down, though. If you can't or refuse to do that, you end up stagnant and irrelevant like Japan.
Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.
Yes, this is a big deal, but most of us have simply stopped using Google and moved on to other tools.
> most of us have simply stopped using Google
Citation needed
I implemented something similar years ago for the publisher I worked for. Like 2006ish. It was after Katrina, I'd never had a full time dev job, and I created it as a POC to show to my employer that they could invest in me full time as a developer (I was helping put their magazines together when I wasn't working on their CRM).
I created a marketplace with finely tuned SEO for my employer to advertise (and charge) companies in niche industries. My SEO was better than the SEO of the developers who worked on their sites, and our audience was obviously much larger than theirs, so we ranked higher. Any time you would search for the company name or the product type in a certain geographic area, you'd find links to our pages dominating the search results.
One of the interesting things is the shenanigans some of these companies would pull to show up first in our local results. A whole lot of A1 and AAA names began to spring up as they decided that if the list was going to be alphabetical by default, then they needed to be the first in their category.
> One of the interesting things is the shenanigans some of these companies would pull to show up first in our local results. A whole lot of A1 and AAA names began to spring up as they decided that if the list was going to be alphabetical by default, then they needed to be the first in their category.
This well predates Google, though; it was a common trick for placement in the (physical) phone book.
This man is surprised that his google results are terrible. I have to assume this is a frog boiling thing and he's only just noticed the water heating up. Having switched to Kagi years ago, I'm immediately horrified by the state of Google if I ever end up on it. It's appalling and has been for a few years now.
Try those same search terms in Kagi and you'll see Forbes at the top of the results. I use Kagi and like it a lot but you should be aware that most of their results come from Google.
You can block Forbes in Kagi search, but not in Google.
It's getting closer to the point where we will compare Google to Kagi like web-browsing without an ad-blocker. It's hell surfing the web with ad-blocking off.
Reading this comment just above your comment is funny:
Google does a lot of personalization of search results. But if you don't give it your searches, it won't know what you want. So when you come back after switching, it's much worse.
BlackHat SEO's have insiders at many of these companies that'll publish your article for $X amount of money. Or edit existing articles and insert your URL.
You don’t need an insider for you know where to just buy the link. They hang their shingle out on at least one link buying marketplace.
This is not that different from this guy who posted how he 'stole' CEO traffic from his competitor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38433856
And it is not that different (albeit at a smaller scale) from what websites like mini partition wizard has been doing. Their sitemaps are full of articles that don't relate at all to their tool:
https://www.partitionwizard.com/news_en_sitemap.xml
https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic_en_sitemap.xm...
All these 'articles' pollute search engines.