Getting your game noticed is a tricky business when you have to punch through the noise of the more than 10,000 new Steam games releasing each year. Young Horses, the developer of Bugsnax and Octodad, have found itself in an even trickier spot: Thanks to Google, people are expecting a Bugsnax sequel that doesn’t exist.
“We are not working on a Bugsnax sequel right now and I need AI bs to stop telling kids we are based on a wiki ideas fanfic,” Young Horses co-founder and president Philip Tibitoski tweeted earlier today. It turns out, through the wonders of algorithmic search result curation, Google’s featured snippets have been informing people that Bugsnax 2 will be releasing in October 2024, despite the fact that neither Young Horses or any other developer are making it.
I’ll be real, I think this is more of a problem with Fandom than Google. Fandom has been abusing the fuck out of their SEO lately, and manage to push their shitty site to the top results on almost any fiction media-related search you do now.
Yeah, Google’s AI got the preview wrong, but it probably wouldn’t have happened if Fandom wasn’t constantly injecting themselves into every single search. They allow users to post anything they want, without any vetting, and then push those inaccurate posts to the search engines.
Half the time, the page on Fandom is a 100% copy/paste of the page from Wikipedia, except with a thousand ads littering the page. Guess which one shows up first in the search results, though?
On the one hand, yes, and Fandom is a blight on the internet.
On the other hand, AI like ChatGPT are wrong some 53% of the time. The fact that this is another “use nontoxic glue to keep your cheese from falling off of pizza” situation doesn’t mean that Google isn’t equally culpable for doing nothing to prevent these sorts of occurrences even when the sources are right (AI is as likely to make things up that aren’t even in its cited sources as it is to actually give you info from them).
Fandom has always been a shitty company abusing the spirit of CC licenses. They animating the husks of dead wikis whose communities moved to selfhost just so they can show autoplay video ads.
Support independent wikis by installing extensions https://getindie.wiki/ and https://support.wiki.gg/wiki/Wiki.gg_Redirect. (Also get yourself a mobile browser that supports extensions: Firefox on Android and Orion on iOS).
I made the mistake of hosting my wiki about civil defense sirens on Fandom. Moving all 187 pages to a better mediawiki site has been a pain in the ass but it’s worth getting off of Fandom.
You are right, the article and the users on Twitter are all blaming Google and the AI but the blame is at the source of information.
Nah. It would be easy and probably responsible for google to ban site’s that are malicious like that from poisoning their AI. I think the blame rests squarely on google.
I think this is an ESH situation. Fandom sucks for pushing their poison, Google sucks for drinking it
Isn’t just summarizing the top/sponsored link instead of pulling from all sources the issue, though? Like sure, Fandom is gaming the SEO system, but why is the obnoxious Google AI that’s the first thing you see just pulling from one source?
I mean, I don’t see a reason to get upset with Google here – Google’s got no incentive to have the SEO crowd do well, combat them too – but it’s Google that isn’t doing the right assessment with their page ranking system if the problem is that the better information source is Wikipedia and Fandom is being ranked more-highly.