CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search - eviltoast
Google says deleting old pages to bamboozle Search is "not a thing!" as CNET erases its history. The tech news site removed thousands of old articles in a recent bid to appease Google and improve its performance in search results over the past few months.
  • Dojan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    58·
    1 year ago

    Relevant song.

    Honestly, Google’s decrease in quality feels very noticeable to me. It’s not just Google itself but it’s across their services. They’re making the user experience worse, and promoting irrelevant, mass-produced garbage. On occasion when I’ve been looking for something non-technical and niche, I’ve been taken to random machine-translated websites that just seem entirely AI generated.

    This is a great example.. A friend of mine was contemplating getting a sugar glider (swedish: Korthuvad flygpungekorre, or just flygekorre) and I got curious about what they’re like as pets. So I Googled it and got the above result. It is poppycock! Almost entirely nonsensical!

    Sugar gliders in the Wild

    Babysugarslips begin life in their mothers bag and are called joeys, just like kangaroos. Because of this unique start on life sugar gliding aeroplanes are classified as pungdjur, not rodents like the similar sexy squirrel.
    …
    The sugar whisk is an omnivore, so apart from nectar and juice they’ll also eat both plant material and meat, including fruit, insects, and even small birds or rodents.
    …
    If your swingers aren’t tame and not used to being handled, it might take some time and patience to get them to the point where they’re sexy.

    This type of content has gotten “better” since the release of better language models, but whenever you bump into an article that’s written by a machine, it’s always so very obvious, because they have a tendency to just meander and not really say anything of substance at all. A prime example being this article about World of Warcraft players being excited about “glorbo”, archive.org link.

      • Dojan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Thinking back it’s not the most accurate translation.

        “Snygg” doesn’t have a great equivalent in English. You can call people “snygg” and it’s somewhere between handsome and sexy, but it’s not gendered at all. Men and women can both be “snygga.” Clothes or objects with an aesthetic appeal (like photos or paintings) can also be “snygga” and something can be “snyggt” done. I don’t think you can use the word with animals though, like if you call a dog “snygg” it sounds wrong.

          • Dojan@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            1 year ago

            Hahaha. It does look a bit like the N word doesn’t it? The “sn” is about what you’d expect, like in “snail”. To make the Y sound, start of with making an “e” sound, like in “easter” or “eating”, and while making that sound, make an “o” shape with your mouth, like you’re saying “oh”, then you get a rough approximation of the “Y” sound. It’s a rather nasal sound!

            The “gga” is about what you’d expect too. Avoiding the obvious n-word, think “gold digga” instead, no rhotic vowel like in “digger” but “digga.”