Google News Lost the Fight to LLM Slop (While Google Itself Sells Slop, Nowadays Under the Name "Gemini")
Many people say that "Google is getting worse"; that's almost an understatement
THIS morning we gave several examples of fake 'articles' about "Linux" showing up in Google News. Hours later a sister slopfarm of "gbhackers" [1, 2, 3, 4] published an almost identical piece of LLM slop: (same as the one in the other slopfarm; notice they try to associate Linux with "backdoor" - though that's actually a Windows problem)
Incidentally, upon the same checking cycle we also spotted "Linux" SEO spam from Gizmodo.
As already mentioned here the other day (here in Gemini/HTTP(S) and in IRC), Gizmodo is transforming from a notorious slopfarm to a spamfarm of sorts:
It links to this (there are loads of other links like that, capturing many search terms under the guise of news).
Days ago there were like half a dozen "Linux" results linking to pages like the above. Google is drowning in junk.
Google News seems to be in a tough place. It had mass layoffs, it does not see (nor list) lots of legitimate sites and, to make matters worse, it does list a large number of slopfarms. This means it rewards chatbots, not authors.
Google is part of the problem. Google too has LLM ambitions. █