Let's recognise the irony of your link. The need for ^^^ such services is a symptom of the problem.
We are all taking measures to circumvent the rubbish.
I don't believe that every link that I click should contribute revenue to any billion-dollar corpocracy. I definitely do not want rubbish content to be intermingled with valid information.
This is not the Internet that we want.
If an entity wants money from me, let it prove its value from the basic requirement of quality.
"Search results plagued with ‘clickbait’ would have been an understatement 20 years ago.
The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) is almost entirely made-for-google' ranking algorithims.
The situation is worse than it is on closed social media, including Google's YouTube.
Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keeps some of the rot at bay.
Google is literally content made by uninterested copywriters exclusively for Google rankings.
I was recently looking for general travel advice on Google. I found it completely impossible. The content is all written by people (or ais) that had never visited. Everything reads like a middle school essay.
I often resort to searches in a smaller language, where economic incentives are 100X smaller than English.
Google created incentives for littering the web with garbage. Then they took away incentives for anyone else to even bother.
Google killed the thing that gave them life. They gave Vince Serf a sinecure and a hows-your-mother for the rest.
I dreamed of building a website like the type I grew up on in the late 90s and early 2000s. The gamefaqs, mrfixitonlines and casterrealms-type websites for me were at the forefront of making this internet medium to be better than books, voice or anything else for that matter for the transmission of information.
Fast forward 20 years later. I think I've spent close to 300k on the website and team to help with it. I don't even want to think about my own labor costs. These days the google results for my niche are entirely dominated by an ugly purple wordpress blog ran by non-native English speakers that gets hacked every few months with a redirect to porn or russian sites. Their information is frequently wrong. It doesn't hurt their rankings at all. Yoast through it bro. Keep up the great work Google.
I'm rather shocked how the quality of their search results has tanked over the years. I used to be able to find decent academic content, or programming related topics quite consistently 5 years ago. Now I'm getting only a few vague results either from stackoverflow, math stackexchange, reddit, or apple, and the rest is just utter garbage. Yandex, of all search engines provide consistently better results. Fortunately, Google Scholar did not suffer this fate yet, but I'm dreading the day when it will.
> Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keeps some of the rot at bay.
YouTube's stuck in its own algorithm hellhole. Mostly due to their insistence that creators have to post on a regular basis, creative block or lack of things to cover be damned. So if your niche has nothing to talk about right now, well you'll need to find something, anything to cover to stay relevant. And if your fans/viewers want something that you don't care about anymore, well that sucks even more. Changing to a topic you do care about will probably tank everything for weeks, potentially longer.
It's like a video creating version of a factory production line for those trying to become popular/famous there.
Ironically, the title of the article is literal clickbait. The first four paragraphs (out of 21) of the article are related to the title. The majority of the article (11 paragraphs) are dedicated to AI safety.
I avoid companies like Google as much as possible, but is it really their fault that so many people fall for clickbait? If that's what a majority of people click on, shouldn't users share the blame?
> Google created incentives for littering the web with garbage. Then they took away incentives for anyone else to even bother.
exactly this.
I have very extensive knowledge in a certain niche that is profitable (for other people).
I really enjoy building sites, so I tried to build a site that explains all the important topics for both short attention span 'TLDR' people, but also have more in-depth articles for people wanting to learn more. I built additional tools, a custom crawler with GPT regularly analysing new incoming data etc... and had a lot of fun building it.
the "organic" users I get (about 30-40) a day, have an average visit time of 3-4 minutes, which is pretty long for text-only sites I think.
but i absolutely loathe "off-page" seo, e.g. buying links.
so now the site will keep rotting away, after all the fun of building it is gone. and I have no incentive to work on it much more apart from the occasional maintenance, as it's not my primary business. And I don't want to sink thousands into buying links.
The only way to get "organic" traffic nowadays in even remotely profitable verticals, is by investing a shitton into backlinks.
the amount of shit low quality articles that have just been written for placing a link to game the google rankings is absolutely insane.
> I often resort to searches in a smaller language, where economic incentives are 100X smaller than English.
I wonder for how long that's going to work: the cost of translating with LLM are now basically $0 and LLMs are exceptionally good at doing that. So basically: have LLMs generate complete, total and utter crap in english. Then have LLMs decline this crap in all the world's languages.
Sadly, for smaller languages, usually pay of copywriters is also much smaller than English, so they aren't protected from it at all.
How bad are things? Bad indeed. I even buy my airline tickets from a traditional brick-and-mortar agent with whom i built a relationship over years and who finds good deals for me and knows the pitfalls better than the internet could suggest.
Non ironically, you might wanna try Tiktok for searches where you want an actual human point of view.
My searches are now split evenly between TikTok, Google with site:reddit.com, ChatGPT and Google with no filter as a last resort. And I really want to give Kagi another try in the coming weeks.
Because there is audience that like garbage and clickbaits. We need to learn how consume digital media and have this stimuli under control.
For example there are plugins like Unhook that let you stop autoplay or suggested videos to show on YT. It's so refreshing to watch YT only for purpose that you initially come for, without garbage distractions...
I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being companies were creating pages and blog posts specifically to target keywords without actually having coherent things to say on the topic. Moreover people within Google like Matt Cutts seemed to be at the time if not outright encouraging it, at the very least giving pointers on how to game the system. This strikes me as more relevant than ever, and I have to imagine the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically.
Beyond that, the way Google now ranks pages based on how well they fit their pretty limited definition of working on mobile and how “fast they load” has done exactly zero to promote quality content. I use quotes because I have worked on ad-ridden super slow SPA’s that manage higher scores than super fast static sites.
SEO / billboards / paid-for advertising is basically legal propaganda (arguably a form of mind control or more neutral we can say reality shaping through narrative structuring).
I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting, anywhere else is "public domain" and shouldn't be allowed in my opinion. It is the root to many evils, it is the mechanism that trends towards hacking the user in the loop in a positive feedback system, which also optimizes at the users expense yet depends on the user. Quite parastic.
> I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being companies were creating pages and blog posts specifically to target keywords without actually having coherent things to say on the topic.
Is there a way to improve the detection of posts like this so they can be deranked? If so, why isn't this done? You would have thought the original PageRank was meant to combat this because useless articles wouldn't get linked to.
For what it's worth, whenever I'm helping with SEO, it's generally only to encourage website owners to use semantic HTML tags properly and structure their content in a way (e.g. titles, headings, sections, new pages with links between them) that's easier for humans with and without screen readers, and for search bots to read. I don't like the practice of writing articles to target profitable keywords that aren't relevant to your site or writing bloated articles.
Unfortunately, all of this in lumped together as "SEO" so it's become a bad word.
> how “fast they load” has done exactly zero to promote quality content. I use quotes because I have worked on ad-ridden super slow SPA’s that manage higher scores than super fast static sites.
I think speed is only a small ranking boost. Maybe this will increase over time. If it was a big boost right now, it would have forced every website to make large immediate changes which would have been very controversial I'd think.
> I have to imagine the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically.
Funny enough, LLMs are actually for the very first time challenging Google’s utility as a knowledge engine.
I see more and more Non-techie people asking ChatGPT about receptors or locations instead of Google.
Also, if there’s anything that I need to research and it’s not a general knowledge stuff but something like “How long I can travel with a EU registered car in Turkey” I will use Bing Chat, Perplexity or ChatGPT. I gave up Google already, it’s just too much spam and low quality content that I have enough incentive to break my usual workflow and habits and try LLMs.
I’m sure Google is doing great monetarily with search as if everything is garbage Ads are quality content but the technology to bypass both the ads and garbage is here.
It would be ironic, if Google search, SEO and LLMs would make the internet so unusable as to give redacted content in the form of books and physical journals a second life.
Well, my white list of sites providing good content for my interests actually is incredibly short by now anyway, in total maybe a handfull.
> the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically.
Do you mean LLMs will be used to generate more SEO content that is irrelevant?
Doesn't it work both ways? You can use LLMs to filter out irrelevant content better than ever? A lot of the time I use ChatGPT-4 it's as a search engine - and I don't even mean with the Browser plugin, I mean it's quicker to ask ChatGPT-4 for its encoded knowledge than to Google and click on links.
Twelve years ago, this wasn't even a thought in the back of my head, and I bet those in the SEO industry never thought Google would let things deteriorate to such an extreme.
The web thrived for a decent number of years with ads before it began to really spiral down.
For me the biggest cause of that spiral was the shift from most users using desktops to most users using mobile to interact with google.
In the desktop search world, google used to respond with large comprehensive articles on subjects that not just answered peoples questions but also educated them on the subject around their question. This was the golden age so to speak, it answered your question along with 10 others on a subject but also helped you to understand if your question was even the right one in the first place.
With mobile, google shifted to trying to directly answer the question you asked and nothing else, presumably because people were far less willing to read large articles on mobile and just wanted fast answers.
This latter approach is much easier to SEO garbage than the original that took real knowledge and effort to write.
>In the desktop search world, google used to respond with large comprehensive articles on subjects that not just answered peoples questions but also educated them on the subject around their question. This was the golden age so to speak
IDK, for me it seems the worst plague are the sites that when you search for something like "how to reverse a pushed commit in git" don't give you a single sentence answer you seek, but you scroll and scroll over, what is git, how it works, why do people use it, how to install it, if you're lucky the answer will be at the very bottom after you clicked through the infuriating cookie consent and you closed two full page video ads. If you're unlucky the answer is hidden somewhere in the "content"...
Oh and comparing mobile with desktop? What is it on the desktop with all the shitty sites that try detecting you're moving to close it(often when you just move your mouse while reading) and they suddenly try to take over the entire window with some full page flashing modal dialogs. Insanity...
My take on why this happened is twofold: 1- Google, yes. 2-the stupid cookie consent law of the EU. Yes, it made launching a huge window obscuring the entire site's content on entry acceptable. It was all downhill from that.
These days most non technical people just have their phone and live inside the FB/IG/TT/X/Gmail/Google apps on their phones and don't even go on the web.
And app developers are doing everything to keep them inside the app with a crappy in-app browser which also benefits the Apple/Google app store ecosystem.
Apples intention with Safari was inside the name. "Safari - you're in the African jungle, theres lions and tigers, be careful, probably best avoided."
They don't want you using it. Download an app and pay us 30% instead. And that's what people do.
Convenience-seeking users don't really seem to care. Why bother with desktops and even google search when they have apps on their phone to do stuff. Nobody even trusts the web anymore because of all the SEO content spam and potential to be scammed.
If you were Google making billions a year off the app ecosystem because its a superior experience.. wouldn't your incentive be to make web as bad as possible?
It is interesting to think about where this will be headed in the future with LLMs. Will people just ask the AI in their phone for their immediate answer and the click baity articles lose a bunch of traffic as a result? I think that is kinda inevitable.
What will that mean for bona fide quality sites? I don't know but part of me hopes that those detailed sites will flourish to offer more details than can be offered in a single LLM response. Wishful thinking perhaps.
They'll be a huge backlash of course from the click-bait sites - just like with news sites protesting about losing traffic.
Desktop to mobile was also a big shift from the perspective of wanting to offer the "continue your journey" experience + having the same experience on both. Which initiated moving features from being done locally to "log in and sync in our cloud", or dumbing features down on desktop, or downright removing them so that "it's the same on desktop and mobile".
Which IMO is related to the next thing in chain:
- It was really easy to subscribe to an RSS feed in 2000s; if you had a proper meta tag in the website header, the browser UI would show up a prominent RSS logo in the URL bar. Firefox had this built-in. Apparently Chrome too [1]. At some point this was killed. Perhaps due to mobile gaining traction, lack of space on mobile, and Chrome's annoying minimalist approach? Or perhaps because Google wanted to promote its own (R.I.P.) Google Reader, (R.I.P.) Google Wave, (R.I.P.) Google+?
(Having said that, I must admit I have declared RSS bankruptcy at some point, after subscribing to _way_ too many feeds).
- I remember there used to be a lot of blog platforms and discussion boards, people would write a lot of good stuff there, each of those platforms would create a de facto community.
Then, Google managed to make Blogger/Blogspot UX terrible; and most of other platforms died and got replaced with Facebook and Twitter. (I'm still not sure why many of those seemingly thriving platforms have died).
- Facebook and Twitter over years slowly change the algo, to not show you stuff you subscribed to, but random viral crap which optimizes "engangement".
I'd argue that its even lower than that. Barring short-form video content, phones (and tablets) are almost exclusively consumption devices. Writing anything long-form on a phone is a pain in the ass, and so there's an implicit discouragement. Forget programming. Artists have procreate, but they had Wacom tablets before, so that hasn't changed much.
That shift (pc to smartphone) represents a lot more "who and how many" users than how they use it.
As late as late 2000, web was still pretty exclusive club. I went to college mid-2000s. Even among students, it was a geeky minority that really "consumed" internet massively.
If the web was real life, we'd have recognised this very easily.
Not that I disagree, but "I spent 5 years helping Google achieve its market dominance and mindshare, was accused of bullying employees, left quietly a few months later, and am now trashing it in the press as part of the marketing process for my next startup" doesn't have quite the clout it could have.
US antitrust turning a blind eye towards the aggregation into FAANG (or was it conflict of interest?) also made this possible. Specifically, Google's acquisition of DoubleClick alone (then the largest ad network) created a monopoly and closed vertical supply chain network along with AdWords/Google Search. But then Google also controls TV (YouTube), devices (Android), and browsers (via Chrome and subverting weak and financially dependent puppet orgs for web standardization and advocacy), and also many services found via Google Search.
It has become quite difficult to find experts on Google. Google is probably catering to the "entertainment" category of reader now more than it was in 2013. This opinion stems from my experience.
And my experience is that I'm an old school technical blogger who writes articles certainly not for the "entertainment" crowd, but for the professional crowd. My readership stays high from Monday to Friday and drops to nearly zero over the weekend.
Over the last 10 years, I have observed that my readers come from referrers like Google.com or Google.de less frequently. I would say that I get about 20 times fewer readers from Google. However, Google still constitutes about 90% of my readership, down from perhaps 97% to 99%. These are the facts, looking at my analytics.
The other 10% come from DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, Bitbucket, MS Teams, ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, Atlassian, Swarm, Ecosia, topical forums, and company domains. The share of readership from sources other than Google used to be closer to 1% - 3% in the past.
From my experience as a user of Google, I also find it much more difficult to find experts in any given field. About a decade ago, I would find so many more hard-boiled technical blogs. Now, the mid-level college essay-style knowledge is much more promoted. This shift makes sense for Google as an ad company, even if it harms everyone, future Google included.
With all that said, here are my conclusions, based in the reality of my own technical blog and its readership -- Google is worse for the technical crowd, which is now more likely to share technical resources by word of mouth (like Atlassian, Swarm, Teams, topical forums and company domains) or find them with other search engines. Google's effectiveness has not significantly diminished, as it still accounts for 90% of the way people reach my technical blog, so it might still be very functional for this purpose. Challenger search engines appear to have gained a significant stake in the tech crowd, a contrast to the scenario 10 years ago. But it seems like the decline of Google is a bit catastrophized.
These are only thoughts from my perspective, though they are grounded in some objective metrics.
I agree but the root cause isn't Google, it's advertising in all its forms, Google's ads just happen to be the most profitable ones. Kill advertising and the web will be fixed automatically and permanently. Using uBlock Origin is everyone's duty towards a better web. It should come pre-installed in Firefox.
As an example, google are knowingly profiting from rip-offs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957
Why are there still three ads before the official government site if I search for "apply esta"?
I am always a bit cautious, when I listen to arguments from competitors, who compete with Google. Is it an argument or marketing speech?
First of all, Google is not the internet. Is providing search results a challenging business? Yes. Could do Google do a better job? Yes, so could do others. The fact, that Bing does not gain market share even though pushing everything ChatGPT related may confirms this notion.
Content and consumer habits changed.
In the 90th, website where dominated by text. Compared to today, every page that was suggested by Google resembled a book. Today most websites look like easy to consume snippets due to lower attention span, less time.
Then came Twitter, TikTok, Facebook etc.
So I would not blame Google in the first place.
Will ChatGPT replace Google? Not entierly, but they are working on it.
Will we say the same ("ChatGPT send LLMs into 'spiral of decline'") about ChatGPT in 10-15 years from now? Maybe.
>The criticism of his former employer came as Mr Suleyman told the Telegraph about plans for a new international body to monitor AI threats.
I hope they first threat they choose to monitor is the monopolisation of the AI services, all while the huge monopolies preach about "the dangers of ai" to increase the barriers to entry for the small guy (we all know disappearance of open source models and a ban on sale of hardware capable of running them to individuals is their most desirable wet dream).
It's going to get worse. Here's a great primer on the problem we're facing, written by a Google -> OpenAI engineer.
"I think that being able to automatically produce arbitrary content that is indistinguishable from human-generated content at scale is the death knell of the web as we know it."
This guy is such a big mouth. Very obvious he is cozying up to British politicians to further his own goals. Saying "Big Tech Bad" is a surefire hit among that crowd.
Information online is “buried at the
bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”,
Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can
“sell more adverts”, fuelled by
Google’s technology.
I think we are at a turning point in this regard.
AI can now read through SEO fluff text and ads and present the user with the information they are looking for.
Therefore, there will be no more incentive to create those types of sites.
The web will change. Into what it will change is yet to be seen. But it will change.
I'd like to see some experiments with Search engines that rank on things that are hard or impossible to game. Impossible in the sense that the search-engine controls this variable entirely.
Like "age of the article" through "time we saw it first & how much it changed since". Or like "churn", through "how often we saw new content come and go".
Anything that users or owners control, will be gamed. So maybe there are variables that only the search-engine itself controls that still provide adequate or good ranking?
Perhaps the internet being saturated by the general global public who are very tribal and huddle around their bubble sites is the root cause here. Google, Facebook,etc... are just reacting.
People huddle around HN for example like they do on reddit,fb, insta, telegram,discord,vk,yt,bilibili,etc...
Before the mobile users' eternal september, I used to find myself searching for sites to hang out at. I can't remember the last time I signed up to a sight to commune with users. Especially, now I am very careful because there are a lot of bad actors and it's impossible to actually be pseudonymous.
TLD's were supposed to help with this over commercialization of the internet. .com and .co were supposed to be exclusive to commerical sites, all the blogs,forums,etc... were supposed to be on .org and .net, these days a TLD is like a vanity license plate.
[+] [-] mobilio|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heresie-dabord|2 years ago|reply
Let's recognise the irony of your link. The need for ^^^ such services is a symptom of the problem.
We are all taking measures to circumvent the rubbish.
I don't believe that every link that I click should contribute revenue to any billion-dollar corpocracy. I definitely do not want rubbish content to be intermingled with valid information.
This is not the Internet that we want.
If an entity wants money from me, let it prove its value from the basic requirement of quality.
[+] [-] znpy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|2 years ago|reply
The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) is almost entirely made-for-google' ranking algorithims.
The situation is worse than it is on closed social media, including Google's YouTube.
Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keeps some of the rot at bay.
Google is literally content made by uninterested copywriters exclusively for Google rankings.
I was recently looking for general travel advice on Google. I found it completely impossible. The content is all written by people (or ais) that had never visited. Everything reads like a middle school essay.
I often resort to searches in a smaller language, where economic incentives are 100X smaller than English.
Google created incentives for littering the web with garbage. Then they took away incentives for anyone else to even bother.
Google killed the thing that gave them life. They gave Vince Serf a sinecure and a hows-your-mother for the rest.
Thieves.
[+] [-] p3rls|2 years ago|reply
Fast forward 20 years later. I think I've spent close to 300k on the website and team to help with it. I don't even want to think about my own labor costs. These days the google results for my niche are entirely dominated by an ugly purple wordpress blog ran by non-native English speakers that gets hacked every few months with a redirect to porn or russian sites. Their information is frequently wrong. It doesn't hurt their rankings at all. Yoast through it bro. Keep up the great work Google.
The entire story was posted on twitter last year by some shocked SEO researcher last year https://twitter.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929
[+] [-] NL807|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CM30|2 years ago|reply
YouTube's stuck in its own algorithm hellhole. Mostly due to their insistence that creators have to post on a regular basis, creative block or lack of things to cover be damned. So if your niche has nothing to talk about right now, well you'll need to find something, anything to cover to stay relevant. And if your fans/viewers want something that you don't care about anymore, well that sucks even more. Changing to a topic you do care about will probably tank everything for weeks, potentially longer.
It's like a video creating version of a factory production line for those trying to become popular/famous there.
[+] [-] resolutebat|2 years ago|reply
Try Wikivoyage, the Wikipedia Foundation's open travel guide. Listings are a mixed bag, but the general advice is often spot on.
[+] [-] nsagent|2 years ago|reply
I avoid companies like Google as much as possible, but is it really their fault that so many people fall for clickbait? If that's what a majority of people click on, shouldn't users share the blame?
[+] [-] pinkslipper3|2 years ago|reply
exactly this.
I have very extensive knowledge in a certain niche that is profitable (for other people). I really enjoy building sites, so I tried to build a site that explains all the important topics for both short attention span 'TLDR' people, but also have more in-depth articles for people wanting to learn more. I built additional tools, a custom crawler with GPT regularly analysing new incoming data etc... and had a lot of fun building it.
the "organic" users I get (about 30-40) a day, have an average visit time of 3-4 minutes, which is pretty long for text-only sites I think.
but i absolutely loathe "off-page" seo, e.g. buying links.
so now the site will keep rotting away, after all the fun of building it is gone. and I have no incentive to work on it much more apart from the occasional maintenance, as it's not my primary business. And I don't want to sink thousands into buying links.
The only way to get "organic" traffic nowadays in even remotely profitable verticals, is by investing a shitton into backlinks.
the amount of shit low quality articles that have just been written for placing a link to game the google rankings is absolutely insane.
[+] [-] jorvi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theGnuMe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|2 years ago|reply
I wonder for how long that's going to work: the cost of translating with LLM are now basically $0 and LLMs are exceptionally good at doing that. So basically: have LLMs generate complete, total and utter crap in english. Then have LLMs decline this crap in all the world's languages.
[+] [-] anovikov|2 years ago|reply
How bad are things? Bad indeed. I even buy my airline tickets from a traditional brick-and-mortar agent with whom i built a relationship over years and who finds good deals for me and knows the pitfalls better than the internet could suggest.
[+] [-] thiht|2 years ago|reply
My searches are now split evenly between TikTok, Google with site:reddit.com, ChatGPT and Google with no filter as a last resort. And I really want to give Kagi another try in the coming weeks.
[+] [-] jdub|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnalbertearle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] medion|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t0bia_s|2 years ago|reply
For example there are plugins like Unhook that let you stop autoplay or suggested videos to show on YT. It's so refreshing to watch YT only for purpose that you initially come for, without garbage distractions...
[+] [-] donatj|2 years ago|reply
Beyond that, the way Google now ranks pages based on how well they fit their pretty limited definition of working on mobile and how “fast they load” has done exactly zero to promote quality content. I use quotes because I have worked on ad-ridden super slow SPA’s that manage higher scores than super fast static sites.
[+] [-] pyinstallwoes|2 years ago|reply
I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting, anywhere else is "public domain" and shouldn't be allowed in my opinion. It is the root to many evils, it is the mechanism that trends towards hacking the user in the loop in a positive feedback system, which also optimizes at the users expense yet depends on the user. Quite parastic.
[+] [-] seanwilson|2 years ago|reply
Is there a way to improve the detection of posts like this so they can be deranked? If so, why isn't this done? You would have thought the original PageRank was meant to combat this because useless articles wouldn't get linked to.
For what it's worth, whenever I'm helping with SEO, it's generally only to encourage website owners to use semantic HTML tags properly and structure their content in a way (e.g. titles, headings, sections, new pages with links between them) that's easier for humans with and without screen readers, and for search bots to read. I don't like the practice of writing articles to target profitable keywords that aren't relevant to your site or writing bloated articles.
Unfortunately, all of this in lumped together as "SEO" so it's become a bad word.
> how “fast they load” has done exactly zero to promote quality content. I use quotes because I have worked on ad-ridden super slow SPA’s that manage higher scores than super fast static sites.
I think speed is only a small ranking boost. Maybe this will increase over time. If it was a big boost right now, it would have forced every website to make large immediate changes which would have been very controversial I'd think.
[+] [-] mrtksn|2 years ago|reply
Funny enough, LLMs are actually for the very first time challenging Google’s utility as a knowledge engine.
I see more and more Non-techie people asking ChatGPT about receptors or locations instead of Google.
Also, if there’s anything that I need to research and it’s not a general knowledge stuff but something like “How long I can travel with a EU registered car in Turkey” I will use Bing Chat, Perplexity or ChatGPT. I gave up Google already, it’s just too much spam and low quality content that I have enough incentive to break my usual workflow and habits and try LLMs.
I’m sure Google is doing great monetarily with search as if everything is garbage Ads are quality content but the technology to bypass both the ads and garbage is here.
[+] [-] hef19898|2 years ago|reply
Well, my white list of sites providing good content for my interests actually is incredibly short by now anyway, in total maybe a handfull.
[+] [-] ryanjshaw|2 years ago|reply
Do you mean LLMs will be used to generate more SEO content that is irrelevant?
Doesn't it work both ways? You can use LLMs to filter out irrelevant content better than ever? A lot of the time I use ChatGPT-4 it's as a search engine - and I don't even mean with the Browser plugin, I mean it's quicker to ask ChatGPT-4 for its encoded knowledge than to Google and click on links.
[+] [-] brucethemoose2|2 years ago|reply
Twelve years ago, this wasn't even a thought in the back of my head, and I bet those in the SEO industry never thought Google would let things deteriorate to such an extreme.
[+] [-] dageshi|2 years ago|reply
For me the biggest cause of that spiral was the shift from most users using desktops to most users using mobile to interact with google.
In the desktop search world, google used to respond with large comprehensive articles on subjects that not just answered peoples questions but also educated them on the subject around their question. This was the golden age so to speak, it answered your question along with 10 others on a subject but also helped you to understand if your question was even the right one in the first place.
With mobile, google shifted to trying to directly answer the question you asked and nothing else, presumably because people were far less willing to read large articles on mobile and just wanted fast answers.
This latter approach is much easier to SEO garbage than the original that took real knowledge and effort to write.
[+] [-] Roark66|2 years ago|reply
IDK, for me it seems the worst plague are the sites that when you search for something like "how to reverse a pushed commit in git" don't give you a single sentence answer you seek, but you scroll and scroll over, what is git, how it works, why do people use it, how to install it, if you're lucky the answer will be at the very bottom after you clicked through the infuriating cookie consent and you closed two full page video ads. If you're unlucky the answer is hidden somewhere in the "content"...
Oh and comparing mobile with desktop? What is it on the desktop with all the shitty sites that try detecting you're moving to close it(often when you just move your mouse while reading) and they suddenly try to take over the entire window with some full page flashing modal dialogs. Insanity...
My take on why this happened is twofold: 1- Google, yes. 2-the stupid cookie consent law of the EU. Yes, it made launching a huge window obscuring the entire site's content on entry acceptable. It was all downhill from that.
[+] [-] pentae|2 years ago|reply
And app developers are doing everything to keep them inside the app with a crappy in-app browser which also benefits the Apple/Google app store ecosystem.
Apples intention with Safari was inside the name. "Safari - you're in the African jungle, theres lions and tigers, be careful, probably best avoided."
They don't want you using it. Download an app and pay us 30% instead. And that's what people do.
Convenience-seeking users don't really seem to care. Why bother with desktops and even google search when they have apps on their phone to do stuff. Nobody even trusts the web anymore because of all the SEO content spam and potential to be scammed.
If you were Google making billions a year off the app ecosystem because its a superior experience.. wouldn't your incentive be to make web as bad as possible?
[+] [-] mattlondon|2 years ago|reply
What will that mean for bona fide quality sites? I don't know but part of me hopes that those detailed sites will flourish to offer more details than can be offered in a single LLM response. Wishful thinking perhaps.
They'll be a huge backlash of course from the click-bait sites - just like with news sites protesting about losing traffic.
[+] [-] jakub_g|2 years ago|reply
Which IMO is related to the next thing in chain:
- It was really easy to subscribe to an RSS feed in 2000s; if you had a proper meta tag in the website header, the browser UI would show up a prominent RSS logo in the URL bar. Firefox had this built-in. Apparently Chrome too [1]. At some point this was killed. Perhaps due to mobile gaining traction, lack of space on mobile, and Chrome's annoying minimalist approach? Or perhaps because Google wanted to promote its own (R.I.P.) Google Reader, (R.I.P.) Google Wave, (R.I.P.) Google+?
(Having said that, I must admit I have declared RSS bankruptcy at some point, after subscribing to _way_ too many feeds).
- I remember there used to be a lot of blog platforms and discussion boards, people would write a lot of good stuff there, each of those platforms would create a de facto community.
Then, Google managed to make Blogger/Blogspot UX terrible; and most of other platforms died and got replaced with Facebook and Twitter. (I'm still not sure why many of those seemingly thriving platforms have died).
- Facebook and Twitter over years slowly change the algo, to not show you stuff you subscribed to, but random viral crap which optimizes "engangement".
[0] https://www.chromium.org/user-experience/feed-subscriptions/
[+] [-] _ahxg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paradox460|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|2 years ago|reply
As late as late 2000, web was still pretty exclusive club. I went to college mid-2000s. Even among students, it was a geeky minority that really "consumed" internet massively.
If the web was real life, we'd have recognised this very easily.
[+] [-] wzdd|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|2 years ago|reply
Something's gotta give.
[+] [-] clnq|2 years ago|reply
And my experience is that I'm an old school technical blogger who writes articles certainly not for the "entertainment" crowd, but for the professional crowd. My readership stays high from Monday to Friday and drops to nearly zero over the weekend.
Over the last 10 years, I have observed that my readers come from referrers like Google.com or Google.de less frequently. I would say that I get about 20 times fewer readers from Google. However, Google still constitutes about 90% of my readership, down from perhaps 97% to 99%. These are the facts, looking at my analytics.
The other 10% come from DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, Bitbucket, MS Teams, ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, Atlassian, Swarm, Ecosia, topical forums, and company domains. The share of readership from sources other than Google used to be closer to 1% - 3% in the past.
From my experience as a user of Google, I also find it much more difficult to find experts in any given field. About a decade ago, I would find so many more hard-boiled technical blogs. Now, the mid-level college essay-style knowledge is much more promoted. This shift makes sense for Google as an ad company, even if it harms everyone, future Google included.
With all that said, here are my conclusions, based in the reality of my own technical blog and its readership -- Google is worse for the technical crowd, which is now more likely to share technical resources by word of mouth (like Atlassian, Swarm, Teams, topical forums and company domains) or find them with other search engines. Google's effectiveness has not significantly diminished, as it still accounts for 90% of the way people reach my technical blog, so it might still be very functional for this purpose. Challenger search engines appear to have gained a significant stake in the tech crowd, a contrast to the scenario 10 years ago. But it seems like the decline of Google is a bit catastrophized.
These are only thoughts from my perspective, though they are grounded in some objective metrics.
[+] [-] leobg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonatron|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nologic01|2 years ago|reply
Excuse me for no longer taking any tech influencer promises at face value. More accurately, for taking them at zero value.
Tell me first 1) your real business model and 2) how other actors will respond to your business model
Enough with the half-truths and dishonesty.
[+] [-] _the_inflator|2 years ago|reply
First of all, Google is not the internet. Is providing search results a challenging business? Yes. Could do Google do a better job? Yes, so could do others. The fact, that Bing does not gain market share even though pushing everything ChatGPT related may confirms this notion.
Content and consumer habits changed.
In the 90th, website where dominated by text. Compared to today, every page that was suggested by Google resembled a book. Today most websites look like easy to consume snippets due to lower attention span, less time.
Then came Twitter, TikTok, Facebook etc.
So I would not blame Google in the first place.
Will ChatGPT replace Google? Not entierly, but they are working on it.
Will we say the same ("ChatGPT send LLMs into 'spiral of decline'") about ChatGPT in 10-15 years from now? Maybe.
[+] [-] Roark66|2 years ago|reply
I hope they first threat they choose to monitor is the monopolisation of the AI services, all while the huge monopolies preach about "the dangers of ai" to increase the barriers to entry for the small guy (we all know disappearance of open source models and a ban on sale of hardware capable of running them to individuals is their most desirable wet dream).
[+] [-] DoingIsLearning|2 years ago|reply
They somehow never grapple with these ethical issues when getting payed.
Edit: I don't disagree but feels hypocritical and obviously on a newspaper to advertise their new ventures.
[+] [-] reducesuffering|2 years ago|reply
"I think that being able to automatically produce arbitrary content that is indistinguishable from human-generated content at scale is the death knell of the web as we know it."
https://nonint.com/2023/03/09/gpt-might-be-an-information-vi...
[+] [-] AJRF|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mg|2 years ago|reply
AI can now read through SEO fluff text and ads and present the user with the information they are looking for.
Therefore, there will be no more incentive to create those types of sites.
The web will change. Into what it will change is yet to be seen. But it will change.
[+] [-] blitzar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] berkes|2 years ago|reply
Like "age of the article" through "time we saw it first & how much it changed since". Or like "churn", through "how often we saw new content come and go". Anything that users or owners control, will be gamed. So maybe there are variables that only the search-engine itself controls that still provide adequate or good ranking?
[+] [-] badrabbit|2 years ago|reply
People huddle around HN for example like they do on reddit,fb, insta, telegram,discord,vk,yt,bilibili,etc...
Before the mobile users' eternal september, I used to find myself searching for sites to hang out at. I can't remember the last time I signed up to a sight to commune with users. Especially, now I am very careful because there are a lot of bad actors and it's impossible to actually be pseudonymous.
TLD's were supposed to help with this over commercialization of the internet. .com and .co were supposed to be exclusive to commerical sites, all the blogs,forums,etc... were supposed to be on .org and .net, these days a TLD is like a vanity license plate.