I realize this is not your typical CNW article, but I’m taking a moment to vent some frustrations we have been dealing with in recent months. Specifically, I’m going to talk about the very annoying ways Google is organizing and displaying results for “net worth” searches today. Taking a step back in time, at one point (circa 2010 – 2016) CNW and Google had a very symbiotic relationship. Unfortunately, between roughly 2016 and 2019, the relationship became very antagonistic from Google. During those years, if you performed any net worth search in Google, the search page would display a giant unclickable answer at the top of the page, with the information scraped directly from our site. The situation got so bad that in 2019, the United States Congress actually called me in to testify against Google during an investigation into the company’s monopoly antitrust violations. You can read my full testimony here. Over the next few years after testifying, I actually saw Google pull back from its aggressive and antagonistic “answer boxes” for a while. Things were somewhat… normal and symbiotic again. Then came ChatGPT. I don’t use ChatGPT, and I dont actually know anyone who does. I’m fairly confident that most people still predominantly do their web searching in Google (via Safari on an iPhone or Chrome on an Android). For whatever reason, Google seems to be terrified of ChatGPT. Or maybe more directly, Google is terrified of looking like it isn’t at the forefront of the supposed AI revolution. As a result, and you’ve probably seen this in your own searches, Google has loaded the top of its search result page with a bunch of AI answers. They call it “AI Overview” (AIO). Here’s a real example: Right now, when I google “Christian Bale net worth,” Google displays a giant AIO with a bunch of bland text scraped from two articles from a site called “Digital Dev: Hot Hollywood.”
If you scroll another page down, this is what Google displays:
And btw, the above screenshots are from my desktop computer. The mobile experience is actually worse, and most people today are searching via their mobile phones. As you can see in the screenshots above, Google has created two full pages of results with a bunch of random widgets and boxes and photos, with only ONE organic link to a website. That website is seemingly calpoly.edu, the website for Cal Poly University. As it turns out, Cal Poly’s website was hacked, and some nefarious actor has inserted tens of thousands of AI-generated celebrity slop articles into a subdirectory. If you notice from my first screenshot above, Google’s AIO answer text is scraped from two of these hacked Cal Poly AI slop articles. It gets better! At some point in recent weeks, Cal Poly discovered the hack and deleted/blocked those thousands of AI slop pages. So, if you click any of the links Google is displaying so prominently right now, they actually go to dead pages! And yet, whenever you do any net worth search in Google right now, I bet you will see something like this:
Or this:
Or this:
Another Frustration
When I search “Brad Pitt net worth” right now, CelebrityNetWorth.com – the actual source of this info – is nowhere on the first page of Google. We are in the middle of the second page. The first page consists of:
The Cal Poly hacked site answer box Google’s “People also ask” widget Google’s “Top Stories” widget Style Caster article that credits CNW (published a week ago) DailyMail article that credits CNW (published yesterday) Parade.com article that credits CNW (published 16 hours ago) Brad’s wiki page that has no mention of his net worth finance-monthly.com AI slop article published two days ago Hindustantimes.com AI slop article published this morning Google’s Random video widget
Daily Express article from yesterday Screenrant.com article from September titled “Brad Pitt: Net Worth, Age, Height & Everything You Need to Know” Hindustan Times again! Finally, CelebrityNetWorth.com
Conclusion
I am fairly confident that Google will nuke the deleted Cal Poly AI spam site from its search results at some point, but that doesn’t solve the bigger issue that scares me. Actually, two bigger issues: Believe me, the last thing I want to do in the world is write articles like this. I just want to publish the best website in the world. A website users love when they can actually find it! Can we please get back to that? If you made it this far, can you please subscribe to CNW’s newly launched newsletter, “Deep Pockets”? Every week, Deep Pockets tells the story of a major fortune being made or lost. Recent “Deep Pockets” stories have been about Coca-Cola, Michael Jordan, the Super Soaker, Capri Sun… I am having so, so, so much fun researching and writing these stories each week and I think you would really enjoy reading them. There are no ads, and the newsletter is totally free. I have no idea how this will make money. Maybe it won’t ever. In the meantime, writing them each week is a nice distraction from Google’s shenanigans. So please subscribe by entering your email in the box below; I would really appreciate it:
-Brian [email protected]
