Doesn't basic PageRank for search engines solve the problem of search results filling up with AI junk?
As in, a page should only rank well if the page is linked to from websites that have good reputations.
So it's unlikely reputable news websites are going to link to and boost the search rank of sites full of fake articles and fake images, and any news website that did would quickly start to lose reputation/trust and their own ranking.
Before AI, the web was already full of unlimited junk, spun articles, clickbait and spam, with backlink farms trying to promote it. What's different here?
> The site itself is mostly an AI generated mess, on top of that - its rankings are manipulated by articles like this, ... Most of these articles look like a traditional "link pyramid" network.
So the problem is not being able to detect link pyramids? Where is the link pyramid getting its PageRank reputation from and can't you ban the lot of them once the manipulation is discovered?
I think there could also be the converse problem: quality content hosted on some small website could be hard to discover in the first place, since no one links at it.
Where would these backlink farms get their reputable backlinks from to make this work though?
It's not like e.g. the BBC are going to start linking to AI generated articles without checking their accuracy. And if they did, the BBC would risk their PageRank influence and their own ranking.
I get backlink farms can work right now and Google doesn't strictly follow PageRank, but I'm asking if the PageRank concept used in the right way would help.
Maybe you then run into a social problem: while the PageRank algorithm would dictate to downrank BBC in that case, would the search engine provider actually be willng to downrank such a popular organization? Think even about places that sperad misinformation and conspiracy theories. Those host poor quality content, but generate traffic so AFAIK don't get penalized in search results.
As in, a page should only rank well if the page is linked to from websites that have good reputations.
So it's unlikely reputable news websites are going to link to and boost the search rank of sites full of fake articles and fake images, and any news website that did would quickly start to lose reputation/trust and their own ranking.
Before AI, the web was already full of unlimited junk, spun articles, clickbait and spam, with backlink farms trying to promote it. What's different here?