Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers
arstechnica.com
“Spreading misinformation suddenly becomes a noble goal,” Redditor says.

A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Search’s reliance on Reddit and Google’s AI Overview.

Apparently, some London residents are getting fed up with social media influencers whose reviews make long lines of tourists at their favorite restaurants, sometimes just for the likes. Christian Calgie, a reporter for London-based news publication Daily Express, pointed out this trend on X yesterday, noting the boom of Redditors referring people to Angus Steakhouse, a chain restaurant, to combat it.

Again, at this point the Angus Steakhouse hype doesn’t appear to have made it into AI Overview. But it is appearing in Search results. And while this is far from being a dangerous attempt to manipulate search results or AI algorithms, it does highlight the pitfalls of Google results becoming dependent on content generated by users who could very easily have intentions other than providing helpful information. This is also far from the first time that online users, including on platforms outside of Reddit, have publicly declared plans to make inaccurate or misleading posts in an effort to thwart AI scrapers.

  • Snot FlickermanEnglish
    222·
    30 days ago

    lmao, nobody cares when it’s big companies silently manipulating the results like this to the benefit of influencers, but once regular people become enraged enough to poison the data, now it’s something to talk about and totally represents how dystopian everything has gotten!

    And while this is far from being a dangerous attempt to manipulate search results or AI algorithms, it does highlight the pitfalls of Google results becoming dependent on content generated by users who could very easily have intentions other than providing helpful information

    Thanks for joining us in 2009, ArsTechnica. Hang on, I’ll grab my “Three Wolf Moon” t-shirt.

    https://www.theregister.com/2009/04/17/time_top_100_hack/

    Time Magazine’s poll of the 100 most influential people has been hacked by a motley band of online troublemakers who have managed to manipulate the top 21 names so their first letters spell “marblecake, also the game.”

    • Vanth@reddthat.comEnglish
      34·
      30 days ago

      It’s the new WallStreetBets GameStop saga. Fine when big companies manipulate the market, bad when normal people do it on a much smaller scale.

    • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
      25·
      30 days ago

      Also, uh, hasn’t Google been dependent on user generated content since 1998?

      Like how is that remotely news that a search engine indexes other people’s data to, you know, provide search results?

      You could have seeded nonsense into Google any time in the past nearly 3 decades because that’s how all of this works, so how is this shocking other than some Job Creator somewhere made $3 less than they would have otherwise and now it’s a catastrophe that must have new laws made?

      • sbv@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        25·
        30 days ago

        You could have seeded nonsense into Google any time in the past nearly 3 decades because that’s how all of this works

        That’s the SEO arms race. Ad peddlers have been creating sites to bump up their Page Rank, and Google has been adding secret sauce to detect and deprioritize them.

        The difference is that Google over prioritized Reddit pages, trusting Reddit’s updoots. Google now needs to find other signals to determine if a Reddit post is as valuable as the updoots suggest.