Crimes Against Search

Towards a better way of collecting.

30 Nov

Michelle Santiago Cortés on the SEO caper that enraged the internet.

Jake Ward was so proud of what he had done, he posted it to Twitter. Perhaps he felt like Brad Pitt or George Clooney in the Ocean’s film franchise–smart, sly and glamorous–because with the help of some cutting edge tools, Ward and his team had gotten away with millions. “We pulled off an SEO heist,” he declared. It was a heist that stole “3.6M in total traffic” right out from under a competitor. 

In the traffic pulling game, a competitor would be a website that ranks highly in the search results for any given keyword. Instead of doing the grueling work of working with Google’s algorithm to build a website that not only responds to users’ needs and redirects them to their advertising clients’ products, but is also primarily optimized for search–Ward decided to steal it from someone who did. As he explained in his Twitter thread, Ward skipped the hard part and exported a competitor’s site map, turned their URL basenames into headlines and used those headlines to generate thousands of articles with the help of AI. Follow his renegade playbook, and you too can watch the traffic and ad revenue roll in. 

The replies to Ward’s Tweet are rife with sarcasm, congratulating him for making search engines “functionally unusable” and blaming him for why we “can’t search for anything anymore.” In flooding the internet with bogus content aimed at nabbing a quick dollar, Ward was “shitting in the pool” of the “information commons.” The fury pointed at a collective effort to maintain and feed an information commons we can all use meaningfully, that is constantly being undermined by greed. As one standout Tweet noted: “Imagine making your buck off the modern-day equivalent to the burning of the library of alexandria and having the nerve to post on twitter about it.”

It’s hyperbolic, but I can identify with the key point of tension being articulated in these responses: A lot of us spend time online connecting to what we see and interact with, we build meaning with and against it, and hope to preserve as much of it as we can. We are increasingly helpless, however, when a bad actor refuses to play by meaning’s rules.

Earlier this week, Futurism reported that Sports Illustrated was publishing questionable content credited to writers with AI-generated headshots and dubious (read: nonexistent) work histories. At its best, this is a matter of a third-party contractor running a content farm that uses AI-generated images to create alias profiles for its writers in order to game the algorithms without divulging the identity of their staff. At its worst, however, a major media company hired a third-party contractor that uses a suite of AI image and text generators to populate entire websites with content–from product recommendations to medical advice–and outfit them with fake writer profiles to feign credibility.

I often think about how the digital media bubble was primarily the product of optimizing for traffic and impressions-based ad space. There was a moment in digital media where an anything goes ethos and an increasingly online public met the era of the lurid personal essay, the Tumblr-brained social commentary, the Vice-coded video docs–oddities and outrage breeding virality. The internet was loaded with earnest content and search engines proved vital to indexing and recalling every last morsel of it. There was a sense of abundance: you could read about anything and research everything. Search engines enabled that: We lived in the passifying illusion that the whole of recorded human history was a search query away, even as we added to it. 

Now we’re at the mercy of actors like Ward and even recent histories are harder to reach through the thickening muck of junk websites vying for programmatic ad money. Search engine monopolies and their dependence on ad revenue have a way of accelerating enshittification of the entire media landscape. Not only are people like Ward and media execs that turn to content farms rewarded for shitting in the information commons, but the rest of us are too small to reach the handle.

Not only are people like Ward and media execs that turn to content farms rewarded for shitting in the information commons, but the rest of us are too small to reach the handle.

This corrosion of search-engine reliability isn’t the first instance of at-scale enshittification to threaten the crumbling walls of the internet's Library of Alexandria. Yet we are as unprepared as ever to salvage our favorite parts of it. We can each take copious screenshots, download html files and employ the growing suite of software tools (like Conifer or Wayback Machine’s browser extension) to preserve chunks of the internet. But it’s too little too late for the lost softcore porn that was scrubbed from Tumblr, to be memorialized as broken links. :(

We are adrift–a culture of consumers accustomed to buying objects and building collections as the sole means of documenting our cultures–deprived of the infrastructure to do so. But our individual inability to collect and store is one I’ll lament the least. 

Yes, we’re drifting, but maybe we can choose to float towards a more collective stewardship of the media we care about. As cliché as it sounds, even in the Tumblr days (or in the present work of Internet Archive or Rhizome), we relied mostly on each other to index by hashtagging, to preserve by downloading and reuploading. Ironically, this might lead to a hardware renaissance that slips the monopolies of Google and Apple.

You found a cool CD? I have a disc player. Your laptop, or mine? We can rescue what we can in a growing stack of hard drives and invest some cash on things like media players and port converters. It can even be pleasant: I personally fantasize about building a media library that is more like a suite of tools than a collection of dead-end artifacts. It won’t solve the problems of an internet economy driven by ad revenue but it might turn us into more meaningful and efficient collectors.

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PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

  • Jezebel to Be Resurrected by Paste Magazine (NYT)

  • Tumblr is “downscaling” (The Verge) and YouTube is getting into games (also, The Verge)

  • Diablo Cody and Ryan O’Connell are writing the 1-hr Deuxmoi drama “Anon Pls” (The Wrap)

  • Sabrina Carpenter filmed inside a Catholic church and got a priest fired (Vulture)

  • Lyst Annual Fashion Report declared 2023 the Year of Miu Miu (WWD) But we already knew that.

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MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

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