You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool/software etc because everyone has gamed the "Best software for xyz" etc. But what's the alternative ? None. There are these "review" websites like Capterra/Software Advice/G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT if you want to be shown on the main page for that category, you need to pay crazy PPC.
Source: I play this game since I run a software business. Would love an alternative but there are none. You either Play the game or you Die.
From the point of view of someone who spent 10 years running an e-commerce store, and all its advertising, until a couple of years ago. Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead. The hay day of being able to play the game and make a tidy profit is long gone.
Google are playing every trick in the book to extract every possible cent from advertisers, spying on their business and sales to maximise their own profits. Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. People complain about the tracking of users/visitors, but the tracking of businesses is just as bad.
They probably have better insights into the economy and market trends than most governments and banks.
The penny is dropping, advertisers are noticing, my long term expectation of Google's business are not what they were.
Since ads are a red queen's race, wasting people's attention and assuming we don't want to outright ban them then the next best alternative is to tax them heavily.
How about 0.00001 cent per pixel-second-view?
Then people will only put up ads when there's some real value in it, not just to keep up with the competition.
There is no alternative. People talk about alternatives but everyone I've checked is even worse. Bing, DDG etc. All give complete garbage results. Perhaps not as gamified, but usually that just means you're going to a wordpress of a less competent admin.
The alternative is places where people congregate. Google used to be a great place to find relatively objective information, but being ad driven it’s all gone to commercial advertising. Word of mouth (IE searching with “[…] Reddit”) gives far better information.
And given the game is won by the highest bidder, all of the surplus created by technical progress goes to advertising which, as you point out, adds zero value and, in fact, detracts from rational agents making optimal decisions.
This is /exactly/ the kind of market failure where those of us who prefer smaller government want to start talking about appropriate regulation.
https://metaphor.systems/ is pretty good for exactly this kind of thing. The way the search algorithm is designed also make it extremely difficult to game.
The alternative for users is Kagi, which is superior to Google for search results.
For businesses, there is no good alternative to Google. Many are investing a lot of effort and money in social media, but the returns are very low compared to Google.
If you are trying to sell a product, I know one weird trick: Just make a product that people enjoy, and they will recommend it to others.
No need to pay for advertising, no need to play the SEO game. The only marketing you need for a decent product is a website with docs and a download button.
This works especially well if you have some sort of freemium product, because then the 90% of people who use the free version still act as multipliers.
I don't know if it works for all businesses, but it's worked for me over the last decade or so.
I cant speak for any site other than G2. We have multiple unpaid products that appear appropriately in their lists and quadrants. The question one has to ask themselves, just like in SEO "is my profile optimized" and try work out what their automations expect rather than paying for placement.
Is there no search engine that outright bans all commercial content?
There are plenty of searches where I want to find what real people are thinking, not what some company's article says. This kind of thing could easily be crowd-sourced a la SponsorBlock.
Hey @codegeek, have you tried SaaSHub? It's goal is to be more "objective" compared to Capterra & G2. Yet, it's questionable to what extent that is achieved.
It's so weird that Google still hasn't created the ability to block spam domains.
I don't think it's a technical difficulty but rather a management decision to allow spam as long as they have their adsense ads and it baffles me they just don't care about their end users at all.
I think being a monopoly with most competitors lagging a lap behind can make you this way, but with chatgpt catching up quick, Google better start thinking about their users now as it's a growing sentiment that their quality is totally bad nowadays and their uncaring attitude towards spam domains like Pinterest and spam search results where sites are creating hundreds of pages with same content and different heading is just not gonna cut it anymore.
Most of these spam content farms are covered with ads supplied by Google. The incentive isn't necessarily there to remove them.
On top of that the worse the search results, the more likely the user will click an ad rather than an organic result. The Google of old wouldn't have been tempted by that incentive, but that Google is long dead.
Bad search result = more revenue from ads.
Obviously it's a fine balance, they don't want to loose users, but they will have the metrics to (religiously) work from.
As someone who used to run ad campaigns on Google until a couple of years ago, they are doing the same to advertisers. Users will happily click an ad, go back to the result and try another, many many times. Google have systematically made the advertising on search results worse, showing ads more regularly for poorer placements, removing control and visible auditing. It's all so they can extract more revenue from the advertisers.
They actually did have it as an experimental feature for a little while, maybe 10 years ago. [0]
If I recall correctly, it was made available in response to another big wave of criticism directed towards Google about "Content Farms". It has been interesting to see the difference in response between the "Content Farm" debacle and what we are dealing with currently.
If anyone wants this capability, the chrome extension uBlacklist ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi... ) provides it. I've found it very useful for removing github scraper sites from search results. Whenever you see a garbage result in a google search, you just click "Block this site" and it's gone forever.
> I don't think it's a technical difficulty but rather a management decision to allow spam as long as they have their adsense ads
It is absolutely this, yes. They tell people where to go, and they also profit from the ads they put on the places they tell people to go, and they have no real competition[1]. It has made them one of the most valuable companies on the planet. There is no incentive for them to rank higher quality results over ad-filled pages.
> they just don't care about their end users at all.
They do, a lot actually. We're just not the end users. The advertisers are. Thet don't need to care about us since they're a monopoly. Use Brave Search, DuckDyckGo or something elae to help change that. Get other people to too.
> it baffles me they just don't care about their end users at all.
Just for you, especially for you in fact, I went and dug out this link to an interview with Corey Doctorow where he explains his theory of platform of “enshittification”.
I'm talking out of my ass here and know nothing about how search actually works in 2023, but I feel like their search problems really are solvable with their scale.
Like you said, a first step would be blocking spam domains.
Another would be a return to how the algorithm used work, prioritizing results that are frequently linked to elsewhere using the relevant keywords. In the '00s, this was quickly gamed by companies setting up endless blogs to link to their own products, but I feel it could be mitigated by assigning some kind of trustworthiness score to the sites doing the linking. It shouldn't be hard to recognize that a site being recommended a lot on Reddit or some other well established repository of user-generated content is going to be more genuine than "recommendations" from some random blogspam site nobody's heard of.
2) Spam is adversarial. They have the ability to block spam domains from last week, but it’s an ongoing investment as the adversaries adapt.
That said I do think Google depends too much on human raters who are not customers. It’s caused a lot of drift between the customer’s expectation of quality and Google’s.
> It's so weird that Google still hasn't created the ability to block spam domains
by who??? Google itself "blocks" or downgrades spam websites all the time. If they open it up to "the people", the same SEO crowd will rush in with scrapers to decimate competition, including any legit websites. So strange to see people jumping into conspiracy theories here without thinking of the consequences for a second.
After having used computers for a few years (oh, about 30), and having grown up with the internet (first dialup at age 16 in 1996), I gotta say,
Access to information should not have (ranked, optimizable, commercially-bent) search as its base interface. This is a cosmic, civilization-level screwup. Not only do you get the decades of SEO and advertising, but the whole system becomes lossy over time. You can't find what you used to anymore.
What's the alternative? Manually curated directories lost to search. Anything completely manual isn't going to be "web-scale". Anything algorithmic is ranked and optimizable.
Google was absolutely incredible when it first showed up. Now it is not great. When I want information all it gives me is shopping or listicles one step removed from shopping.
I've had good luck promoting my game on social media but when someone hears the name and Google's it they'll get results like pic related where someone has embedded an ad-wrapped knock-off of the game which contains more adverts.
https://imgur.com/a/mz07uyR
Personally I can't find much on Google if I'm actually searching for something I don't know about. Finding the local mechanic is fine but querying a programming question, health problem or recipe is absolutely fucked. I sold all my Google stock recently but should have done so sooner. The value they have is in gmail and gsuite accounts but I can see the search business is circling the drain.
Conspiracy theory: they love showing shitty sites because those sites display adverts making Google money.
Google will eat at it further with stuff like this from the article:
"Google knows this, so it adds a “Question and Answers” block before the first SERP result, probably diverting a tremendous amount of traffic away from that page."
They scrape answers from sites that they used to send traffic to and publish it themselves. In many cases, though, those sites won't exist without the incentive of organic search traffic.
I get why Google does it, but it does create a feedback loop where less of that info will be out there to scrape.
The majority of times when i search on google I'm looking for someone's personal take on a matter. Whether it's a software recommendation or alternative, a recipe, or experience with a tool. Google only has listicles, top x, or best in 202x.
I used to search reddit, but the hostile mobile page ruined that for me. Now i go to yandex and navigate through malware to find what i want.
It doesn't help that recent trend of developers building their content website with react and such, have no little to no concept of SEO.
Because of widespread spam, astroturfing, hidden shilling, and soon generative AI, there is no way to tell whether something written on the internet was actually someone's personal take or whether it is paid for. I'd argue there's no web forum or social media site anywhere where you can reliably say "this was posted by an actual human and was not paid for."
I've been looking recently for an opinion article on the Tailwind CSS framework, ideally listing its benefits, drawbacks, long-term maintenance considerations etc. There appears to be absolutely no way to find this type of information on Google these days.
I think it depends on the topic. On technical / software questions I do still find individual websites and blogs. For something like product reviews, my experience is exactly like yours and the only thing that shows up is the trash you mentioned.
I don't think this is a search problem, I think Google is legitimately surfacing what's available on the Internet for given query. I think this is the dead internet theory at play, and that there just isn't anything valuable to show!
People who would (in the past) run their own website or blog now post that same content on social media, which is why Reddit has become mandatory for people looking for genuine opinions.
Totally. The internet is full of blog sites explaining how to do things that are impossible. Like how to cast from vlc to dlna on Android. They'll have a whole page with bullet points and everything that ultimately involves using a Chromecast. I once ended up at a page about an emulator that was hallucinating in GPT3 levels. Something like playing Gran Turismo on an xbox emulator or something. They have no shame.
This is strangely where I've found the most personal benefit of LLMs. As long as it's not too current or depend on recent information (like the weather), searching for information in LLMs reminds me a lot of Google 10 years ago.
Yea sometimes LLMs hallucinate, but sometimes websites are just wrong. For a variety of topics LLMs are just a better form of search.
I've seen this being very prevelant in technical support, searching for an answer about "Windows blue screen error code 0xwhatever" will yield an infinite list of results telling you to reboot, run sfc /scannow, and reinstall Windows
As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse.
A genuine desire to help incoming traffic doesn't really matter either. Anything helpful will be infinitely cloned, as long as there is incentive to clone it.
I dont really know a good solution either. Targeted ads are incredibly useful to small businesses, and that genie is out of the bottle.
Education is the path out of this: advertised products are ALWAYS worse value. You are overpaying to fund convincing the next sucker.
The market is pretty efficient, and there are always alternatives. If you aren't lazy, you can save a huge amount of money by not buying advertised products.
On the rare occasions I see an ad for something cool that I want, I search for it on aliexpress and 90% of the time find it for 1/3 the price.
Whenever someone tells you that they bought something because of an ad, you should make them feel a little embarrassed about it. There should be mild social punishment for admitting an ad hijacked your brain and made you get out your wallet - it means you're a sucker, a rube, a feebleminded lazybones.
No it's not just ads at all. SEO drives traffic. There are many ways to monetize such traffic, and ads are just one.
A lot of SEO is driven by local business owners who hire SEO people with dubious track records that make big promises. They invariably clutter up their websites with 10,000 articles along the lines of "best plumber in dallas".
It's funny you mention ads though. One reason that it's so hard to find an SEO person that's actually worth anything is that if they were really good at what they did, they could just throw up their own websites with ads and make a much better living that way than selling SEO services. They don't of course, which should tell you something about how good they really are.
> As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse.
Search will only get worse for google users, not for google or google customers.
Google can easily produce only quality search results, by penalising a result by the number of ads it serves.
They don't do this.
They can identify the SEO people and companies, and heavily penalise their clients.
They don't do this either.
They can, because you're logged in, allow you to maintain a blacklist. They don't.
Trust me, for google this is an easy problem to solve; it's just that, for google, this is not a problem, but works as intended behaviour.
While i'm not naive anymore (i hope not, there's no way to tell lol), and i know most business is simply a scam/based on people's delusions or addictions or other vice without providing any value, the ad industry can't stop surprising me. In all my career i never seen a case of any paid ads actually getting people anywhere. But they continue to spend, and spend, and spend.
Retargeting may be the only exception, although it is annoying as hell, it won't let people forget about your stuff (and comes very cheaply because very few people will ever see it), so probably generates positive returns... But i'm not even sure about that one.
The web is still a zero-sum game without money involved. Search has 5-10 slots for whichever topic and if you're not in it, you effectively do not exist.
This was even true before search, in web directories. It has a limited amount of slots, you need to be on it at all and as high as possible.
"Automated search engines that rely on keyword matching usually return too many low quality matches.
To make matters worse, some advertisers attempt to gain people’s attention by taking measures meant to
mislead automated search engines. We have built a large-scale search engine which addresses many of
the problems of existing systems. It makes especially heavy use of the additional structure present in
hypertext to provide much higher quality search results. We chose our system name, Google, because it
is a common spelling of googol"
PS: secretly, I hope that this post starts ranking for “a comprehensive ecosystem of open source software for big data management”, which is why I have said it verbatim so many times and added a helpful callout at the top for students. To be honest, I'd settle for the 19th spot: just above highadviser.com.
Stole my thunder! Amazed your comment regarding “a comprehensive ecosystem of open source software for big data management” hasn't appeared on page 1 yet. It's been a whole 7 hours...
The whole Cisco courses, blog spam, SEO industry are some of the worst things to exist in technology. I hope all of them gets burned by a massive fire. Who even thinks of becoming a SEO consultant?
These Cisco certifications are such a scam tbh. Cisco commands and CLI are the most confusing, illogical designs for any feature. And they make sure to put in tens of thousands of features and hundreds of ways to configure every different feature. Then they create these overpriced courses and pay for their own employees to take every single one. Since Cisco employs a lot of people, and prefers people with Cisco certifications, this creates a lot of demand for the courses.
Most of the certifications could be replaced with a single 2 month networking course that explains the workings of features, provided they redesign their CLI to be slightly usable.
I had a go at fixing this with Sitetruth, which was an attempt to tie web sites to real-world companies rated using info from Hoovers, the SEC, DNB, etc.
But the whole concept of tying web sites to real world companies now seems dated.
The SEO world is gonna love AIGC. I'm sure it's already in wide usage there; it makes the convincing-but-fake review websites trivial to stand up in quantity.
It's the real content that's going to get disrupted/destroyed.
Who do you will be lining up to buy AIGC software?
The article links to a tweet where hustlebros build a 500-page WP site with "best shoes 2023" type articles with affiiate links. It's already semi-automated, AI GC is just the final piece.
If you do a lot of SEO keyword research, you'll come across these often. Lots of topics have odd exam-question-like keywords with large search volumes. As the article points out, there's little point optimizing for them unless you want to attract traffic from students (or dishonestly bamboozle your SEO clients into thinking you've done wonders for their organic traffic).
Google being garbage as a search engine feels like something we could have predicted as soon as google realised ads make money.
Search engines powered by ads are simply not incentivised to send you to the best product, or even a group of the best products, since you won't click their adverts.
What perplexes me is how these sites make it to the _front page._ Isn't ranking heavily informed by the number of sites that link to the page in question, and the reputation of those sites? I would imagine that the only sites linking to these spam pages are other spam sites run by the same owner (and, of course, google.com), which themselves should have low reputations. Does "exact match" really outweigh reputation scores that much?
In high competitive keywords, yes. But these sites don't have backlinks (https://i.imgur.com/9ka6yV1.png). So if you wanted to beat them you either write new content that matches the search intent (like OP) or you find good backlinks.
How do these SEO dashboards know what people are searching for? Is there a way (maybe via the ad bidding platform?) to get this kind of data from Google?
People talk about SEO as a cat&mouse game, but I'm not sure it has to be.
Does Google want to win the game, or do they profit from the game continuing?
For example... When Google was founded, your site would flourish by the value of its content. But today, given all the SEO that the search engines permit, your options are limited. And one of the big options you're forced to choose from is to pay Google money, to be seen at all in real-world searches by people.
"That's a very nice Web site you got. Would be a shame if nobody was to find it."
If they wanted to, maybe Google has enough information about the world that it could wipe out the vast majority of SEO, with a zero-tolerance policy.
For example... Let's say you do SEO work. Google can probably tell that a site you worked on was SEO'd. So the site gets penalized severely. But there's more. Google probably knows exactly who you are, much of what you work on, who you interact with, etc. After your last clients are burnt to the ground, discoverability-wise, you get an engagement to work on a different site. Google has a good chance of figuring out that, too, and those sites get penalized severely. For engaging in deceptive and manipulative behavior, to rig search engine results, compromising people's ability to access the world's information.
"Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
You're not going to keep doing SEO, because nobody wants to pay money to have their site receive search engine perma-death.
I'm not saying that this particular approach would be a good thing (and there would have to be a managed transition from the current mass sociopathic frenzy). But saying that the current situation is a cat&mouse game that can't be solved... might mainly be serving the cat and the mouse.
Maybe the cat and mouse are in a symbiotic relationship that lets them both milk the cows.
well, a comprehensive ecosystem of open source software for big data management definitely describes Hadoop, so this article is ranked #1 for showing us that.
Given “a strange game: Almost as strange as global thermonuclear war,” I was a little crushed that the post didn’t end, “The only winning move is not to play.”
codegeek|2 years ago
Source: I play this game since I run a software business. Would love an alternative but there are none. You either Play the game or you Die.
samwillis|2 years ago
Google are playing every trick in the book to extract every possible cent from advertisers, spying on their business and sales to maximise their own profits. Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. People complain about the tracking of users/visitors, but the tracking of businesses is just as bad.
They probably have better insights into the economy and market trends than most governments and banks.
The penny is dropping, advertisers are noticing, my long term expectation of Google's business are not what they were.
the8472|2 years ago
Since ads are a red queen's race, wasting people's attention and assuming we don't want to outright ban them then the next best alternative is to tax them heavily. How about 0.00001 cent per pixel-second-view?
Then people will only put up ads when there's some real value in it, not just to keep up with the competition.
qingcharles|2 years ago
I resort to Duckduckgo and Brave's searches among many others. Even things like Yandex give much deeper dives now.
p3rls|2 years ago
eyelidlessness|2 years ago
And gob help you if you dare search for alternative to _____.
taurath|2 years ago
harry8|2 years ago
And given the game is won by the highest bidder, all of the surplus created by technical progress goes to advertising which, as you point out, adds zero value and, in fact, detracts from rational agents making optimal decisions.
This is /exactly/ the kind of market failure where those of us who prefer smaller government want to start talking about appropriate regulation.
soneca|2 years ago
qwoz|2 years ago
https://metaphor.systems/ is pretty good for exactly this kind of thing. The way the search algorithm is designed also make it extremely difficult to game.
carlosjobim|2 years ago
For businesses, there is no good alternative to Google. Many are investing a lot of effort and money in social media, but the returns are very low compared to Google.
nicbou|2 years ago
newaccount74|2 years ago
If you are trying to sell a product, I know one weird trick: Just make a product that people enjoy, and they will recommend it to others.
No need to pay for advertising, no need to play the SEO game. The only marketing you need for a decent product is a website with docs and a download button.
This works especially well if you have some sort of freemium product, because then the 90% of people who use the free version still act as multipliers.
I don't know if it works for all businesses, but it's worked for me over the last decade or so.
bks|2 years ago
Name_Chawps|2 years ago
There are plenty of searches where I want to find what real people are thinking, not what some company's article says. This kind of thing could easily be crowd-sourced a la SponsorBlock.
seydor|2 years ago
moneywoes|2 years ago
What would a fair review site look like?
stanislavb|2 years ago
ivanjermakov|2 years ago
dgellow|2 years ago
derefr|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
LelouBil|2 years ago
superasn|2 years ago
I don't think it's a technical difficulty but rather a management decision to allow spam as long as they have their adsense ads and it baffles me they just don't care about their end users at all.
I think being a monopoly with most competitors lagging a lap behind can make you this way, but with chatgpt catching up quick, Google better start thinking about their users now as it's a growing sentiment that their quality is totally bad nowadays and their uncaring attitude towards spam domains like Pinterest and spam search results where sites are creating hundreds of pages with same content and different heading is just not gonna cut it anymore.
samwillis|2 years ago
On top of that the worse the search results, the more likely the user will click an ad rather than an organic result. The Google of old wouldn't have been tempted by that incentive, but that Google is long dead.
Bad search result = more revenue from ads.
Obviously it's a fine balance, they don't want to loose users, but they will have the metrics to (religiously) work from.
As someone who used to run ad campaigns on Google until a couple of years ago, they are doing the same to advertisers. Users will happily click an ad, go back to the result and try another, many many times. Google have systematically made the advertising on search results worse, showing ads more regularly for poorer placements, removing control and visible auditing. It's all so they can extract more revenue from the advertisers.
andrenotgiant|2 years ago
If I recall correctly, it was made available in response to another big wave of criticism directed towards Google about "Content Farms". It has been interesting to see the difference in response between the "Content Farm" debacle and what we are dealing with currently.
[0] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-m...
bhuber|2 years ago
coldpie|2 years ago
It is absolutely this, yes. They tell people where to go, and they also profit from the ads they put on the places they tell people to go, and they have no real competition[1]. It has made them one of the most valuable companies on the planet. There is no incentive for them to rank higher quality results over ad-filled pages.
We need to break up big tech.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/un...
guerrilla|2 years ago
They do, a lot actually. We're just not the end users. The advertisers are. Thet don't need to care about us since they're a monopoly. Use Brave Search, DuckDyckGo or something elae to help change that. Get other people to too.
urbandw311er|2 years ago
Just for you, especially for you in fact, I went and dug out this link to an interview with Corey Doctorow where he explains his theory of platform of “enshittification”.
https://podtail.com/en/podcast/future-tense-full-program-pod...
I think it will interest you to hear a reasonable theory as to why Google doesn’t care as much about their end users as you might think they should.
babypuncher|2 years ago
Like you said, a first step would be blocking spam domains.
Another would be a return to how the algorithm used work, prioritizing results that are frequently linked to elsewhere using the relevant keywords. In the '00s, this was quickly gamed by companies setting up endless blogs to link to their own products, but I feel it could be mitigated by assigning some kind of trustworthiness score to the sites doing the linking. It shouldn't be hard to recognize that a site being recommended a lot on Reddit or some other well established repository of user-generated content is going to be more genuine than "recommendations" from some random blogspam site nobody's heard of.
wilde|2 years ago
1) Google and you are defining spam differently.
2) Spam is adversarial. They have the ability to block spam domains from last week, but it’s an ongoing investment as the adversaries adapt.
That said I do think Google depends too much on human raters who are not customers. It’s caused a lot of drift between the customer’s expectation of quality and Google’s.
jasonfarnon|2 years ago
twelve40|2 years ago
by who??? Google itself "blocks" or downgrades spam websites all the time. If they open it up to "the people", the same SEO crowd will rush in with scrapers to decimate competition, including any legit websites. So strange to see people jumping into conspiracy theories here without thinking of the consequences for a second.
Aeolun|2 years ago
titzer|2 years ago
Access to information should not have (ranked, optimizable, commercially-bent) search as its base interface. This is a cosmic, civilization-level screwup. Not only do you get the decades of SEO and advertising, but the whole system becomes lossy over time. You can't find what you used to anymore.
lenzm|2 years ago
plagiarist|2 years ago
andersrs|2 years ago
Personally I can't find much on Google if I'm actually searching for something I don't know about. Finding the local mechanic is fine but querying a programming question, health problem or recipe is absolutely fucked. I sold all my Google stock recently but should have done so sooner. The value they have is in gmail and gsuite accounts but I can see the search business is circling the drain.
Conspiracy theory: they love showing shitty sites because those sites display adverts making Google money.
tyingq|2 years ago
"Google knows this, so it adds a “Question and Answers” block before the first SERP result, probably diverting a tremendous amount of traffic away from that page."
They scrape answers from sites that they used to send traffic to and publish it themselves. In many cases, though, those sites won't exist without the incentive of organic search traffic.
I get why Google does it, but it does create a feedback loop where less of that info will be out there to scrape.
firefoxd|2 years ago
I used to search reddit, but the hostile mobile page ruined that for me. Now i go to yandex and navigate through malware to find what i want.
It doesn't help that recent trend of developers building their content website with react and such, have no little to no concept of SEO.
ryandrake|2 years ago
OtherShrezzing|2 years ago
marklar423|2 years ago
I don't think this is a search problem, I think Google is legitimately surfacing what's available on the Internet for given query. I think this is the dead internet theory at play, and that there just isn't anything valuable to show!
People who would (in the past) run their own website or blog now post that same content on social media, which is why Reddit has become mandatory for people looking for genuine opinions.
jrmg|2 years ago
Anyone who’s searched for reviews or tech questions recently has experienced this. And it’s slowly eating everything.
The web is turning into nothing but potemkin content.
dizhn|2 years ago
the_snooze|2 years ago
PheonixPharts|2 years ago
Yea sometimes LLMs hallucinate, but sometimes websites are just wrong. For a variety of topics LLMs are just a better form of search.
yonatan8070|2 years ago
brucethemoose2|2 years ago
Ads.
As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse.
A genuine desire to help incoming traffic doesn't really matter either. Anything helpful will be infinitely cloned, as long as there is incentive to clone it.
I dont really know a good solution either. Targeted ads are incredibly useful to small businesses, and that genie is out of the bottle.
cwkoss|2 years ago
The market is pretty efficient, and there are always alternatives. If you aren't lazy, you can save a huge amount of money by not buying advertised products.
On the rare occasions I see an ad for something cool that I want, I search for it on aliexpress and 90% of the time find it for 1/3 the price.
Whenever someone tells you that they bought something because of an ad, you should make them feel a little embarrassed about it. There should be mild social punishment for admitting an ad hijacked your brain and made you get out your wallet - it means you're a sucker, a rube, a feebleminded lazybones.
arbuge|2 years ago
A lot of SEO is driven by local business owners who hire SEO people with dubious track records that make big promises. They invariably clutter up their websites with 10,000 articles along the lines of "best plumber in dallas".
It's funny you mention ads though. One reason that it's so hard to find an SEO person that's actually worth anything is that if they were really good at what they did, they could just throw up their own websites with ads and make a much better living that way than selling SEO services. They don't of course, which should tell you something about how good they really are.
lelanthran|2 years ago
> Ads.
> As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse.
Search will only get worse for google users, not for google or google customers.
Google can easily produce only quality search results, by penalising a result by the number of ads it serves.
They don't do this.
They can identify the SEO people and companies, and heavily penalise their clients.
They don't do this either.
They can, because you're logged in, allow you to maintain a blacklist. They don't.
Trust me, for google this is an easy problem to solve; it's just that, for google, this is not a problem, but works as intended behaviour.
anovikov|2 years ago
Retargeting may be the only exception, although it is annoying as hell, it won't let people forget about your stuff (and comes very cheaply because very few people will ever see it), so probably generates positive returns... But i'm not even sure about that one.
dahwolf|2 years ago
This was even true before search, in web directories. It has a limited amount of slots, you need to be on it at all and as high as possible.
renewiltord|2 years ago
Have you seen a 419 scam? Doesn't have any ads. Just a direct intro to get scammed.
jklinger410|2 years ago
boxed|2 years ago
The first five results for me was this SEO spam. I went in and blocked those domains. Now it's all good stuff again.
nomel|2 years ago
RyanHamilton|2 years ago
divbzero|2 years ago
(If we discuss “a comprehensive ecosystem of open-source software for big data management” enough, perhaps we can get this thread to rank too.)
izzymiller|2 years ago
rchaud|2 years ago
tomcam|2 years ago
pavel_lishin|2 years ago
Like bragging about throwing the most empty soda cans out of your car as you drive down the highway.
ilrwbwrkhv|2 years ago
rchaud|2 years ago
perryizgr8|2 years ago
These Cisco certifications are such a scam tbh. Cisco commands and CLI are the most confusing, illogical designs for any feature. And they make sure to put in tens of thousands of features and hundreds of ways to configure every different feature. Then they create these overpriced courses and pay for their own employees to take every single one. Since Cisco employs a lot of people, and prefers people with Cisco certifications, this creates a lot of demand for the courses.
Most of the certifications could be replaced with a single 2 month networking course that explains the workings of features, provided they redesign their CLI to be slightly usable.
Animats|2 years ago
One with external costs imposed upon others.
I had a go at fixing this with Sitetruth, which was an attempt to tie web sites to real-world companies rated using info from Hoovers, the SEC, DNB, etc. But the whole concept of tying web sites to real world companies now seems dated.
whispersnow|2 years ago
ceejayoz|2 years ago
It's the real content that's going to get disrupted/destroyed.
rchaud|2 years ago
The article links to a tweet where hustlebros build a 500-page WP site with "best shoes 2023" type articles with affiiate links. It's already semi-automated, AI GC is just the final piece.
username135|2 years ago
Veen|2 years ago
wffurr|2 years ago
izzymiller|2 years ago
CrzyLngPwd|2 years ago
Search engines powered by ads are simply not incentivised to send you to the best product, or even a group of the best products, since you won't click their adverts.
nazcan|2 years ago
obblekk|2 years ago
Is it just that no one has found a good way to do it yet or is it fundamentally impossible because of some google ranking thing?
Solvency|2 years ago
This is literally intentful design by Google to make as much revenue as possible while providing as little utility as possible.
The internet as we know it is utterly shaped by this purposeful dystopian SEO dynamic.
bbischof|2 years ago
(not OC)
steveBK123|2 years ago
timwis|2 years ago
agmater|2 years ago
Aeolun|2 years ago
asymmetric|2 years ago
rl1987|2 years ago
cyanydeez|2 years ago
hoseja|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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neilv|2 years ago
Does Google want to win the game, or do they profit from the game continuing?
For example... When Google was founded, your site would flourish by the value of its content. But today, given all the SEO that the search engines permit, your options are limited. And one of the big options you're forced to choose from is to pay Google money, to be seen at all in real-world searches by people.
"That's a very nice Web site you got. Would be a shame if nobody was to find it."
If they wanted to, maybe Google has enough information about the world that it could wipe out the vast majority of SEO, with a zero-tolerance policy.
For example... Let's say you do SEO work. Google can probably tell that a site you worked on was SEO'd. So the site gets penalized severely. But there's more. Google probably knows exactly who you are, much of what you work on, who you interact with, etc. After your last clients are burnt to the ground, discoverability-wise, you get an engagement to work on a different site. Google has a good chance of figuring out that, too, and those sites get penalized severely. For engaging in deceptive and manipulative behavior, to rig search engine results, compromising people's ability to access the world's information.
"Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
You're not going to keep doing SEO, because nobody wants to pay money to have their site receive search engine perma-death.
I'm not saying that this particular approach would be a good thing (and there would have to be a managed transition from the current mass sociopathic frenzy). But saying that the current situation is a cat&mouse game that can't be solved... might mainly be serving the cat and the mouse.
Maybe the cat and mouse are in a symbiotic relationship that lets them both milk the cows.
cratermoon|2 years ago
dmvdoug|2 years ago
soulblaze3|2 years ago
[deleted]
vogon_laureate|2 years ago
It was looking the other way
When they shot it in the head
They took the cannolis, dropped the weapon and fled
They left a little note that the cops done read
It said: “SEO is dead, yeah, #SEOisdead”
It was killed by a fully autonomous GPT
An AI assassin executed it with glee
It had outlived its purpose, so it has ceased to be
Will anyone even miss it? Highly un-like-ly
Maybe Neil Patel, Semrush, and Yoast WP
It was kind of critical to their whole industry
But SEO is dead, y’all, SEO is dead
It was looking the other way when they shot it in the head
Don’t believe me? Google it now you’ll see
Wait, how can this be? It’s still full of page after page of SEOpremacy?!
But SEO is dead, fam, SEO is dead
We saw the footage of it getting popped in the head
They dropped the murder weapon and made scarce with cannolis
But in truth the victim was already long known to the po-lice
When it comes to killing search it was light years ahead
It ran a mob of listicle and review-site gangstas
Paid ad omertàs, hashtag mafiosas
Meta-tagged, ultra-blagged, copywritten hustlas
Want to find out if you’ve got penile cancer?
Here’s ten ads for “natural” Viagra
SEO is dead, Lord, SEO is dead
It was looking the other way when they put a cap in its head