Comment by jsheard

> Google has been playing the SEO cat and mouse game forever, so can startups with a fraction of the experience be expected to do any better at filtering the noise out of fresh web scrapes?

Google has been _monetizing_ the SEO game forever. They chose not to act against many notorious actors because the metric they optimize for is ad revenue and and those sites were loaded with ads. As long as advertisers didn’t stop buying, they didn’t feel much pressure to make big changes.

A smaller company without that inherent conflict of interest in its business model can do better because they work on a fundamentally different problem.

> those YouTube channels which post a new "product review" every 10 minutes, with an AI generated thumbnail and AI voice reading an AI script that was never graced by human eyes before being shat out onto the internet

The problem is that, of the signals you mention,

• the highly-informative ones (posting a new review every 10 minutes, having affiliate links in the description) are contextual — i.e. they're heuristics that only work on a site-specific basis. If the point is to create a training pipeline that consumes "every video on the Internet" while automatically rejecting the videos that are botspam, then contextual heuristics of this sort won't scale. (And Google "doesn't do things that don't scale.")

• and, conversely, the context-free signals you mention (thumbnail looks AI-generated, voice is synthesized) aren't actually highly correlated with the script being LLM-barf rather than something a human wrote.

Why? One of the primary causes is TikTok (because TikTok content gets cross-posted to YouTube a lot.) TikTok has a built-in voiceover tool; and many people don't like their voice, or don't have a good microphone, or can't speak fluent/unaccented English, or whatever else — so they choose to sit there typing out a script on their phone, and then have the AI read the script, rather than reading the script themselves.

And then, when these videos get cross-posted, usually they're being cross-posted in some kind of compilation, through some tool that picks an AI-generated thumbnail for the compilation.

Yet, all the content in these is real stuff that humans wrote, and so not something Google would want to throw away! (And in fact, such content is frequently a uniquely-good example of the "gen-alpha vernacular writing style", which otherwise doesn't often appear in the corpus due to people of that age not doing much writing in public-web-scrapeable places. So Google really wants to sample it.)

Reminds me of a Google search I did yesterday: “Hezbollah” yields a little info box with headings “Overview”, “History”, “Apps” and “Return policy”.

I’m guessing that the association between “pagers” and “Hezbollah” ended up creating the latter two tabs, but who knows. Maybe some AI video out there did a product review of Hezbollah.

>At least in Googles case, they're having so much difficulty keeping AI slop out of their search results that I don't have much faith in their ability to give it an appropriately low training weight.

I've noticed that lately. It used to be the top google result was almost always what you needed. Now at the top is an AI summary that is pretty consistently wrong, often in ways that aren't immediately obvious if you aren't familiar with the topic.

I don’t think they were talking about the quality of Google search results. I believe they were talking about how the data was processed by the wordfreq project.

Google has those problems because the company's revenue source (Ads) and the thing that puts it on the map (Search) are fundamentally at odds with one another.

A useful Search would ideally send a user to the site with the most signal and the fewest noise. Meanwhile, ads are inherently noise; they're extra pieces of information inserted into a webpage that at best tangentially correlate to the subject of a page.

Up until ~5 years ago, Google was able to strike a balance on keeping these two stable; you'd get results with some Ads but the signal generally outweighed the noise. Unfortunately from what I can tell from anecdotes and courtroom documents, the Ad team at Google has essentially hijacked every other aspect of the company by threatening that yearly bonuses won't be given out if they don't kowtow to the Ad teams wishes to optimize ad revenue somewhere in 2018-2019 and has no sign of stopping since there's no effective competition to Google. (There's like, Bing and Kagi? Nobody uses Bing though and Kagi is only used by tech enthusiasts. The problem with Google is that to copy it, you need a ton of computing resources upfront and are going up against a company with infinitely more money and ability to ensure users don't leave their ecosystem; go ahead and abandon Search, but good luck convincing others to give up say, their Gmail account, which keeps them locked to Google and Search will be there, enticing the average user.)

Google has absolutely zero incentive to filter out generative AI junk from their search results outside the amount of it that's damaging their PR since most of the SEO spam is also running Google Ads (since unless you're hosting adult content, Google's ad network is practically the only option). Their solution therefore isn't to remove the AI junk, but to instead reduce it enough to the degree where a user will not get the same type of AI junk twice.

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