Slopwatch: Almost a Majority of Google News is Now Slopfarms (Fake Sites, Fake Articles)
Google News is getting worse and worse. Over time it's becoming increasingly unsafe to link to sites found there, as it would incentivise cheaters and plagiarists. It now admits there's a problem. However, Google contributes to this problem and wants to profit from this problem.
Today's Slopwatch speaks about the problem with focus on Google, seeing that some slopfarms like LinuxSecurity are slowing down and losing momentum.
Here's the latest:
This problematic site is waning. Not much coming out of there anymore.
"The Indian news sites are tough" to curate, an associate said earlier, "because they post everything to their feeds."
I tend to eventually become super-watchful or careful with these - even the "big ones" (large companies) - as they are part-time slopfarms and many of their articles are simply fake.
"Yes," the associate said , "that is a growing problem. I am really hoping that it passes by and the big ones learn that such shortcuts hurt their marketshare."
They probably count marketshare in terms like money (e.g. how cheaply they can produce slop). I simply suppose they will die, eventually, so this problem will solve itself as the sites go offline (no further output), seeing that they already make excuses, even out in the open (earlier this week), for slop.
They also drown out Google News.
That's not to say that only Indian sites do this. But a lot of slopfarms are operated by some folks in India. Simple observation. Don't mean to stigmatise anybody. It's just what it is...
Google News has just spewed out three fake articles from the slopfarm WebProNews, which was once upon a time a real news site. Here's slop about the Ubuntu LTS news:
And ripping off Phoronix, as usual:
Google Noise ('news') also got very easily fooled, at least twice in the same day, by a triplet of slopfarms operated by the same people and hitting Google's "news" indexes with pure rubbish.
The first set of examples:
Fake image, fake text. Compare to:
And also to this:
How can Google not see the issue with the above?
The second set of examples:
Now compare to:
Almost same as (different slop 'stock'):
So at least 9 of the results for "linux" today are just pure slopfarms. It adds up to a considerable proportion of the whole, at least a third. Google News is noise. █