A lot of HN readers conceptualize the forces attacking the integrity of the search results as just some isolated people taking occasional potshots, and then maybe slinking away if their trick gets blocked.
It is probably a lot more accurate to visualize the SEO industry as a Dark Google. Roughly as well resourced, with many smart people working on it full time, day in, day out, with information sharing and coordination. It isn't literally one company, but this conception is probably a lot closer then the one in the heads of most people reading this. Dark Google is motivated, resourced, and smart.
And then, once I started thinking of it that way for this post, I realized that increasingly.... Google is increasingly at beck and call of Dark Google. They're increasingly the real customers of Google and the real source of money. It's why Google just seems to be getting worse and worse for us... it's because we're not the real customers any more. Dark Google rules.
And if Dark Google has not yet figured out how to scam AI... it is only a matter of time. Dark Google is where Google gets its money now. When Dark Google turns its attention to AI fully, OpenAI will be no more able to resist its economic incentives than Google did.
Can't wait for the first screenshot of someone searching for the impact of the battle of Gettysburg on the civil war and seeing the AI do its subtle best to slide an add for Coca Cola into it in some semantically bizarre manner.
Pure speculation on my part, but to play along, I suspect the models you mentioned will be a cheaper or free subscription option.
And again speculating, but given Apple's new emphasis on privacy, it might rhyme quite well to (1) make that into apple intelligence or even (2) make it fully local and, as a matter of principle, not dependent on external infrastructure.
> I very much agree this is effectivity a 'honeymoon' period.
At this point I'd be much more interested to hear which "unicorn" tech company did not have such a honeymoon period which it later turned away from. This should really be the default, expected behaviour at this point.
> At this point I'd be much more interested to hear which "unicorn" tech company did not have such a honeymoon period which it later turned away from
Doctolib in France (and Italy, Germany, Netherlands) is one such example. Founded in 2013 so decent life, still as good as in the beginning for both consumers (people booking healthcare appointments) and the customers (doctors paying to use it for their appointment management). And they're only getting better, with e.g. an AI assistant in beta to take notes during appointments.
Dark Google isn't a new thing. Isn't even an Internet thing. It's the very same cancerous growth on society that's been ruining every single communication medium we invented, the disease that's the answer to "why X sucks?" for any X.
Advertising industry.
I wish I knew what it would take for people to stop treating the unholy blend of marketing communications as respectable occupation, and consider it for what it is: a guild of liars ruining lives and societies.
Devs always complain about advertising, but it's why devs tend to do much better comparatively to other jobs in same region. Without distribution mechanisms, there are no sales, without sales, there are no well paid jobs, and eventually no jobs at all.
Similar can be said about almost any other job, except the well-paid part.
Look at the world before advertising. Everything had to be local small scale only. So everything was very expensive, because no large-scale manufacturing effectivity and massive discounting on end product. Lot of technology isn't even possible on small scale.
Nothing worse than salty uneducated devs that think they understand how world works, just because they know how to code, but know nothing about history, economy, business and marketing.
I don't like intrusive advertising either. Nobody says that it has to be pushed to the most extreme level possible for it to maintain the benefits. Not even remotely. I also use agressive adblock, I don't react to ads in Google or YouTube, because they tend to be bad and completely non-relevant. I occasionaly react to Instagram ads though, for example. I bought products off Instagram ads and I am glad for it.
Some way to promote your product to consumers is extremely valuable and healthy to the modern world. Unless you want to separate yourself from it and become a self-sufficient small community oriented society, like Mormons.
The idea of virality and "build great product and they will come" has to be the stupidest crap devs tend to believe. It only works briefly in the early stage within the new market category. 99.9% of world'S products are in mature stage, and those beliefs will get you bankrupt. World needs advertising. New startup founders of great valuable products need advertising. You can notice that those that understand that, succeed vastly more often.
going from 0 to profitable doesn't require that much marketing. people do discuss good products and recommend them for pain points independent of being bombarded with ads for them. you can talk about your product to people who need it.
going from profitable to "we own gigantic yachts that supply our humongous yachts" aka jeff bezos money requires absurdly crafted insidious borderline evil marketing.
> And if Dark Google has not yet figured out how to scam AI... it is only a matter of time.
There is one thing the AI companies have going for them that Google doesn't: They don't have 90% market share.
That's a huge problem that only Google has, because if your black hat SEO stops working against Google, you dedicate all your efforts to fixing it until it does, and then Google has to win against the combined efforts of everyone in the world.
Now suppose there were a dozen search engines that all had around equal market share. You find something that works against the first one but that causes you to get dropped to page 10 by two of the other ones. You finally find something that works against three quarters of them... for a week... after which it still works against a third of them but doing that causes the other two thirds to drop you again. To have any chance with those now you have to stop doing that, but if you do you fall off the front page for the third it was still working against. Also, by the end of the month that third will be a quarter.
You could target only one specific search engine, but then you're doing the same amount of work for only 8% of the advantage, meanwhile that search engine can concentrate their efforts on thwarting the similarly smaller percentage of black hat SEOs who chose to target them instead of one of the competing search engines.
It's much harder to hit a dozen moving targets at once than just one.
If beating SEO was something a company with a different algorithm could do, then it would have happened by now. Google remains the default search engine because the alternatives are perhaps even more susceptible to SEO than Google, so there just isn't the motivation to use them. Why do I have to go to the second or third page to find an answer with a naive search on DDG?
> If beating SEO was something a company with a different algorithm could do, then it would have happened by now.
The reductio of this argument is that nothing can ever change or improve because if it was possible someone would have done it already.
More to the point, people who have used Kagi seem to speak favorably of it. A search engine you have to pay for is never going to be the mass market option, but it can have enough users to be self-sustaining and remain one of the options, and it proves it can be done.
Not OP, but here's how I read it: the SEO operators are driving traffic to google's ad network, where google make's its money. They aren't necessarily paying google much: the ad buyers are doing that, but they deliver the eyeballs to google's ads.
Its kind of like the US hospital system, where doctors are considered by the hospital, if not de jure then certainly de facto, to be the real customers of the hospital. Doctors don't pay the hospital much of anything -- the patients do, usually via their insurance company -- but without the doctors, no procedures happen (i.e., no "traffic.") Hospitals can't bill for room and board, nursing services, therapy, etc., where the hospital makes its operating income without the doctors, and in markets where multiple hospitals exist, doctors drive the patients to the hospital(s) of the doctor's choice. Ergo, the doctor is the "real" customer of the hospital.
The hospitals can and have adapted to get a bigger share of the revenue pie by hiring their own doctors and buying up the clinics that drive a lot of customers to hospitals in the first place, just like Google has introduced products that are more vertically integrated, but the basic dynamic still exists where they are dependent on third parties to deliver customers.
2) I took at look at the most recent CMS data[0] I could find (from 2022,) and out of the top ten owners of hospitals in the United States, zero are payers. I only recognize about half of the parties in the 11-20 part of the list, but of the ones I do recognize, one is related to a payer. I can find no data to support your assertion that insurance companies are purchasing hospitals. They are purchasing physician practice groups, but that only reinforces the dynamic I described where hospitals have to court physicians to drive patients to their facilities.
Hospitals vs. physicians groups is a distinction without a difference in this context (people responsible for making you better). It is like on paper J&J is not responsible for cancer its baby powder causes (some bankrupt entity left holding the bag).
To make sure I'm not misremembering, I've asked deepseek in web search mode: "Is it true that hospitals are increasingly owned by insurance companies in US" It says: "In summary, the ownership of hospitals by insurance companies is a growing trend in the U.S. healthcare system, driven by the desire to control costs and integrate care delivery. While this model offers potential efficiencies, it also raises significant concerns about the quality of care and the balance of power in the healthcare industry." I've looked at several links it provided and they are consistent with the conclusion. Try it for yourself.
I don't see much point in continuing this conversation. I linked you to primary source data about who owns hospitals in the United States. You responded with some AI slop with absolutely no reliable citations.
I posted an analogy about the dynamic that exists between hospitals and doctors. You responded by saying that's a distinction without a difference, when the dynamic I described is a primary difference between the two groups: doctors can practice medicine without hospitals. Hospitals cannot provide patient care without doctors.
You seem like a human, so I give you the benefit of the doubt. Try to see the forest behind the trees instead of just repeating yourself ignoring what is said.
> Try to see the forest behind the trees instead of just repeating yourself ignoring what is said.
I'm not ignoring anything. I posted an analogy about how the US hospital business has some similar incentive structures as Google's search business, in that both are dependent on
third-parties to deliver revenue. You, for reasons that are not clear to me, felt the need to post an unhelpful, off-topic, and incorrect rant about the insurance system in the US backed up, apparently, by nothing more than your favorite AI hallucination engine.
I don't think you've even tried to understand what I posted or why, nor do I think you are capable of understanding why your claim is completely irrelevant to what I wrote. Guess what? Even if insurance companies purchased every single hospital in the country, those hospitals would still be dependent on the doctors to operate.
I'm familiar with both organizations. 1) the OP asserted that insurance companies "increasingly" owned hospitals. UPMC and Kaiser have existed for decades. 2) together, they represent less than 2% of the hospitals in the United States.
Setting aside the previous commenters "the cure is a threat" thing, there's some precedent for this in the US healthcare system in the form of HMOs (particularly Kaiser Permanente.) Part of that is supposed to be vertical efficiency. Part is the idea that it is possible to avoid extremely expensive acute care services with proactive low-cost primary care.
One would think so. Unless there are programs that pay you for sick patients (risk adjustment) and you control how much you are willing to spent on a patient.
I've made a mistake of consuming healthcare related content due to the recent ceo assassination. Do not recommend.
That's got nothing to do with cures. In that world administering a cure would be cheaper than treating a chronic illness, which is the opposite of what's being said.
But Google would do just as well (probably better) without the SEOs, no? The SEOs are just manipulating the order of search results to their own interests, but I don't see how this would benefit Google's bottom line.
SEO pages tend to be infested with ads (which google makes money on,) whereas legitimate businesses much less so. Imagine this scenario: you run a B&B on a popular tourist island and take reservations over the web. You pay google to run an ad relevant to your business. Some SEO turkey comes along and builds a ranked-up site that shows that ad, and has no other real reason to exist. Does google make more money or less money with the SEO operator in the equation? Would the original business have even bought a google ad if they could get organic traffic to their site without all the SEO spam?
Your last point is the most important: SEO forces businesses to advertise on Google, because it is so hard to appear on organic results. Without black SEO, there would be much less need for ads. It is clear that Google has a symbiotic relationship with black SEO.
Maybe one step removed, if I understand it right, the spam sites make money by offering ad space and traffic, and Google makes money by selling ad placement on those sites, so actually Google and Dark Google are on the same side of the marketplace.
In a way, it's the other way around, Google is paying the spammers for providing billboard space for their ad placement services.
The pervese incentive is that the harder it is to find what I'm looking for, the more ads I get served, hence all ad supported products trend towards becoming useless (see also: Amazon.com)
"dark Google" seems like the title of a blog post I would find on HN! This is intended as a compliment, in case not clear... Add some important facts and figures (what is the revenue of dark Google, who and how many are they employing) and write it up!
"Dark Google" is dark as in bad, but not as in obfuscated. They can be seen and observed in places like LinkedIn where they discuss their plans in the open.
But I don't think Google is part of them, or their slave. I think Google is our last line of defense.
True, it's not very effective; more like the knight in Monty Python's Sacred Grail. Still, when we lose Google, we'll have nothing else.
I think you're right, but also this doesn't contradict the article. Google reset to a cleaner state (leaving behind the advertising choked portals of the late 90s). Over time both internal and external forces have chipped aways at Google's original model.
It's taken 20 years of a public company having to show quarter on quarter, year on year revenue increases, which has resulted in (Dark) Google squeezing dollars over quality.
I think AI companies have a bit more time to avoid a similar situation.
Or not. If the rates stay where there are or do not drop drastically there is lot sooner pressure to actually show profits. 2010s were very special economic environment.
A lot of HN readers conceptualize the forces attacking the integrity of the search results as just some isolated people taking occasional potshots, and then maybe slinking away if their trick gets blocked.
It is probably a lot more accurate to visualize the SEO industry as a Dark Google. Roughly as well resourced, with many smart people working on it full time, day in, day out, with information sharing and coordination. It isn't literally one company, but this conception is probably a lot closer then the one in the heads of most people reading this. Dark Google is motivated, resourced, and smart.
And then, once I started thinking of it that way for this post, I realized that increasingly.... Google is increasingly at beck and call of Dark Google. They're increasingly the real customers of Google and the real source of money. It's why Google just seems to be getting worse and worse for us... it's because we're not the real customers any more. Dark Google rules.
And if Dark Google has not yet figured out how to scam AI... it is only a matter of time. Dark Google is where Google gets its money now. When Dark Google turns its attention to AI fully, OpenAI will be no more able to resist its economic incentives than Google did.
Can't wait for the first screenshot of someone searching for the impact of the battle of Gettysburg on the civil war and seeing the AI do its subtle best to slide an add for Coca Cola into it in some semantically bizarre manner.