BHPian shrinz.vivek recently shared this with other enthusiasts.
I was trying to find the difference between Ford Figo and Freestyle and as usual, I hit it up on google. Normally the best answer to any google question is within the top 3 or 5 results.
But the top 6 results look like it was written by a computer and not a human. For example: The line "Figo has 1499 cc (Diesel top model) engine, while Freestyle has 1499 cc (Diesel top model) engine" could not have been written by human.
The 7th result was more satisfactory and went something like this - "The Freestyle is essentially a more rugged-looking Figo facelift, just that it was launched a year before the hatchback".
Many such instances makes me wonder, is the internet filled with auto generated articles? If yes, how authentic is it? Like many other skills, will we lose our essay writing or comprehension skills sooner than expected? What will be the impact of this on future generations who grow up reading such material?
Here's what BHPian m8002? had to say on the matter:
They are auto generated and that's the only way they can do it. They are not going to have some human (that too who knows his cars ) come up write ups for comparison for 1000's of combinations. Thats just impossible.
Most of these sites allow you to compare the Alto, BMW 5 series and a Lambo side by side. So they end up with automated content generators. Some of the better sites would remove these or change the wordings.
Here's what BHPian CoolFire had to say on the matter:
Yes, most comparison sites simply use these kind of bot made descriptions. Whether pure bots or lazy copy paste jobs is something that does not matter even. Same thing happens in most popular comparisons like mobiles, laptops, game consoles or other popular electronic gadgets. On the brighter side, that is precisely why forums like Team-BHP thrives even after all the commercial onslaughts.
Tips I found useful to tackle this :
1. If you have time and patience, video search often gives better results.
2. In searches of such topics add the keyword "forum" to spot good discussions like what you find here.
3. Key in the name of the specific forum, magazine or website you know is good in that area in the search string.
Here's what BHPian Rehaan had to say on the matter:
Speaking about this problem in general:
- Indeed this is a huge problem, and a big money-maker too. Thousands of average auto-generated content pieces can usually garner way more traffic than dozens of good hand-written ones. That's the unfortunate truth.
- It's only going to get worse, as artificial intelligence and neural networks get put to use for these tasks. That's going to make it harder and harder for humans to spot it too.
- The problem is that Google laps these pages up, since they've been specifically designed to appease their algorithms.
- Unfortunately I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel, unless Google takes a stronger stance. Either by having some huge breakthrough in their ranking intelligence, or penalizing these pages heavily when caught, lowering their rankings, or relying on human feedback to spot these generated pages.
- Another question is, where does one draw the line? What is an acceptable auto-generated page, and what is not? If it's just side by side data, it's okay, but if it's woven into sentences, it's not??
- Google always talks about their E-A-T rankings (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). However, unfortunately the tech giant seems to be doing a pretty poor job when it comes to spotting this accurately. Simply put, it's one against a million. The competition that's trying to outsmart Google is too smart, too many in number and moving much faster.
- The same can also be seen on Youtube, where bots put together videos on topics, using stock footage libraries, generated scripts, and text-to-voice. Thankfully Youtube relies on the community for thumbs up/down & comments as ranking factors, so that keeps this junk content from being high up on most search results on Youtube. Google search however does not have anywhere near as strong a community feedback loop.
- Another sad thing to witness is Copy-Paste journalism, where the information is just ingested at one place, and regurgitated at another -- with no value add, critical thought or expert opinion added. I think Google is a little better at spotting this, and also giving the original source more weightage in search results.
- Recently I saw a website that let you copy-paste text into it, and it would re-write it using synonyms, changing words and sentence structures, so that you'd end up with a totally unique (ie. untraceable) content piece. I bet it's a hit with kids trying to do homework!
Check out BHPian comments for more insights and information.