June 2024 Google Search Observations

[NeapTide]

That's how google is disguising ads in Generative AI results. They are not even labelling them ads anymore. Pure day light robbery of user generated content and plagiarizing that with ads for their own gain.

[drive.google.com ]

[edited by: not2easy at 4:57 pm (utc) on Jun 1, 2024]
[edit reason] new month, new thread [/edit]

[mosxu]

Apple intelligence based on openAI is coming with no ad blocker!

Are we going to see competition probably not!

[Markedd]

I know that some of you assumed it was going to happen and it did happen. As I said a few posts before, I have moved to YouTube and still kept the website for script purposes. The site is not on Google at all right now, but I did check Gemini to see what it will show when checking for the info I wrote. Bear in mind that I am the only person of the Internet that creates this content, so when the website died, an entire niche disappeared. What do you think Gemini showed? Indeed, it was parts of the website and curiously, some info from my videos as well. So there you have it. Additional proof that the websites were removed to make way for the AI. Also, be very aware that the 'AIs' can steal content from YouTube videos as well.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Toxic fools. Just tried to search for a few random articles of mine. Articles that were, once, doing incredibly well. Brought a lot of traffic in. Now I cannot see them on the Google SERP anywhere. So I can definitely see the possibility of G removing these articles and adding them to their AI. Then not showing it to prevent the potential copyright backlash.

I can still find some of my articles on Yandex, though on the second page. It was on page 1 but at least I can still find it. (Oh, hold on. I spot an article on page 1 after all. It even ranks higher than a competitor that usually dominates everything else. incredible! As for Bing. Well this is new, for me anyway, they now have a huge row of Youtube videos. Did they do a deal with Google? Are they not meant to be competitors? It's like a huge gang of idiots being lead by Google. Do your own version of Youtube Bing ffs!

Bing is such a disappointment. I'll admit I don't use them but they now have just as much clutter, why? It's like looking at the Google SERP but with Bing written on it. After the Youtube videos we have 2 large snippets. Followed then by the same useless names that is already dominating other search engines. I generally thought that Bing was better than this. PAA is also here, interesting. What a continuation of mess. Though, unlike with Google my articles are still there. Though, again, on page 2.

Desperate companies mimicking each other. I'll be honest I use neither Google or Bing and I'm really not regretting it. (Edit: Just noticed I have an article on page 1 with Bing. Whilst the only thing, after a brief search, that ranks on page 1 with Google is my Reddit post. Hmmm... Could be worse but I do miss my 4,000 daily visitors. I'm now down to 300 instead. I'm trying to rally my writers to become more consistent but if that fails I am out. I am also yet to hear back from Mediavine regarding what they want to do with my site. But if they remove me its also over.

[superclown2]

I generally thought that Bing was better than this.

Bing always was an incoherent mess. Now it's far, far worse. Plus they STILL hide the fact that the ads are, well, ads and not generics. At least Google label them clearly. And yes, why are they featuring so many YouTube videos? They don't seem to have ads in them so what's in it for them? Do they really think that people looking for quick answers want to watch the same boring junk over and over again?

Still, having spent billions on putting AI into their 'search engine' only to find that their market share has barely budged (worldwide they have gained less than one percentage point) perhaps they are desperate to try anything at all in the hope that they can finally succeed. All this will do will make them even less relevant than they already are.

[jchiff]

Google has apparently given up on "organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful.”

So what could their new mission statement sound like?

[theconversation.com...]

[mosxu]

AI is looking to maximise profits and algo is actually attacking us!

The organic shopping listings were filled with some small businesses now only high street store’s listings ?

[Dooku]

Google has apparently given up on "organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful.”

Hear hear! Finally a good explanation and analysis of AI and it's results.

From the article:
"To be crystal clear, LLMs are not a form of intelligence, artificial or otherwise. They cannot “reason.” For LLMs, the only truth is the truth of the correlation among the contents of its database."

I have mentioned several times here there is NOTHING artificial and certainly NOTHING "intelligence" about AI.
This article explains very well that because of how "AI" e.g. simple decision tree algo's work, then by definition these problems can NEVER be fixed! Google, as usual is talking BS when they say they will fix the issues we have seen in the past weeks. They can only adjust manually for those examples, they can NOT fix the REAL underlying issues.

This means that googlers exactly know what they are doing, they are not stupid, but instead are plain evil.
Corrupting the worlds data all because of business profits is never a good idea, this will go from bad to worse.

[jchiff]

"Google. We put the glue in pizza."

[ichthyous]

Perhaps someone can shed some light on when and why the search results all switched to showing only shopping results for broad swaths of searches? Clearly someone at Google decided that everyone in the world is looking ONLY for shopping results for a wide range of searches that used to rank a mixture of results. Dozens of searches are showing mostly the same online store results over and over, and it's so crowded with tiny thumbnails and prices that the whole thing is a mess. Has anyone noticed this in their niche too? If you aren't an online store you just vanished completely for all of these terms. How does this benefit Google?

[EditorialGuy]

Dozens of searches are showing mostly the same online store results over and over, and it's so crowded with tiny thumbnails and prices that the whole thing is a mess. Has anyone noticed this in their niche too?

I haven't seen much of this, but every now and then a SERP like the ones you've described crops up in my informational searches. I've also noticed that Google seems to give --more weight to "content marketing" than it should. For example, in a search for Widgetville local bus fares, Google's top organic result might be a quasi-informational page that's selling local bus tickets for Widgetville. That's just weird.

[Dooku]

Clearly someone at Google decided that everyone in the world is looking ONLY for shopping results for a wide range of searches

It's the best their "AI" can do from calculating the probability of "what you mean" using their tens of thousands of GPU's in the google datacenters. I am starting to notice more of the same also.....sigh.

[Whitey]

@jchiff - great article and thanks for surfacing it.

The closing paragraphs were so on point, i thought:

Access to knowledge
The societal damage from having to depend on a corrupted knowledge-organizing process is difficult to overstate. Access to sound knowledge is essential to every part of society. Google’s advertising dependence and dataist ideology have driven it to the point where it is actively sabotaging our knowledge ecosystem.

This sabotage requires a stiff regulatory response. To put it bluntly, Google Search needs to be run by people with the ethics of librarians, not tech bros.

To get there, governments need to establish minimum acceptable standards for Search to ensure that it produces sufficiently high-quality results. These standards should include forbidding links between advertising and search results, as well as the use of search data to fuel personalized advertising.

Further, search companies, and all global platforms, need to be brought under domestic democratic oversight, but remain inter-operable across borders, in co-ordination with fellow like-minded democratic countries.

None of these steps will be easy. But unless we are OK with continuing to delegate the organization of the world’s information to a reckless, profit-driven company that doesn’t see a problem with releasing a product that tells people it’s healthy to eat rocks, we don’t really have a choice but to bring Google to heel.

PS - i was somewhat irritated by the response from Elizabeth Tucker, Googler Responsible For The March Core Update, interviewed by @rustybrick . What can i say other than the responses seemed to lack authenticity and be more like an attempt of Google coolaid/PR.

The search results are cr*p. The communication process is cr*p. Why is Google continuing to blow it's own, out of tune, self acclaiming trumpet. It sounds to me like political like PR nonsense with everyone paid to keep their jobs marching to the corporate/political party doctrine. But then again, who believes a politician, and then what should we realistically expect.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate @rustybrick securing an interview, and convening polite conversation, but ........

Maybe in 20 years regulators will finally wake up to a series of minimum standards, as per The Conversation article.

[seroundtable.com...]

[jchiff]

@Whitey Yeah, the talking heads are paid handsomely for the spin no?

As an interesting side note, I'm reminded of a quote by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt who said "the Internet is a cesspool", and that "trusted brands are the solution". This was in 2008.

[ichthyous]

Very strong traffic this week, including a big jump up in the number of top 3 and top 10 ranking terms just this week. Today there is a huge surge in traffic from everywhere in the world, except for the USA (-30%) and Canada (-23%):

The United Kingdom
+133%
The United States
-30%
The United Arab Emirates
+112%
France
+131%
India
+98%
The Netherlands
+189%
Germany
+73%
Canada
-23%
Turkey
+594%

Anyone else seeing this? The surge in traffic has resulted in no new inquiries since the 10th, not one!...very interesting.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Opposite day today. But that is because I still use GA4. Apparently for myself and many others it is bugged. The traffic is showing a -90% drop. Realtime traffic is at the slowest it has ever been. None of this makes sense and apparently everyone else is in the same boat. Hence bugged. But it is Google property so... I really need to find a free equivalent version. Trusting anything with Google written on it is becoming tedious and a recipe for disaster.

[mhansen]

Also, be very aware that the 'AIs' can steal content from YouTube videos as well.

@MarkDD - I'd propose that Google Chrome the browser, and Android operating systems are the culprits in consuming the data and training the LLM's. With all that we know about how Google is continuing to operate, I put absolutely nothing past them at this point, including building systems into the browser base code and operating systems on mobile devices that they control, to pipe every single bit of data processed, into their LLM engines.

[Markedd]

@mhansen Add iOS, MacOS, Windows OS, Adobe suite, SONOS and many more to the list...

[ichthyous]

USA traffic is dying again...last two days way down the entire day, and then suddenly surges at the end of the day to break even. I hardly think that is a real traffic pattern, and the complete lack of any new sales inquiries this week proves it. My last actual sale was three weeks ago. That is impossibly bad...I am beginning to think that everyone has stopped spending completely in expectation of a recession. Are people seeing a decline in sales from other (non-Google) channels? I don't sell via amazon and other sources.

[seokees]

I don't know what you guys sell, but I think my site is in a completely different category, in a different country, but seeing the same decline after decline in conversions and traffic drops. I dont sell products, just leads in the home improve. But the same isssue. And traffic is on avg. really low and bounces back a few times a day. Very weird pattern.

So overall the 'internet' (so, Google) is dying (sounds ridicilous) if you look at a good portion of sites. Like people stop using the internet. In real decline in just a matter of months, in my case.

[Micha]

I see that the European Championships are starting now. My website is almost dead at the moment. Apart from that, I have to say that the traffic is still stable, even the Discover traffic came back for two days. However, exactly what I expected has happened: Google is not renewing the ENP contract, only the big publishers are still getting money, many small publishers I've spoken to have all lost their contracts.

[edited by: Micha at 7:06 pm (utc) on Jun 14, 2024]

[Shepherd]

I wonder how many times this video is going to get played in court?

[x.com...]

And to be fair, she's not wrong, google can do what ever they want with their SERPs. What is going to get them is, once again, their greed. They can not have their cake and eat it to. Promoting their own properties while raking users and customers over the coals. Most people in google's current situation might dial it back, lay low, play it cool for a bit... not google, seems like they are going all in supernova scorched Earth on their way out. Hope the SEC is also paying attention, this may be the biggest pump and dump stock in history.

[Conro]

I'm seeing more and more sites that are stopping or being updated very rarely than before. Some have been abandoned for months now. The once precise SERPs are now replaced with sites with the most generic results possible and with forums everywhere or short superficial guides written by brands. I've noticed that Bing is also going the Google route, I've done some searches with completely wrong results. I don't know what's going on, but it looks like there's an intention to destroy the web,

[Juniya]

@Conro that is true, a lot of *established sites in some of my industries have stopped posting since that nail in the coffin, March update. It's a shame because a lot of these guys were putting out great information and I think in a few months, the internet will 'miss it'. It's a shame when you can only get the news or updates about certain things from the same usual 5 big companies/sites.

I still have a slither of hope that Google will reverse their core updates to let the smaller publishers back in but I wouldn't bet on it.

[RedBar]

Traffic for my global widget site for the last 7 days is -50%, if this continues the same until the end of this month then I shall remove the site completely from the SERPs leaving only a log-in page for international trade customers.

IMHO Google's "independence" vanished years ago therefore many of the more recent algo updates appear to be politically motivated. Welcome to your web sanitisation.

[ichthyous]

Right now my traffic reverted to what it was before the six weeks of incredibly poor traffic. Despite the much better traffic, no sales whatsoever. The inquiries are laughable...CEOs of companies asking to download files to DIY things rather than pay for them outright. New inquiries from everywhere in the world have vanished completely. UK, AU, CA, EU and UAE...all sending more traffic, but no inquiries compared to last year. And what is coming from USA is just useless.

Is this all due to Google? I think Google is definitely making sales leads harder to come by now, but we are looking at a global slowdown in spending. Two wars dragging on, prices for everything are sky high, and election year jitters.

[RedBar]

but we are looking at a global slowdown in spending.

In Western economies probably so, BRICS etc I am not seeing this, YMMV !

[brightstone]

@ichthyous What hasn't been realized, maybe by anyone yet, is that the people who were buying and spending online, a large number had an income of SOME kind, even if it was small, from the internet. Now that that income has dried up, there's less money to spend. If all of our websites were restored to previous positions and traffic, I think conversions would be harder to come by. Even the post office employees are worried about layoffs due to the lack of packages being brought in for mailing. One clerk who has seniority (and is thankful he won't be laid off) is calling it "scary slow".

[ichthyous]

What hasn't been realized, maybe by anyone yet, is that the people who were buying and spending online, a large number had an income of SOME kind, even if it was small, from the internet. Now that that income has dried up, there's less money to spend.

This doesn't apply to my business. I sell luxury items that sell for up to tens of thousands of dollars. My customers were always affluent at a minimum, or downright rich. That stratum has more money than ever due to the increase in asset prices...real estate, stocks, and even interest rates on cash. They have a ton of money increasing every day...and I am not seeing spending at all. It is also wrapped up with the real estate market...people aren't buying/selling that much now so no need to move. People not setting up as many new homes and not purchasing discretionary items.

Keep in mind that in the USA at least wages are growing. Wages are outstripping inflation, but the average salaried employee is feeling the impact of higher prices so they are tightenting up even if they are employed and making a good salary. The greed of corporations (making the highest profits since the 1960's) is strangling the goose.

[Markedd]

@ichthyous So..basically, a few rich people are holding the economy hostage. Let's wait for the trickling down. It's going to trickle at any moment. And to not be completely off-topic, I have seen some progress on a website created from redirects, so who knows?..

[Martin Ice Web]

@ichthyous, i join our club. Starting last friday, sales from google traffic fell of the cliff. And for sure it is google, because it started from 1 minute to the other.

And current UI is user unfriendly. Tricking users to click on ads.

-finding information on google leads in most cases to 10 year old rubbish sites with incorrect information. ( I only give google a try if i could not find something on bing )
-not to forget annoying spun article from big companies that just scratch the topic in order to get clicks on their affiliate sites. ( the 10 best, the 10 most ... )
-disregarding keywords in query

[Dooku]

Starting last friday, sales from google traffic fell of the clif

Since about first week of this month google is scraping the barrel really hardcore to meet second quarter revenue goals.
And that action is getting worse and worse each quarter for at least the past 2 to 3 years......and obviously will fail at some time when the peak has been reached because it's a zero sum game. We will all see what will happen at the first ever quarter when that trend breaks BIG time.

[Micha]

At least the big news sites are getting more visibility again, and visibility has to come from somewhere. I think we can all guess who is suffering again.

@martin Could it be that the Google results in Germany have deteriorated again since Monday?

And as for the shop's turnover, I'll go with that. It's exactly the same in the shop I'm currently working on.

[superclown2]

not to forget annoying spun article from big companies that just scratch the topic in order to get clicks on their affiliate sites.

Google used to penalise affiliate sites, or even drop them from their listings completely, because they claimed that they "offered a poor experience for visitors".

Now big sites that spend heavily on Google ads outrank the original creators of the products and services that they have affiliate pages for.

Why? Not because it makes them more money, at the expense of "offering a poor experience for visitors" surely? I think we all know the answer to that.

Meanwhile Google's "lobbying" efforts intensify ......[nypost.com ]

[mosxu]

Do not count on Congress to do anything…

Last 3 days zombies over here, main purpose is to make us pay more…

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha,

i can´t tell you cause i don´t use google because of its terrible UI.

[ichthyous]

Last 3 days zombies over here, main purpose is to make us pay more…

I have had higher traffic...potentially some of it zombie (i.e. Vietnam, SE Asia, etc). But most of it seems to be following real patterns...a very low conversion rate though and those that are sending inquiries are not viable.

Google has switched almost all searches which it believes have a commercial intent to show only ecomm/shopping sites on the page, whith many ecomm ads at the top too and a huge ecomm product carousel at top. If you don't show prices up front and don't have product ratings you are just screwed.

[Shepherd]

Traffic from google will likely never be viable for a business again.

google has all the data and sources it needs to understand which searchers are potential buyers and the value of those buyers.

With this knowledge, google can and does manipulate the SERPs to favor ads, encouraging buyers to click on them.

Moreover, google no longer relies on a large pool of advertisers to maximize its ad revenue. Instead of running a traditional auction, google sets the ad price and directs traffic to the site willing to accept the most negative cost-per-acquisition (CPA).

This scenario is ideal for google but disastrous for businesses and consumers.

[Micha]

In the USA, AI search engines are sprouting up like weeds. Fortunately, the trend has not yet arrived in the EU.

For Google, the air is getting thinner with every new provider and if the company doesn't get its act together soon and continues to deliver such lousy search results, then even the big name won't help much and it will noticeably lose market share.

[techcrunch.com ]

[Dooku]

In the USA, AI search engines are sprouting up like weeds

This is just the latest in the long line of capital investment attempts using the "AI" trend to try and collect as much money in a short amount of time. Some have flopped already....taking the investors money with it.
Ed Zitron described this trend already. It's also funny why most of these companies are coming from a certain region?(if you dig deeper who actually owns them). We now have AI toothbrushes and get this: AI paint.....I kid you not.

This will all go the way of NFT's soon....or the two wearable AI mini computers which have now been exposed as a SCAM....but hey they got their investors money collected. We just need to wait until too many investors(companies) get burned and loose money so they won't touch anything remotely AI again.

The YT video below explains how ironic it is that after several decades we have returned from a well designed UI (SERP) to a command line chat bot....it's just beyond stupid:
[youtube.com...]

[londrum]

I think its a fad as well. People use search engines to find websites. what's so great and amazing about being served up a computer written summary every time you search for something? Imagine getting all your information from one single source - google - forever.
It might work if their content was the best on the web, but its not.
Users will tire of it eventually.

[Micha]

We now have AI toothbrushes and get this: AI paint.....I kid you not.

Really now? I shouldn't ask, but why the hell do you need an AI toothbrush?

Of course, this is a trend, and it's not the first one we've seen, and we've seen many trends disappear quickly.

But this trend is extremely dangerous for Google because, as Londrum wrote, users will eventually get fed up. So if the top dog continues like this, it will be the first to be affected by this "fatigue".

[delorean]

GOOGLE SERP IN 2024 IN A NUTSHELL
>Reddit
>Quora
>LinkedIn
>YouTube/TikTok
>Forum Site
>Spam Site/High Authority Site
>Legit Independent/Small Sites, either lucky to be shown in search results or completely gone

Am I right or wrong?

[makintocheplus]

@delorean You are absolutely right 👍

There are lot of rumors that next core updates will fix the Serps but not 100%

[EditorialGuy]

[b][/b]

Google used to penalise affiliate sites, or even drop them from their listings completely, because they claimed that they "offered a poor experience for visitors".

For years, Google said that affiliate links were fine if the page provided a good user experience. (I remember that one of our pages was used in Google's Quality Rater Guidelines as an example of a useful page with affiliate links.) Google wasn't opposed to affiliate links (which are basically just a form of advertising), it was opposed to "pure play" affiliate sites.

The idea seemed to be that a page should be able to stand on its own and be useful if you stripped out the affiliate links. The page's content needed to provide a meaningful "value add." That's a reasonable rule of thumb, but it does allow for a grey area, and it's certainly possible that Google's algorithm, AI systems, etc. have trouble differentiating between, say, an informational page with affiliate links and a page that was created only to generate commissions. Even for humans, differentiating between the two can be difficult unless you're making a comparison between (to use an extreme example) a product-review page at a site like Wirecutter or Housefresh and a white-label affiliate page.

[EditorialGuy]

Question: What happened to phase 2 of the most recent Google Core Update, which was going to be about "site reputation abuse" or parasite SEO? Google gave advance warning of its new policy a few months ago, and the policy was supposed to take effect in early May. I haven't heard much discussion of this over the last month or so. Did the algorithmic portion of the "site reputation abuse" update ever launch? Or did it merely fizzle? One would expect to have seen hundreds of of angry complaints on Webmaster World and RustyBrick's Search Engine Roundtable by now.

[Markedd]

@makintocheplus Don't fall for it. Google has been saying this for almost a year now. They're lying.
@EditorialGuy I asked this question a while back as well and it seems that it may not have happened at all. At least no big brand was impacted, so I assume it was just some weird appeasement for the masses to show that they're willing to go after the big guys as well. They didn't.

[universenet]

There are lot of rumors that next core updates will fix the Serps but not 100%

@makintocheplus do you think fix will be before or after court? What rumors says?

[Shepherd]

happened to phase 2

google responded, late last week I believe, that the algo part has not rolled out yet. Maybe the manual actions missed revenue projections...

[RedBar]

Hey G, I bought 10 new phones today ... Did I use your search, no, did I use any other search, no, I went straight to the manufacturer's site where they have regular offers, 5 mins done and dusted and will be with me tomorrow.

[superclown2]

Am I right or wrong?

No. You missed out Forbes.