Leaked Documents Reveal How Google Search Gatekeeps the Internet

We all need to stop using this as our default search engine

The time has long passed whereby we need to remove Google as the effective governing authority of the internet. As with most things online, a good idea ballooned into a net negative for nearly everyone else. This fact was obvious decades ago. There needs to be actual competition and government need to reassert itself as more than a rubber stamp for business growth.

Annoying stuff, but I've suspected for awhile.

My personal blog is life changing, but y'all will never find it, at this rate. /Sarcasm

More seriously, a decade ago my personal blog was the number one article on the Internet for like 3 deeply esoteric technical topics. Neat.

At some point, that stopped happening. I didn't give it serious thought, because those articles were never meant for anything but my personal reference, anyway.

But it made me wonder what was going on with the algorithms.

On one hand, I figure people can just go to stack overflow. Except, I don't participate in SO, because they're a bunch of tossers. But then, I figure someone else can just copy my write-up into Stack Overflow. Except, no one does, anymore, probably because they can't find my blog either.

Again, my blog is mostly useless shit. So maybe the algorithm was just doing it's job. But I've wondered for awhile if the Internet wasn't just plain better a decade ago when search actually worked.

Whose blogs was I missing out on? Now I find stuff like that through Mastodon, but it still isn't targeted topical search, yet.

I need to get in on that web ring action going on.

The excellent podcast “Search Engine” has a couple recent episodes covering this, the history of Google and how it became the core of the internet, and their bullshit AI shenanigans. Highly recommend.

It still burns me that a McKinsey shrill runs it now.

I don't think those rankings themselves are the problem, at least not the ones mentioned in the article, the issue is a lack of transparency and configurability.

"isLocalCovidAuthority" makes a hell a lot of sense but if it gets boosted to the front then google should say "We are prioritising this result because we deem it trustworthy source of relevant information": If you make an editorial decision, actually stand by it.

"isSmallPersonalSite" also makes sense, but what about giving users the choice of prioritising or deprioritising it instead of making it for them?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Bringing the right webpage to your computer is no passive task as thousands of editorial decisions are made on your behalf by a secretive group of Googlers.

Several SEO experts tell Gizmodo the leak lists 14,000 ranking features which, at the very least, lay a blueprint for how Google organizes everything on the web.

Google has previously denied that it uses some of these ranking features in Search, but the company confirmed these documents are real, albeit, in its telling, imperfect.

“We would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about Search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to Gizmodo.

King and Fishkin also noticed the ‘isCovidLocalAuthority” and “isElectionAuthority” in their writeups of the leak, both pointing out the importance of search engines in elevating quality information.

“It’s a non-statement that doesn’t address the leak, provides no value, and might well have been written by an AI trained on the past decade’s most soulless corporate messaging.”

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