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In the memo, CNET says that so-called content pruning “sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results.” Stories slated to be “deprecated” are archived using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and authors are alerted at least 10 days in advance, according to the memo.
These metrics include page views, backlink profiles and the amount of time that has passed since the last update,” the memo reads.
A comparison between Wayback Machine archives from 2021 and CNET’s own on-site article counter shows that hundreds — and in some cases, thousands — of stories have disappeared from each year stretching back to the mid-1990s.
Red Ventures, a private equity-backed marketing firm that owns CNET, didn’t immediately respond to questions about the exact number of stories that have been removed.
Red Ventures has applied a ruthless SEO strategy to its slate of outlets, which also includes The Points Guy, Healthline, and Bankrate.
In the wake of that revelation and resulting errors on AI-generated stories, Red Ventures temporarily paused the content and overhauled its AI policy.
Red Ventures, a private equity-backed marketing firm that owns CNET
Ah, there’s yer problem.
SEO is ruining the internet. Give me results for a search, let me choose the sort order optionally. Bring back Boolean operators, or at least make AND and OR work again.
I feel like shitty sites getting too good at SEO has largely made google useless. That’s why you had to append “Reddit” to get any useful info that wasn’t from some SEO scamsite.
deleted by creator
Google: “No”
Ah, the corporate enshittification of search.
I’d settle with making “verbatim” search the default without having to switch to it every time.
That’s really disappointing honestly, I “grew up” reading CNET; I don’t read it much anymore, but the articles they’re deleting are likely the ones that initially got me up to speed with technology.
Meanwhile google isn’t even worth using anymore…
I’ve been trying out Kagi lately, a paid search engine. Not sure whether I’ll stick with it or not. I do like it though. I’ve been so tired of pages of pages of ads and nothing else in Google. I’ve had this inexplicable feeling for years that there’s gotta be more internet out there than the ad-ridden SEO hellscape Google shovels on you.
So far I am happy with Brave Search, but I completely agree with the sentiment. I think that any ad-based business stops worrying about end-users once they reach a certain size and they only way to avoid this is by ensuring that customers can vote with their wallet.
I’ll have to give Brave a look, thanks for the recommendation. And agreed. In general, I’ve been making more of a concerted effort lately to get away from things that are supported via ads. Either making use of open source software when convenient, or moving to paid services. I just hate that insidious feeling of constantly being advertised to.
Brave gets a lot of hate because of its ties to crypto, their recent moves really do not help much, but overall I am a fan. The browser feels designed to be a true user-agent, all of the crypto-related features are opt-in and it’s the only system where the user gets a share of the advertising revenue.
It seems that a lot of content creators (especially the popular ones) feel like that Brave is hijacking “their” ad dollars, but honestly to me it seems that their model is right: the ad dollars don’t get to the creators directly, they go to users and the users can choose which creators they value most. This to me seems more fair and also gives people the power again to “vote with their wallet”.
In my ideal world, people would use be using Brave, collecting $5-$10 worth of tokens every month and redistributing them to creators they like. This is what I’ve been doing since 2019 at least. If the majority of Brave’s millions of active users did the same, the internet would be a lot saner and less algorithm-driven than it is today.
I’ve been using kagi and am loving it so far. My only problem is that it’s forcing me to recognize how often I use search. I’m already almost at my 1000 searches and I still have 15 days left 😭
The new Google Search results:
“Here’s some ads and some AI generated crap. Take it or leave it. P.S. you smell.”
