Why does every search return Forbes?

September 20, 2024 6:38 AM

"Google has decided that Forbes is the authority in everything. Credit cards, cockroach removal, and getting too high from gummies. Forbes is now the dominant authority in damn near everything. [...] I know a lot of folks in the SEO industry. Not one person thinks this is normal or okay. I even heard from a source that I deeply trust that Google employees were complaining about Forbes internally. That was two years ago." A deep dive on the underpinnings of Forbes Marketplace, the parasite SEO operation launched in 2019 by Lars Lofgren.
posted by Rhomboid (58 comments total)

https://chatgpt.com is like a tall cold glass of lemonade in the desert vs. the crap Google has become.
posted by torokunai at 6:46 AM on September 20 [2 favorites]

You don't have to use Google; try Ask Forbes.
posted by flabdablet at 7:00 AM on September 20 [6 favorites]

Maybe I remember the early stages of this, but I quit Google for Kagi sometime last year, when the gradual-making-Google-useless reached a tipping point for me.

I'm hoping Kagi lets me be the customer and not the product. So far it's working better than the alternatives.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:06 AM on September 20 [11 favorites]

Meanwhile Bing is in the corner like Ol' Gil from the Simpsons, desperate to sell out to anyone who's offering
posted by slimepuppy at 7:22 AM on September 20 [10 favorites]

https://chatgpt.com is like a tall cold glass of lemonade in the desert vs. the crap Google has become.

don't eat the yellow snow
posted by chavenet at 7:23 AM on September 20 [58 favorites]

"How about rustproofing? Those embeddings will rust up on your like *that*. Please, I need this. I have been a good Bing."
posted by credulous at 7:28 AM on September 20 [4 favorites]

I often think about how different things would be if Ask Metafilter had the Google ranking it deserves.
posted by gwint at 7:32 AM on September 20 [36 favorites]

Chatgpt? Yeeeaaahhh ... I don't trust anything that can go all farble-warble-racist-bing-bong at the drop of a spaghetti duck in the middle of a bunch of reasonably sane things. Google may suck, but at least someone knows how it works, even if it's not me or anyone I know. Kagi isn't free ... and it isn't free. I understand why and am even fine with it, but I need that money for other things.

And the only company I trust less than Google is Microsoft*.

I kinda wish Apple would get into the search business. They may be some degree of evil, but it's predictably evil (sell you stuff at high prices, but it usually works pretty well and looks pretty good - at least better than everyone else). Also, their stuff usually works well with all their other stuff and I'm mostly using their stuff already.

* At least as far as searching goes. There are a LOT of companies I trust less than Google, if you broaden out the list of products. Right now, anything owned by Phony Stark (Melon Husk) is right at the top (or bottom) of that list. And Jerry Jones. F that guy right in the F-hole. Also, Rupert Moloch ... er, Murdock.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 7:40 AM on September 20 [15 favorites]

Huh. On only one search (cockroaches) from Google do I get a Forbes link, and it's way down at the bottom.

For most links, I don't get anything from Forbes. I've actually heard of the Forbes Marketplace, as cheap way to write a throwaway article and cash in on "Featured in Forbes" and it's had that stink for a while - due to almost no vetting. So I'm aware of Forbes tarnishing their own brand, but I'm not seeing the same search results with a constant bombardment by Forbes.

That's weird.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:58 AM on September 20 [3 favorites]

@The_Vegetables you may have Google's "personalized search" on. (I think it was automatically implemented some years back and remains on for anyone who doesn't take the steps to turn it off).

If true, and if you have spent some time in the past very deliberately ignoring/avoiding Forbes anything, then it may have dropped for you.
posted by heyitsgogi at 8:22 AM on September 20

I switched to Kagi a few months ago on the advice of some MeFites and it’s absolutely worth the 5 bucks/month
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:33 AM on September 20 [3 favorites]

Would be nice if google just took these SEO hawk sites and just de-listed them or stuck them on page 4.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:41 AM on September 20 [3 favorites]

I still use DuckDuckGo about half the time. It doesn't always give me an image option and I have not figured out a pattern.
posted by soelo at 8:46 AM on September 20 [1 favorite]

I can confirm that when I use Google, I get Forbes suggestions on stuff that has nothing to do with finance or the stock market. Which was confusing, because I just think of them as a glossier, more exclusive WSJ but without reporting on anything outside the money industry. Probably because I’m thinking of the old magazine.
posted by caviar2d2 at 8:49 AM on September 20 [3 favorites]

What a bunch of (capitalist) tools.
posted by TedW at 9:04 AM on September 20 [6 favorites]

It's been 2½ years since "Forbes Contributor Razzlekhan" (previously) put the nail in Forbes' coffin, although the site had been useless long before that. Thanks for not getting the memo, Google.
posted by fedward at 9:06 AM on September 20 [3 favorites]

I remember when Forbes' kid was on an episode of SNL when running for president. What a country!
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:20 AM on September 20 [4 favorites]

It's not commented on enough but Goodreads' "quote" section has a similar proliferation on search results of all types. The real issue there is that their quote section is utter garbage. It's absolutely choking on made up and misattributed inspirational grandma Facebook posts and business bro presentation pulls. No page numbers, no validation, etc. However, Google is pulling it as a source of truth.
posted by KrampusQuick at 9:24 AM on September 20 [6 favorites]

When I worked at El Goog (quite a while back now), the people charged with maintaining and improving search quality were engaged in an unending battle to suppress exactly this sort of thing. They stood on two pillars--the first pillar was a cadre of smart people doing hard work and successfully beating back the latest attempts to hijack search results. The second, equally important pillar was the support of bigwigs for decisions that traded off short-term revenue for keeping search quality good.

While I was there, at least, things seemed to be stable. One or both of these pillars crumbling makes me sad, not just because the Internet is worse for it, but because it dishonors the many people who spent blood sweat and tears to keep that system working for so many years.
posted by Pemdas at 9:25 AM on September 20 [26 favorites]

I am a part of this problem because I was looking up the golden bachelorette contestants and clicked the Forbes link.

I even thought it was weird! I still clicked it though.
posted by Pitachu at 9:27 AM on September 20 [2 favorites]

The Forbes clickbait issue on Google has gone on for so long that, like the bizarre inability of the iOS keyboard to quickly allow for coherent punctuation when crafting text messages or the process of buying tickets for a popular show on Ticketmaster, I don't believe anyone in the c-suite uses the product. Sundar must have people to Google for him. Tim must have an assistant carry his iPhone and he just uses his Mac or iPad or something. Nobody at Ticketmaster must actually buy concert tickets, lest be thrust into the absurdity of what they've set up. Garbage.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 9:31 AM on September 20 [16 favorites]

The first blow that Forbes struck
Razzlekhan went to jail
The second blow that Forbes struck
It made old Google fail

Wi a diddie aye-o etc.

Or something like that.
posted by Not A Thing at 9:31 AM on September 20 [2 favorites]

It's just incredible how craptastic Google has become. I mean, Google was, arguably, the gold standard of online search. But now? Still #1 by sheer size, but certainly now Is there, in all the history of business, such an example of a company that had built the industry standard of a product, and then seemingly deliberately kneecapped it into uselessness?
posted by Thorzdad at 9:41 AM on September 20 [8 favorites]

This article is about Forbes' spam business but everyone's talking about the search side of it. Fair enough. Google's multi-year inability to protect itself from exploitation like this is shocking to me, the search quality team used to be better than this. Maybe Google's OK with it because Forbes is running Google ads.

Here's a screenshot of Kagi's solution to this. In addition to having good default ranking you can tune it so it lowers or raises certain sites (or hides them entirely). I just added a rule yesterday to demote Fandom wiki game links and favor wiki.gg links instead. Fandom is also a spam farm and a bunch of games have moved over to a new platform but the site is still struggling for relevancy juice.

Shout out to Phind too, for AI-enhanced search. It's free and very good. Here's it's answer for "Why does every search return Forbes?". It's not a great search result, it's missing Lars' article (but has this MeFi post). What I like is the general structure of it: an LLM synthesized gloss with specific references to web sites to learn more. It's quite good at this. So is Bing Copilot.
posted by Nelson at 9:42 AM on September 20 [8 favorites]

This guy mentions off-hand that the "helpful content update" prioritized Reddit and media over personal blogs and he was not kidding

Looking up terms for which my personal blog were the #1 hit for over ten years, I am now not even in the first page of results. Basically just dropped from the index.

My personal blog hasn't acquired any new content in the last ten years, but it also hasn't gotten any less "helpful." I had #1 hits on a personal blog because you couldn't get the info elsewhere. I wasn't replaced by better articles in media sites, you just cannot get that information anymore, not from Google.

The highest paid ML engineers on the planet apparently cannot develop a model that can distinguish my non-monetized blast-from-the-past web log from actual fucking spam. (or at least, cannot do it without undermining the forever-declining DoubleClick / AdWords business)
posted by your postings may, in fact, be signed at 9:47 AM on September 20 [9 favorites]

Nelson: When you load the examples from TFA into Phind:

"best pet insurance" - Forbes is the #2 result/source
"best cbd gummies" - Forbes is the #2 result/source
"how to get rid of roaches" - Forbes is the #5 result/source

It too is treating Forbes as a definitive source rather than the clickbait farm it is.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 9:49 AM on September 20 [8 favorites]

It's just incredible how craptastic Google has become. I mean, Google was, arguably, the gold standard of online search. But now? Still #1 by sheer size, but certainly now Is there, in all the history of business, such an example of a company that had built the industry standard of a product, and then seemingly deliberately kneecapped it into uselessness?

I don't think it is intentional

I mean, some of the product choices are intentional. They choose to put ads all over the place, sometimes concealing the things you actually want to see

But the terrible fucking results seem to be purely accidental. It is really, really hard to make a search engine that isn't awful, because it is an adversarial problem. You have opponents, and "the enemy gets a vote, too." There are people who stand to make an awful lot of money by messing with your search index.

For example, Bing is not significantly better than Google, and it would be worth billions and billions of dollars to be just a little bit better.

People say Kagi works better, but that will only be true as long as no one uses Kagi. If it is ever a dominant search platform like Google or Bing, people will stand to make a lot of money by messing with Kagi.
posted by your postings may, in fact, be signed at 9:54 AM on September 20 [7 favorites]

I asked Phind if I am cute. It answered...True beauty comes from within.Mom WAS right.
posted by Czjewel at 9:58 AM on September 20 [3 favorites]

An AI by now should be able to check the tone and style of a website, no? Even I can tell if a website is of the useless ones almost at a glance.
posted by polymodus at 9:58 AM on September 20 [3 favorites]

Thanks I EAT TAPAS, I didn't test those. Yeah, Phind is not at the forefront of filtering out spam. The spammy info probably infects the text summaries too.

I wonder if someone has built an LLM-based content farm classifier. Identify sites like Forbes or Livestrong or (lol) Mahalo. It's a bit paradoxical because of course all the AIs are trained so heavily on the output of those content farms.
posted by Nelson at 10:01 AM on September 20 [1 favorite]

An AI by now should be able to check the tone and style of a website, no? Even I can tell if a website is of the useless ones almost at a glance.

What happens when this AI starts writing the content, too? This is an arms race that cannot be won.

If it is ever a dominant search platform like Google or Bing, people will stand to make a lot of money by messing with Kagi.

Maybe the solution is more search engines? I can imagine a situation where small but useful search engines proliferate as people get tired of garbage results.
posted by swift at 10:02 AM on September 20 [1 favorite]

One or both of these pillars crumbling makes me sad

You can directly blame Prabhakar Raghavan.

...no, really, it's because of him personally and the people he's hired.
posted by aramaic at 10:21 AM on September 20 [9 favorites]

Maybe Google's OK with it because Forbes is running Google ads.

Based on third-hand reports, I think that’s what happened: apparently the ad sales-weasels are in charge and the search quality team was disbanded, so the number-go-up MBA logic is dominant there, too. It would certainly be compatible with what I’ve seen since the 2010s where the low quality spam sites which inexplicably remain highly ranked for years are all loaded with Google ads. Thinking especially of the ones which are scraping content from GitHub or Stack Exchange and it is completely impossible that Google engineers aren’t seeing that spam on a daily basis.
posted by adamsc at 10:22 AM on September 20 [9 favorites]

Lately, date discrimination is the biggest issue I've had with Google. That 8 year old page on a Python command isn't actually correct anymore... but it's somehow the top 3 results, since it's been copied across the graph so many times. Even limiting by time range often doesn't work.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I googled "IVI" and got back incorrect results for "ivy". I clicked a feedback link, noted the issue, and it was fixed the next day. I can't imagine that happening now. Google's missing that feedback from actual humans that factors into search results.
posted by SunSnork at 10:23 AM on September 20 [10 favorites]

I often think about how different things would be if Ask Metafilter had the Google ranking it deserves.

Pepperidge Farm remembers!! I paid my first $5 because I wanted to join this cool site that was always at the top of my Google search results. Ugh that was seventeen years ago wasn't it
posted by potrzebie at 10:31 AM on September 20 [11 favorites]

the [Google] search quality team was disbanded

Do you have a reference for what you mean by that?
posted by Nelson at 10:36 AM on September 20

I don't think Google is so stupid or incompetent that they don't know their search results are getting worse or have no way to fix it. I agree that there must be financial reasons why the results sucking is actually good for their bottom line, at least in the short term. Just sending traffic to sites that show Google-delivered ads doesn't seem like enough to me. Maybe the search result ads get more clicks somehow when the results suck?
posted by ssg at 10:42 AM on September 20 [4 favorites]

Maybe the search result ads get more clicks somehow when the results suck?

That actually makes sense; if rather than clicking only on one of the first three or so results and finding what you need, you have to click on several results to find what you need, then wouldn’t Google get more revenue?
posted by TedW at 11:00 AM on September 20 [3 favorites]

Like supermarkets moving everything about.
posted by lucidium at 11:10 AM on September 20 [2 favorites]

People say Kagi works better, but that will only be true as long as no one uses Kagi

A crucial difference is that Kagi is purely subscription-based, so there's a direct financial incentive to keep quality high. They also have a really good feedback mechanism beyond just clicks, which is the block/lower/raise/pin feature Nelson mentioned. If a lot of their users are blocking Forbes results, their plain financial incentive is to downrank Forbes - which in turn gives Forbes an (admittedly tiny) incentive to quit being assholes.

That could all change in a moment, of course, but that moment would be very apparent to the users.
posted by McBearclaw at 11:24 AM on September 20 [5 favorites]

"This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it."
posted by Gerald Bostock at 11:31 AM on September 20 [11 favorites]

Kagi is unfortunately run by a thin-skinned tech wierdo if this link is representative.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:59 AM on September 20 [4 favorites]

Based on third-hand reports, I think that’s what happened: apparently the ad sales-weasels are in charge and the search quality team was disbanded, so the number-go-up MBA logic is dominant there, too.

According to Ed Zitron’s podcast Better Offline, the people running Google decided that “time on site” was a metric they wanted to chase, because more time and more searches means more as revenue. So there’s an actual disincentive to provide a good search experience rather than making you search repeatedly to find what you want.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:57 PM on September 20 [2 favorites]

"This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it."

That's a great inside view, and anyone who feels the need to defend Google should read it.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:00 PM on September 20 [1 favorite]

Obviously it had been ignored for years but back in 2018 when Google officially removed "don't be evil" from its code of conduct and motto it seems like it should have been marked by more notice.

They could have kept just ignoring it and pretending they gave a shit. Instead they yanked it out to leave no room for doubt that they absolutely did not give a shit.

Maybe we should view search as a public utility and have a government funded non-profit?
posted by sotonohito at 1:28 PM on September 20 [4 favorites]

There are shitloads of essential services that would work far better if publicly owned and run on a pure cost-recovery basis but the rentiers always piss and moan so much about Unfair Competition and equip their McKinsey flying monkeys with so many carefully polished lines of horseshit about the Superior Efficiency of the Private Sector that very few of them get off the ground.
posted by flabdablet at 2:06 PM on September 20 [9 favorites]

> Looking up terms for which my personal blog were the #1 hit for over ten years, I am now not even in the first page of results. Basically just dropped from the index.

My experience is similar. I used to have rather high Google rankings on some of my history writings, but in recent years they've slipped onto page 2, 3, 4+ of results. The results on top now are often from sites that appear to have done a lazy rewrite of my work (because they cover exactly the same details and bring no new substance to the topic), but they "win" because of Google's recency bias. I don't have ads on my site so it doesn't cost me anything, but it feels bad to see parasites win.

I get that it's a hard problem--some information doesn't stay accurate over time, such as information about technology. But history doesn't change much.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 2:37 PM on September 20 [6 favorites]

I always wondered why such mid content always got such high search ranking. Honestly though, what exactly was Forbes again? Wasn't it some middlebrow conservative magazine in the 90s or something like that? And some dude in a silly bowtie who kept saying "flat tax!" It's a brand I barely even remember, and yet somehow they suddenly have something to say about everything.
posted by panama joe at 8:06 AM on September 21 [3 favorites]

Yes, that is the 'parasite' part. a separate entity essentially hollowed out Forbes.com from the inside. this has nothing at all to do with forbes the magazine or whatever.
posted by Rhomboid at 8:39 AM on September 21 [3 favorites]

I've seen even DuckDuckGo search results take a nosedive in quality over the last couple of years. Looking for good medical information yields particularly laughable results, and don't even try searching for a book unless you want pages and pages of Amazon results from all over the world.

So I do think the problem is bigger than Google and Forbes/Marketplace.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 12:13 PM on September 21

the [Google] search quality team was disbanded

Do you have a reference for what you mean by that?

Not one I can find easily, but it was a few social media comments to the effect that their Google friends said thr search quality team had effectively lost their political backing and were moved into the general search group - not getting fired, but not having quality as their primary job or equal footing to push back against the people who want to optimize for time on site / ad impressions. This could easily be a rumor or misunderstanding but it would certainly fit the recent decline.
posted by adamsc at 2:07 PM on September 21 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the followup, I was afraid I'd missed some news. Search Quality has had a lot of problems over at Google. A lot of the old timers who were there from the beginning started leaving about seven years ago or so, no drama but just ready to move on. Then more recent problems that might be attributable to leadership: The Man Who Killed Google (linked above) is the definitive recent piece on ties between Google ads and search quality. There's been a recent change in at head of search, too.

Anyway all this looks to me like "Search Quality Team in turmoil", not "disbanded". Internally the company must understand how much their quality is slipping. Their AI work is really doing poorly too. I imagine the mood over there is pretty grim for the folks who aren't just checked out.
posted by Nelson at 2:28 PM on September 21 [1 favorite]

Yeah, that wax probably the wrong term to use. Maybe “defanged”?

It’s sad for me both because I remember telling people to switch from things like Alta Vista to Google back in the day, and because working in the cultural heritage space meant that I’d been rooting for Google to beat the predictions some colleagues made that GLAMs couldn’t rely on Google. Surely if anyone was going to… nope, and almost all of the people I knew there got tired of pushing boulders uphill and moved on.
posted by adamsc at 5:14 PM on September 22 [2 favorites]

I remember telling people to switch from things like Alta Vista to Google back in the day

Which was great advice, back in the day. Before its IPO, Google was genuinely excellent.

It really is striking, the extent to which these huge limited-liability corporations behave like life forms in their own right. Reading the business press is like watching amoebae on a microscope slide.
posted by flabdablet at 9:52 PM on September 22 [1 favorite]

I remember when there were arguments about the market cap of companies like Google, one of the arguments put forth in their favor was that they provided something like a public good - without Google, you'd have to spend much more time searching for things, which resulted in millions of tiny efficiencies that added up to justify their valuation. Nobody makes those arguments anymore because it's clear they are not in the business of providing useful information, they are in the business of selling ads. Given the institutional incentive, in retrospect it's obvious how this is how things would trend.

The other day I was looking up a figure you'd find from government statistical publications and no matter how I phrased it, required exact terms, etc, Google refused to show me what I was looking for and instead served up a more commonly searched for figure that was emphatically not what I wanted. Frustrated, I went to Kagi and it got it on the first try. I feel very strongly in the name of making things "user friendly", "accessible", and "helpful" to the lowest denominator, product managers have greatly reduced the utility of their tools in the hands of other users.
posted by ndr at 4:46 PM on September 24 [1 favorite]

I've been trying to tailor google search limiters and I swear it TRIES to give you crappier results the more of their crap sites you try to filter out.

Take, for example, to get Google to show me the REAL minecraft wiki when searching for "minecraft villager types" not the craptastic fandom.com wiki. Naturally, since it's total shit, Google puts fandom.com at the top.

The search string "minecraft villager types" puts the real wiki six links from the top, and under the image search it puts in. But it does link to the villager page on the real wiki at least.

So let's filter out fandom.com: "minecraft villager types -fandom.com"

The real wiki is still in 6th place, but now it's below those six links, the AI crap, the images, the videos, the OTHER AI generated crap, and "people also ask"

Oh, and suddenly now it links to village on the real wiki, not villager.

OK, so...

New search "minecraft villager types -fandom.com -radiotimes.com -apexminecrafthosting.com -beebom.com -youtube.com" those new three being the top results (ick) for the search and minus youtube because of course I don't want videos.

Now reddit is the top result. But hey, at least the real minecraft wiki now only has four shit results before you see it. But it still links to village on the wiki.

Top result is reddit followed by three D list wannabe game sites.

New search: "minecraft villager types -fandom.com -radiotimes.com -apexminecrafthosting.com -beebom.com -youtube.com -reddit.com"

And now it decides to punish me for refusing to accept all the shit it tried to offer earlier instead of just giving me the actual wiki which should have been the top result from the outset.

The real wiki isn't even on the first page of search results now. It starts with the three D list game sites, adds another, Quara, IGN, and feedback.minecraft.net

The real wiki isn't on the SECOND page anymore. I keep getting people's blogs, Z list wannabe game sites, the search now turns up shit like "Minecraft Villager Job Tier List".

The real wiki is the second result on the THIRD page. And it's still linking to village not villagER.

So let's omit terms, like "tier" and "guide" to filter out some of the blogspam shit.

New search: "minecraft villager types -fandom.com -radiotimes.com -apexminecrafthosting.com -beebom.com -youtube.com -reddit.com -tier -guide -"rant" -quora.com"

It punishes us more. It is digging as deeply as it can to avoid showing us the real wiki. We get github mods now. We're getting -ZZZ ranked personal blogs. We're getting the minecraft forum four different times. All on page one.

Page two is more of the same plus tiktok.

Page three is scraping the bottom of the barrel for the most rinkydink no viewership usually AI generated blogspam.

By page 9 I have not seen the real wiki.

The more you try to filter the crap between you and the actual real source, the deeper Google hides it until finally you are punished for refusing to click their shit by having the real source completely and utterly vanish.

I will concede if you search "minecraft villager types wiki -fandom.com" it turns up the real wiki as the first result.

But you shouldn't have to.

The more crap you try to filter, the more crap google feeds you to keep you from finding what you're looking for. You cannot tailor your search to omit the shit. Google will not permit it.
posted by sotonohito at 6:56 PM on September 24 [6 favorites]

product managers have greatly reduced the utility of their tools

Yes, BUT they launched features! Now they can get promoted, and get the hell out of Search.
posted by aramaic at 8:52 PM on September 24 [1 favorite]

Follow-up from Lars Lofgren: The same people are running fake websites at CNN and USA Today.
posted by mbrubeck at 8:24 AM on September 27 [1 favorite]