Technology

59197 readers

2512 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

244

Google results insist a Bugsnax sequel is coming out next month, but there's one small problem: Its devs aren't making one (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 99 points 1 month ago (8 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

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?

load more comments (3 replies)

load more comments (6 replies)