OK, maybe a slight exaggeration.
But I remember a time when 90% of sites weren't "fake" - existing only to get you to install malware, or just wanting you to land on their page for a couple seconds for advertising revenue. And the number of these sites - but more importantly their percentage of the total, seems to be rocketing upwards.
A (somewhat trivial) example: you used to be able to search for coupons to use on e-commerce sites and... actually find them. There were only a few sites doing this to start with, and you could get genuine coupons from them, easily.
These days 99.9995% of all the "voucher code" sites indexed by Google are either attack sites, or just advertising sites, getting money for clicks. They don't offer any genuine voucher codes, and you can pretty much tell straight away when they appear in Google as "90% off that thing you want! Get deal fo sure! 100% gen-u-ine. No fake site, honest! 90% That big number! You click me please!"
Add to that the amount of misinformation that everyone and his dog is now repeating on their "blog" or twitter or random Facebook junk page.
Even supposed technical sites like Microsoft's TechNet are filled to the brim with automated/scripted responses that don't even try to answer the question. Just people/bots going through the motions, filling the 'Net with more useless crap. More unanswered questions. All recorded for evermore.
And Google! Remember when it actually searched for what you asked it to search for? Before you had to click "Verbatim" just so it didn't ignore your search terms? Remember when it didn't just guess what it thought you might have wanted, and shown your results for that, instead of what you actually searched for? And now it even ignores stuff I put in quotes, when it thinks it knows best. Thanks, Google.
Maybe I'm just an old git, but it seems we've gone past "peak internet usefulness". Now it's becoming/has become a tool for generating revenue from us, whether we like it or not. And fake sites/attack sites/data miners/social engineering sites seem to make up the bulk of it now.
Feel free to disagree
But I remember a time when 90% of sites weren't "fake" - existing only to get you to install malware, or just wanting you to land on their page for a couple seconds for advertising revenue. And the number of these sites - but more importantly their percentage of the total, seems to be rocketing upwards.
A (somewhat trivial) example: you used to be able to search for coupons to use on e-commerce sites and... actually find them. There were only a few sites doing this to start with, and you could get genuine coupons from them, easily.
These days 99.9995% of all the "voucher code" sites indexed by Google are either attack sites, or just advertising sites, getting money for clicks. They don't offer any genuine voucher codes, and you can pretty much tell straight away when they appear in Google as "90% off that thing you want! Get deal fo sure! 100% gen-u-ine. No fake site, honest! 90% That big number! You click me please!"
Add to that the amount of misinformation that everyone and his dog is now repeating on their "blog" or twitter or random Facebook junk page.
Even supposed technical sites like Microsoft's TechNet are filled to the brim with automated/scripted responses that don't even try to answer the question. Just people/bots going through the motions, filling the 'Net with more useless crap. More unanswered questions. All recorded for evermore.
And Google! Remember when it actually searched for what you asked it to search for? Before you had to click "Verbatim" just so it didn't ignore your search terms? Remember when it didn't just guess what it thought you might have wanted, and shown your results for that, instead of what you actually searched for? And now it even ignores stuff I put in quotes, when it thinks it knows best. Thanks, Google.
Maybe I'm just an old git, but it seems we've gone past "peak internet usefulness". Now it's becoming/has become a tool for generating revenue from us, whether we like it or not. And fake sites/attack sites/data miners/social engineering sites seem to make up the bulk of it now.
Feel free to disagree
