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Over the past few years the popular search engine Google has made many updates in an attempt to help viewers find the answers they need without clicking onto any non-Google website. This has often resulted in many mixed results.
The most recent of these features is Google search’s “Helpful Content” update, which uses a machine learning algorithm to scan sites across Google’s search system to automatically display an answer to any question a viewer may have.
While it may sound helpful on paper, this system has had a drastically negative effect on website owners ever since it was released in the middle of September. In the ten days since the system released there have been several Reddit threads from website owners discussing how across the board traffic has gone down.
The reason for this, as outlined in Google’s update notes, is that Google has siphoned the “helpful” information to be displayed without sending traffic to any site while simultaneously suppressing the impressions of sites the algorithm deems to be “unhelpful”. Resulting in less clicks to nearly all sites in the engine.
This update doesn’t just harm website owners however, as it also has a negative effect on people who want to use the Google search engine to find out basic information. Due to a deluge of false information online and AI content that Google’s algorithm cannot distinguish from true answers, it’s helpful content answers have become unreliable, in some ways more hilarious than others.
One of the more humorous cases of misinformation put front and center via this Google update was discovered by niche website owners on Facebook. Upon doing a simple search for how many legs a chicken has he was greeted by Google’s answer that the bipedal animal in fact had four legs.
Aside from claiming the chickens may have two extra appendages invisible to the human eye, Google search also claims that the average human has anywhere between 6-8 legs. The reason for this is that the algorithm has deemed the most helpful post on the subject to be a Quora post that was made as a joke in 2022.
Misinformation like this is expected to become common as Google’s Helpful content algorithm continues to make mistakes like this in the future and continues to suppress smaller sites with actual information.
Perhaps in the future Google will update their algorithm again to something that is less harmful to both website owners and people simply using the search engine, for now though website owners are expected to adapt to this new system and hope for the best.
