Looking at that specific site, it might be generated, or it might be an author hastily copy/pasting information into a template. (On that same site, there are many "Is X poisonous?" articles with identical overall structures.) Overall though, the legitimacy of this particular site is easy to challenge. The "About Us" page claims the site is an individual's passion project, but the "Contact Us" page is blank and deactivating my ad blocker revealed a half-dozen autoplaying videos.
I remember first seeing pages of this kind in the late aughts. Previously, search strings such as "games similar to X" would mainly yield forum discussions. After that, searches would mainly show sites clearly generated from a template, that had zero-effort pages on "games similar to X" for every halfway popular game, boosted by SEO. The situation is slightly better now, but boilerplate sites still rank too high on the results.
Tangentially, I didn't realize until I wrote this reply that Startpage is just a frontend for Google searches. Sigh. Maybe I'll give Mojeek a try.
I do think that chatbot text generation is going to be a big problem going forward, though. And then the search chatbots will be using other chatbots as part of their training data. It's going to be strange.
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chiming
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Date: 2023-05-05 12:26 am (UTC)From:I remember first seeing pages of this kind in the late aughts. Previously, search strings such as "games similar to X" would mainly yield forum discussions. After that, searches would mainly show sites clearly generated from a template, that had zero-effort pages on "games similar to X" for every halfway popular game, boosted by SEO. The situation is slightly better now, but boilerplate sites still rank too high on the results.
Tangentially, I didn't realize until I wrote this reply that Startpage is just a frontend for Google searches. Sigh. Maybe I'll give Mojeek a try.
I do think that chatbot text generation is going to be a big problem going forward, though. And then the search chatbots will be using other chatbots as part of their training data. It's going to be strange.