- Madrid beat Villarreal but Carvajal suffers knee injury
- Madrid beat Villarreal to move level with Liga leaders Barcelona
- Monaco take top spot in Ligue 1 with win at Rennes
- French rugby player on rape charge whistled but 'serene' on return
- Madrid beat Villarreal to level Liga leaders Barca
- Thuram treble fires Inter past Torino and up to second
- 'Fight': defiant Trump jets in to site of rally shooting
- Toddler among 3 dead in migrant Channel crossings
- Mexico City's new mayor sworn in with pledges on water, housing
- Israel on alert ahead of Hamas attack anniversary
- Guardians maul Tigers in MLB playoff series opener
- Macron criticises Israel on Gaza, Lebanon operations
- French rugby player whistled but 'serene' on return amid ongoing rape case
- Kovacic stars as Man City sink Fulham to get title bid back on track
- Retegui hat-trick fires five-star Atalanta to hammering of Genoa
- Heavyweights Australia, England off to World Cup winning starts
- Visiting UN refugee agency chief decries 'terrible crisis' in Lebanon
- Spinners come to party as England defeat Bangladesh at T20 World Cup
- Search continues for missing in deadly Bosnia floods
- Man City sink Fulham to get title bid back on track
- France's Auradou whistled on Pau return in Perpignan loss amid ongoing rape case
- A 'forgotten' valley in storm-hit North Carolina, desperate for help
- Arsenal hit back in style after Southampton scare
- Thousands march for Palestinians ahead of Oct 7 anniversary
- Hezbollah heir apparent Safieddine out of contact after strikes
- Liverpool stay top of Premier League as Arsenal, Man City win
- In dank Tour of Emilia, Pogacar shines in rainbow jersey
- DR Congo launches mpox vaccination drive, hoping to curb outbreak
- Trump returns to site of failed assassination
- Careless Leverkusen held to Bundesliga draw
- O'Brien's 'superstar' Kyprios posts landmark win on Arc weekend
- Toddler crushed to death in migrant Channel crossing
- Liverpool suffer Alisson injury blow
- Habosi helps Racing beat Vannes before Auradou's playing return
- Thousands march in London in support of Palestinians, 1 year after Oct 7
- Israel readying response to Iran missile attack
- Schutt, Mooney help Australia beat Sri Lanka in Women's T20 World Cup
- Liverpool extend Premier League lead with win at Palace
- Djokovic 'shakes rust off' to make third round of Shanghai Masters
- 'Imperfect' PSG fighting on all fronts - Luis Enrique
- Struggling Pakistan look to thwart adaptable England
- Child 'trampled to death' in asylum seekers' Channel crossing: minister
- Gauff fights back to set up Beijing final against Muchova
- Guardiola claims Premier League won't delay season for Man City
- Israel to mark October 7 attack as Gaza war spreads
- Gauff fights back to reach China Open final
- Recovering Stokes ruled out of first Pakistan Test
- Hezbollah battles troops on border as Israel pounds Lebanon
- Alcaraz, Sinner breeze into third round of Shanghai Masters
- Bagnaia wins Japan MotoGP sprint to cut Martin's lead
'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."
X.Karnes--AMWN