p3rls

i've been thinking that google could use its own AI to evaluate URLs instead of relying on pagerank and backlinks which are almost completely valueless as a signal in 2025. in my niche there's more slop than ever being produced daily and it's all hitting rank 1. it's tragic what google is doing to the internet.

In my industry it just returns hindustanitimes slop

In my niche these links are all going to indian scam sites for years and years. Right now can google "taehyung" one of the largest kpop idols and see it live. Count the indian links that have been dominating without any particular expertise thanks to google's changes (indian scammer site kickbacks etc)

at this point, i've built a massive platform for ten years and watching the seoers die might be worth it losing it all for. it'll at least kill off all the indians that have been scamming in my niche for three and half years with impunity

let me tell you briefly how search works in my main's niche of kpop, where i had about 3m monthly sessions last month for august on my platform (kpopping.com)

for 20 years, websites that released idol nudes dominated (https://www.change.org/p/allkpop-com-shut-down-allkpop )

then the first wave of slop that figured out you can buy links (https://x.com/paulkimio/status/1550532282288508929)

and now for the past three and a half years it's been indian news websites that dominate

good riddance to the search-powered internet and seoers, i don't mind bleeding-- i've been bleeding this whole time :)

I think the real frustrating part is that they're using your data, scanning every driver's license etc that comes onto the google play store-- and there's still scammers etc using official google products that people catch everyday on twitter now that scambaiting is becoming a popular pastime.

My niche is more like an indian bus stop after three years of google deciding that's what Korean news needed. Consider yourself lucky.

has HN always been this bad

has anyone had to help any elderly relative with the million scams they've downloaded from google's app store? google does not give a shit about helping regular people avoid scams, it's all just bullshit.

not even to mention the h1b indian kickback stuff that's about to hit them. couldn't happen to a nicer company.

in my industry (korea) google has been actively promoting scammers for almost four years now, trust search results at your own peril

and this is how the entire web was turned into wordpress slop and cryptoscams

i usually get 10 a second hitting the same content pages 10 times an hour, is that not what you guys are getting from google bot?

in my niche (korean entertainment) i now have to compete with 200 indian slop scammers when before it was 10 malaysian scammers, then everyone else was mixed race.

really sad what google has done.

you can see it really obvious on some of these korean queries for singers, eg, google "taehyung" and look at the news tab and give it a count.

i am getting almost 500,000 ai scraper requests a day according to cloudflare's ai audit. google requests the same pages 10+ times each an hour. it was never this bad before.

At this point I'd take a thermostat that can read when my dashboard starts getting heated (always the same culprits causing these same server spikes) and flicks attack mode on for cloudflare.... it's so ridiculous trying to run anything that's not a wordpress these days

I am under attack mode right now because I am being attacked from hundreds of chinese proxied bots taking my PHP response time from its usual 0.2 to 2+second response times. fucking ridiculous.

In this case it looks like the executives should fire the OP and hire the 2nd poster who came up with a solution. C'mon lazy executives.

Almost certainly, entire industries have been given over to indian scammers and their government allies.

Feel free to add my experience

Escape from system (fire protection trades)

Build popular web platform for Korean pop music

Google redirects all korean queries to indian seo scammers for three years (eg, google "BTS" or "BLACKPINK" and count the indian URLs)

LLMs could be used to easily evaluate web content on real standards like google claims it wants to (EEAT) over pageranked SEO slop but sundar the coprophage isn't quite sated yet.

It was GOOGLE that promoted endless yoasted wordpress slop in every single niche made by semiliterate semitechnical people with no actual experience in their niches (despite google's protestations about EEAT)

Even today you can search things like "BTS" and see google has overwhelmingly preferred indian slop URLs for some of the highest traffic queries on the planet and no one gives a fuck.

learn2plumb noobs

At the same time, google also promotes backlinks to the point where domains are bought up for $10k+ sometimes just to give it a redirect to a gambling site

Mousewheel through last years auctions on https://x.com/namemaxicom and can see how broken the entire system is from top to bottom.

i run a pretty large wiki, few mill users a month, and will be ignoring these laws. i'm from the US for reference.

i am saying every single AI company has agents using my site, and some have no fucking respect at all and the growing pains have been immense for an independent company like mine (i'd say about a quarter of our dev time this year).

i got my start being a little shit on progs (literally, the channel was called progs)-- i will never forget those retards helping me in vb6 when my dll would break some ocx file here or there.

the most popular prog, was of course, rampage toolz 2.0 made by oogle but random independents like me could make a cool punter or ascii generator. i copied lots of other peoples' ideas and put them into one prog, with a minimalist design which was revolutionary in the year 2000 or whatever it was and called it cyanide tools.

in fact there were even chatbots back then, believe it or not

The last ten years of consumer web tech was dedicated to SEO slop and crypto. Google has destroyed everything else with its endless promotion of hindustantimes .com listicles.

It's great being an independent site in 2025.

You get fucked by google promoting AIOs and hindustantimes articles for everything in your niche then these scrapers knocking your server offline on the other.

It's hilarious listening to people talk about AI ethics while their bots like perplexity knock my server offline trying to download 50000 files at once. Thank god for cloudflare.

i didn't like kagi either at first, but google has deteriorated so much with the constant hindustantimes .com listicles in every fucking search query it's become unusable