Yeah… I work for an e-commerce website and ever since chatgpt came to the world we have been making product descriptions and write ups assisted by the tool.

The reason from the product manager: SEO

People search for stuff to buy… and they have to find it usually via Google. My experience, buyers care more about the price and the possibility of an old product they love to still be available.

Descriptions? Well, they’re there.

I don’t understand why Google doesn’t give us a blacklisting feature. There are so many garbage results from always the same domains, just let me block websites from search results.

There are browser extensions to hide results, but a search results page with only 3 non blacklisted results isn’t helpful either

There are so many times I look for something somewhat niche that I need information on, and the first 10 or so links are all garabage keyword spammed sites. Literally lists of words that drive clicks to their site (I assume for ads or scripts). It’s super frustrating. I’ve blocked entire TLDs on my network (.zip for example) and installed a add-on to allow me to block results in my searches.

This is just another side effects of the proliferation of AI generated text that is difficult to distinguish from human generated text. Obviously, SEO optimization has always been an issue, but more now than ever, distinguishing the fluff and nonsense from the valid is a significant challenge. I can only imagine small businesses are going to find it even more difficult to stand out when pumping SEO optimized sites requires only a few clicks. How can you compete when the tools are ubiquitous, easy to use, and available to all and the game values the results of these tools rather than the product or company themselves?

I think Google peaked about 6-8 years ago now and then started slipping at an ever accelerating rate.

It’s almost useless for me when searching anything remotely technical or otherwise niche.

I almost consistently need to go to the second page of results now, something I don’t remember doing since like 2009.

I find Bing acceptable. Brave search works well. But I’m actually using Kagi now since I’m hoping their paid model will actually mean I’m not the product.