this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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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.

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[–] Chozo@fedia.io 99 points 2 months 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?

[–] Snowpix@lemmy.ca 9 points 2 months ago

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.

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