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- Nepalis fear more floods as climate change melts glaciers
- Honduras arrests environmentalist's alleged murderer
- Padres pitcher Musgrove needs elbow surgery
- Supreme Court lets stand rules to curb mercury, methane emissions
- Boston beat Denver in NBA exhibition season opener, but Jokic says omens are good
- Chagos diaspora angry at lack of input on islands' fate
- Biden says 'not confident' of peaceful US election
- US trade chief defends tariff hikes when paired with investment
- Lukaku stars as Napoli beat Como to hold Serie A top spot
- Ohtani set for MLB playoff debut as Dodgers face Padres
- Pogba's drug ban cut to 18 months from four years
- Devine leads New Zealand to big win over India in Women's T20 World Cup
- Bosnia floods kill 16 people
- EU court blocks French ban on vegetable 'steak' labelling
- Prosecutors seek dismissal of rape charges against French rugby players
- Meta AI turns pictures into videos with sound
- Bolivia's Morales says claims he raped a minor are a 'lie'
- MLB Reds hire two-time champion Francona as manager
- Daniel Maldini receives first Italy call-up for Nations League
- US dockworkers return to ports after three-day strike
- Ancelotti points finger at Madrid's 'lack of intensity'
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- What happens next in Iran-Israel conflict?
- Country star Garth Brooks denies rape accusations
- Stubbs hits maiden century as South Africa make 343-4 against Ireland
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- Odegaard injury has forced Arsenal to be 'different', says Arteta
- Ratcliffe refuses to guarantee Ten Hag's Man Utd future
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- Mauritius to hold legislative election on November 10
- Britain qualify for America's Cup final after 60-year wait
- IMF asks Sri Lanka to protect hard-won gains
- Morata returns to Spain Nations League squad after injury
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- Public allowed to see video evidence in France mass rape trial
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- De Bruyne out of Belgium Nations League squad
- Japanese trainer Yahagi hopes Shin Emperor achieves 50-year-old Arc dream
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- Bosnia floods kill 14 people
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'Google is broken': How an algorithm tweak cost livelihoods
Google made major changes to its search algorithm and spam filters earlier this year to get rid of low-quality content -- but the effects have proved devastating to some smaller websites.
Online businesses have been left considering layoffs and even site closures after Google's massive upgrade in March and April caused catastrophic drops in traffic.
Gisele Navarro is one of the unlucky ones whose website got caught up in Google's dragnet.
The 37-year-old Argentine runs the HouseFresh website with her husband, and they had been building a healthy niche in product reviews for air purifiers since 2020.
There were no ads, no product placements and no soft-pedalling -- if a product was bad, the site's reviewers would say so.
They earned commissions from clickthroughs to Amazon.
But Google's update changed all of that.
"We found that we went from ranking number one -- because we were one of the only people who had actually done a review -- to not even showing up," she told AFP.
HouseFresh used to get around 4,000 referrals from Google search a day, but this has since collapsed to around 200.
The dropoff in business has been so bad that Navarro said she had been advised to shutter the site and start over with a new domain name.
- Updates 'helpful' -
Underpinning the frustration for Navarro and many other sites is the lack of clarity over how Google ranks results.
The US firm is notoriously secretive about its algorithms -- so much so that an entire industry known as "search engine optimisation" has grown up trying to game the algorithm to get more clicks.
The latest update sent SEO experts into a tailspin, desperately trying to unpack why some sites were boosted and others getting downranked.
Google told AFP in an email that its update was designed specifically to give users "fewer results that feel made for search engines".
"The only changes we launch are ones that our experiments have shown will meaningfully improve results for people. And we do believe that these updates have been helpful," Google said.
Yet Navarro showed in a widely shared blog post in May that people searching for product reviews were increasingly being fed ads and content that appeared to be AI-generated or SEO-maximised.
- 'Tough market' -
Other material boosted by Google's update included user-generated content from websites like Reddit and Quora.
Google defended this approach saying "people often want to learn from others' experiences", adding: "We conduct rigorous testing to ensure results are helpful and high quality."
But staff at one European news website said their articles were now being routinely outranked by largely irrelevant content from Reddit.
The site publisher, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said referrals from Google had plummeted by between 20 to 30 percent since the update -- and cutbacks would be inevitable.
"In an already tough market this is a serious problem for independent publishers like us," they said.
All the businesses AFP talked to said they were now urgently seeking ways to avoid relying on Google search -- whether by writing newsletters, making podcasts or finding other ways to attract audiences.
The boss of a fintech news outlet, who spoke to AFP anonymously fearing adverse effects on their business, said their competitors all employed SEO firms "to buy traffic".
"We don't do that but it's getting harder to hold that position as those sites didn't fall anywhere near as much as ours after this Google update," they said.
Navarro, who has had to reduce her staff drastically, has pivoted to video reviews and newsletters to try to reconnect with her audience.
And despite her experience with Google, she remains an optimist about the web.
She has been heartened by the many messages of support, and an uptick in referrals from alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo.
"The entire knowledge of humankind is on the web -- and that's worth something," she said.
"I don't want to give up on it just because Google is broken."
A.F.Rosado--PC