As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results

by DASD • 3 years ago

334 307 3 years ago

michael1999• 3 years ago

The reverse-takeover of Google by DoubleClick is the Fall. The poison apple. All else is commentary.

thegrim33• 3 years ago

This is a meta-level comment, but a technique I've been using for a while now, which I've found pretty helpful/useful, is that if an article starts off with an anecdote I immediately know not to bother reading it. It shows you that the author is more interested in pushing a feeling/emotion/story rather than relaying actual information. They're trying to manipulate how you think about the topic from the very beginning. It's really hard to describe the pattern but once you see it you can never unsee it. Just food for thought.

j7ake• 3 years ago

Also a lot of (newbie) start up pitches are like this.

rexpop• 3 years ago

This is a standard rhetorical technique for illustrating in personal terms what's difficult to imagine at a systemic or statistical level. It doesn't mean they're trying to manipulate you any more than you're trying to manipulate us, ie writing is pleading.

dustincoates• 3 years ago

A "fun" game I like to play with articles from the Verge is how many words until there's a first person pronoun. (It's almost always in the first sentence.) Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't need the journalist's backstory before I get the meat of the article.

wizzwizz43• 3 years ago

Four! :-P

escapedmoose2• 3 years ago

There’s more than one reason to read an article. Often the story is the point.

robertlagrant2• 3 years ago

That's true, but not great. "I'm here for you to subtly impute how I should feel about something by bypass my critical faculties" is a poor substitute for people who want to be informed.

zztop44• 3 years ago

This one might be a false positive. The article contains lengthy first person descriptions of conversations with SEO “pioneers” and reflections on how they’ve shaped the internet.

I’d also question the heuristic in general. Anecdotes serve a range of purposes. And in any case, it’s quite easy to subtly push a feeling/emotion/story without anecdotes if that’s what you want to do.

pier25• 3 years ago

They're trying to manipulate how you think about the topic from the very beginning.

Isn't giving context exactly that?

pishpash• 3 years ago

You mean like Quora answers from a certain country's users?

sysadm1n• 3 years ago

'The People' when really it's mostly bots these days, and getting smarter with LLMs too. Only a few blogs/articles are written by actual humans, and something strange has happened to my cognitive abilities lately; is discerning whether an article is written by an LLM or a human. I regularly play a game called 'bot or not' now.

heshiebee• 3 years ago

This article is surprisingly(for the Verge) unbiased, really well written and balanced. The title is definitely misleading making it seem like the author will be taking the authoritarian side. 100% worth the read.

omoikane• 3 years ago

Which title? The one visible on the page is "The people who ruined the internet", but the one in the <title> tag is "Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? - The Verge".

The current title on HN is "As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?"

ilrwbwrkhv3• 3 years ago

The internet was ruined when it was de anonymized by Facebook and LinkedIn etc. I remember growing up in a completely anonymous internet. You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally. Then you would go back to society as the real you and temper yourself a bit to fit in and work with others and that was ok because you could blow off steam on the internet.

amadeuspagel• 3 years ago

There are many anonymous websites, like 4chan, and you are free to create your own, which is itself something you can do anonymously.

lukas099• 3 years ago

I'd even wager that the number of people posting content anonymously has only grown in absolute terms.

postalrat3• 3 years ago

How are people you to find your forum if sites indexing sites like google apparently won't link to your site: https://www.google.com/search?q=anonymous+English-language+i...

asdfman1233• 3 years ago

The internet was ruined when your normie older relatives got on it, unfortunately

bdw52042• 3 years ago

They were using the internet before 2008 or so but mainly for sending and receiving emails. Younger people who weren't that into computers mainly used them to message their friends on AIM and pirate music on Napster then Kazaa then Limewire (the platforms kept getting shut down). In the post-2008 world, Facebook replaced email and AIM and Spotify/Netflix replaced piracy. The difference is, the people who used to just use the internet for email now spend far more time online because Facebook is designed to be addicting.

drivebycomment2• 3 years ago

The Internet is more useful than it ever was for a lot more people. It has more information on more stuff, and you can do a lot more than you ever could, and a lot more people benefit from it in more ways than ever. Is it universally better in every way ? No. Could it be better in many important ways? Yes. But hyperbolic statements like "the Internet was ruined" is just nostalgia and hyperbole.

tannhaeuser• 3 years ago

The Internet is more useful than it ever was for a lot more people. It has more information on more stuff, and you can do a lot more than you ever could, and a lot more people benefit from it in more ways than ever.

Without proof, that's just as hyperbolic as the post you're criticizing.

ilrwbwrkhv3• 3 years ago

Not quite. I think "surfing the web" has become a worse experience now than in the past. There are some "internet connected" experiences such as Wikipedia which work well. But the biggest change is that the internet has moved away from being an exploration space to a push content space. The hyperlinking got reduced because tech companies didn't want people to leave their platform and that just made the culture very pushy and clingy.

leptons• 3 years ago

You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally.

You can't even really do that on HN without getting your account deleted. I don't think the blame belongs solely on Facebook and Linkedin so much as anyone who has any kind of power online using it on others as they see fit.

I_Am_Nous• 3 years ago

Sometimes people want to say some pretty antisocial things, so it's not too surprising if people tasked with "keeping the peace" are trigger happy with bans. Presence in a community is a privilege, not a right.

That said I also believe you are correct, even small degrees of power can corrupt and being granted power over conversation means your biases may lead to abuse if you don't agree with a view point or the person holding that view.

StableAlkyne• 3 years ago

Which is ironic, considering the Internet was also "ruined" in 1993 when ISPs gave everyone Usenet access, flooding the Reddit equivalent of the day (if Reddit were the only real forum) with anonymous users who cared not for cultural norms. Prior to that, it was mostly people posting under their real name with their real workplace or college in their email address.

OnionBlender• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

smeagull2• 3 years ago

Get this - you can have an anonymous facebook and linkedin account too.

wizzwizz43• 3 years ago

Have you tried running an anonymous Facebook account in the past decade? Facebook lets you use it for a few weeks (or months), then suddenly refuses to let you in unless you provide identifying information that it never asked for before, and refuses to give you your data back until you “verify it's you” (might be quoting Google or Microsoft there, but Facebook has similar wording) even though they have no records with which to compare it to, so that can't possibly be a valid justification.

charcircuit• 3 years ago

It is against linkedin's policies to use a fake name. While facebook accounts require a real name you can create additonal profiles that use pseudodnyms and can not be traced back to your real name.

no_wizard• 3 years ago

This perhaps, is some rose colored glasses.

I remember friends getting harassed online, where it was one of the few places they could be themselves (for instance, a good friend of mine was openly gay online well before he was in person) and the internet seemingly didn't take kindly to this in alot of corners (gaming for starters)

That said, they were able to find some community that didn't exist the same locally, so the vastness is the upside here in that respect.

ilrwbwrkhv3• 3 years ago

Absolutely. As a homosexual or transgender you would be ripped apart online. But you also strangely learnt to fight back and stand for yourself. It was easier because you were anonymous and you were not always online.

ThrowAway1922A• 3 years ago

Sites like this still exist, though some of the more notable examples have heavily deplatforming attempts against them.

The old internet is dead and most people and organizations abhor the idea of anonymity and anonymous (free) speech.

permo-w3• 3 years ago

if you want that, go on reddit or 4chan or twitter or hacker news or even instagram to some degree. reddit, instagram and hacker news don't even require email validation afaik

phendrenad2• 3 years ago

"The internet" doesn't really exist, now, now does it? 99% of users are living in an AOL-style world, where they live within walled gardens. Why leave twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit? There's nothing out there but a wasteland of crumbling has-been sites. Sometimes you'll find yourself on a blog or news article, but you just click/tap the back button to go back to the walled garden. Nobody is subscribing to your RSS feed. And what really did this is mobile devices. And it isn't necessarily a bad thing, although I do miss the old vbulletin discussion days.

asdfman1233• 3 years ago

There's lots of good content out there, but the problem is finding it. A Google replacement wouldn't be any better, because everyone's attention would be directed into optimizing new replacement site.

It frustrates me when people say "Google should search reddit by default." The reason reddit is still halfway decent is there isn't as much money in gaming it, but there would be if the entire world was sent to it.

bdw52042• 3 years ago

I think the best path to a "Google replacement" is probably to reinvent Yahoo or dmoz. You'd still have to human curate the worthwhile sites through a ton of SEO spam and, if you go the dmoz route of volunteer curators, that's an attack vector for spammers but I think it'd be much more manageable than trying to build an index of the entire web and search it. A new general purpose web directory would also help mitigate probably the biggest harm that Google's algorithm has caused to the web: the death of the "links" page as a standard part of a web site due to sites trying to increase their pagerank by reducing outbound links.

TheCoelacanth• 3 years ago

The only way to make a better replacement is to make a 100 competing replacements each with substantial market share. They don't even have to be better implemented than Google, getting rid of market dominance alone would improve results because SEO assholes wouldn't have time to optimize for all 100.

superkuh• 3 years ago

Your perception is how the vast majority of people see the web. But you're completely wrong about "nothing out there" and "Nobody is subscribing to your RSS feed." Just because you're trapped in the gardens doesn't mean there aren't communities of people who never went in them in the first place.

Yes, there's a thick layer of for-profit walled garden crap on top but the actual web of websites (not applications) is still out there and it's bigger than ever despite being proportionally much smaller compared to the smartphone/megacorp users.

barrysteve• 3 years ago

Showing up on the internet and subscribing isn't enough to scratch the itch.

Games are the place to go and 'show up'.

The internet is no longer used for sharing relatable information. It saturated and walled off valuable information a decade ago.

permo-w3• 3 years ago

twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit

/hacker news

throwaway4474• 3 years ago

I wish your site would have an RSS feed. In our days you have to build your own scrapper

dang• 3 years ago

Related ongoing thread:

Some thoughts about The Verge article on SEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38104407

xwdv• 3 years ago

SEO has always been a moving target. So now it’s all about social media optimization. Think channels, not search results.

richforrester• 3 years ago

Plus a lot of it has been about semantically correct formatting of your content and code.

It's a moving target in that a lot of orgs try to "game the system", or at least exploit it as best they can :)

Good content will mostly rise to the top because that's what search engines strive to optimise.

Nothing really changes that much probably. Just semantics.

zeruch3• 3 years ago

I cant foresee a scenario where an endlessly growing mass of AI-generated noise, stacked upon itself, will be useful to anyone. Humans will invariably find a less contentious path (maybe its seeking out more localized options, maybe its balkanizing into various specialized domains, maybe its $NEWTHINGYETTOBESEEN, or all of the above. But the current trajectory cannot hold.

Someone else mentioned the "reverse-takeover of Google by DoubleClick is the Fall" and I find that spot on.

The Dionysian appetites of adtech will be its own downfall.

w0m• 3 years ago

Eventually; someone will create an index to sort through the AI output and determine what's true/relevant and return it to the consumer.

Call it 'airank' maybe?

cyanydeez• 3 years ago

yeah definitely not truth value.

probably a "exploit" trigger. hard to think how reality and predictive power are going to be mediated through some kind of source index.

lobochrome• 3 years ago

Yahoo!

kridsdale32• 3 years ago

It's basically Wikipedia.

Take as axiom that there exists infinite content of apparently human-readable stuff in the universe at random IP addresses. It is grey static, that maybe at one point in the past used to be ordered information. Now, all entropy.

A human managed and manually curated safe zone of information is the refuge. Real people had real discussions and votes and decisions to result in what you see. This is true with Reddit to a lesser but still useful extent. Democracy can be gamed, but it's 1000x better than Engagement Signal Ranking that drives Google or Meta's products.

The same principles apply to education, science, and political organization of human enterprise.

Basically, institutionalize your info-world.

pradn• 3 years ago

People keep saying the Internet is going to be flooded by AI-generated content. Is it going to be any different than the million Wikipedia/StackOverflow re-skins? A bunch of trash sites we learn to ignore in our search results?

Generative AI can also increase the amount of good content, too. If I knew that a particular human vouched for an AI-generated code snippet, I would trust it as much as a hand-written StackOverflow answer. You can bring the entire arsenal of community and reputation-building to have more people vouching for answers and double-checking others.

That's why the future of StackOverflow is more like Phind, the code-specific LLM that looks like a search engine. StackOverflow already has the community. Now, they need to keep people there to check AI-generated answers.

And there's second order benefits, too. You could have AI check old answers, even human ones, on a regular basis. Imagine if an answer is marked "obsolete" because the AI found a more modern solution, or if it found a security issue.

zeruch3• 3 years ago

" A bunch of trash sites we learn to ignore in our search results?" Exactly. But when/if that stack shifts the signal to noise ratio at escape velocity into a toilet, behaviors will change.

I'm just curious as to what that might look like. We've already seen plenty of examples as to what folks will do when an online option becomes sour/untenable...new ones arrive. Sometimes they look like old options repackaged. Sometimes they are radically new.

viburnum• 3 years ago

This is maybe the worst-written article I’ve ever read. So much random detail about dresses and Canadian hometowns and almost nothing to say about the actual topic.

kridsdale32• 3 years ago

It's written for human beings with full and complete emotional centers. I found it lovely.

haltist• 3 years ago

An art project making it obvious why the economic engine (advertising) that pays for Google's electricity bills is not sustainable: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Google+will+eat+itself

zenincognito2• 3 years ago

SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents.

Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bring ton of revenue every day.

Ofcourse, Google is trying hard to monetize every little real estate but still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the past 3 years.

The other aspect of this the "paid ads" also immensely valuable to advertisers. We have people spending 3 million dollars a month on paid ads returning 8X ROAS. Google & FB are still the most lucrative channels for ecommerce.

rgrieselhuber• 3 years ago

As a SaaS / data vendor in the space, I can confirm.

preommr• 3 years ago

because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve

Do you actually think this or is this just a polite way of saying lots of HNers are out of touch?

gretch2• 3 years ago

I'm not the OP you replied to, but there's a scene from the movie the big short that really punched the understanding into my head:

Michael Burry: I may have been early but I'm not wrong

some exec: It's the same thing!

I believe that a lot of HN posts are probably "right", but they are so far in the future and so non-applicable to day-to-day life, that it's indistinguishable from wrong. For example, everyone predicting Google is going to end - yeah all great companies eventually come to an end - if you want to be insightful, you actually have to be on time with it.

zenincognito2• 3 years ago

Politely, and with due respect, I consider myself "out of touch" for most things that I don't do on a day to day basis or those that are NOT my livelihood.

snowwrestler• 3 years ago

You can’t be ahead of the curve without thinking things that are very different from the current reality.

That said, a lot of different thinking ends up not going anywhere. Only time will sort out the difference.

I will say I agree with the above comment about the current viability of SEO. It’s still very effective. Google is still very heavily used.

One thing to keep in mind is that while organic search might be slipping, other things are slipping at least as much. The slow death of 3rd party cookies is eating away at ad network efficiency. Organic social media reach depends increasingly on influencers, which is a highly fractured and opaque marketplace (inefficient at scale). Email is effective but getting email addresses remains difficult. Trust in press and institutions (aka earned media) is way down. It’s hard out there for marketing!

btown• 3 years ago

still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the past 3 years.

The more Google trains its normal users that “generic queries will get you spoon-fed generic-ness, so you have to be specific to get what you want…” the more valuable placement on long-tail keywords will become. People aren’t going to stop searching, they’ll just hate Google more when doing so. And they’ll begrudgingly adapt.

The SEO industry will be fine. Startups that naturally breathe long-tail SEO will excel. Incumbent advertisers will see keyword costs rising across the board, though, and perhaps pass costs to customers. That’s not inherently a bad thing - but there’s a lot more to the debate there than just this aspect.

userinanother2• 3 years ago

The SEO industry has been the big winner from the crapification of Google. No surprise there

ranting-moth2• 3 years ago

Business is booming

I can believe that. But it also has the equivalent of stage 1 or 2 cancer.

theturtletalks• 3 years ago

I'd be surprised if business wasn't booming. SEO is not a one-time cost. Google continuously changes the algorithm for search results and agencies stay afloat due to this.

Paid ads on the other hand are pretty much set-up once and you feed in the ROAS to Google and they optimize on that. With Performance MAX, users have even less control.

OP's response is akin to a shovel seller saying business is good when people are saying the gold has run dry.

wslh5• 3 years ago

SEO agency owner here

Could we speak? I run a bootstrapped company for more than two decades and [natural] SEO explained part of our growth. Nowadays it is not working as expected after trying a lot of stuff and agencies. It feels like we can write articles all day without moving the needle except peaks sharing in Reddit that go down quickly.

It seems like I need to apply a giant budget to move those metrics. I understand we are in a niche market but we have real work that differentiate for the few competitors.

A 30' call will work. Are you available?

dboreham2• 3 years ago

It seems like I need to apply a giant budget to move those metrics

The plan is working.

zo1• 3 years ago

I unfortunately watched first-hand a company come up with a mediocre "app" that had barely any content. Think short-form content and random videos moderately glued to some topic written by a bunch of low-wage "content writers".

This company then picked a biggish ad-spend budget, spent it on Google, FB and other ad companies (digital agencies). And the users just started rolling in over the course of months. The increase in users, let them "monetize" by convincing "sponsors" to "pay" for content on this new "platform", which netted them a big chunk of profit and more money for more ad-spend which made more users come.

Next up, they will brand and sell this platform which has "X-millions of users", even though most are one-off users, barely any repeat or long-term users, etc.

It's like some sort of endless shit-peddling cycle driven by marketing, and it was frankly disgusting to watch from the sides. Their stated goal was actually noble, uplifting, etc. But all they ended up doing was building a "herd" of users that they could monetize and use for marketing other projects, and helped no one except for their global brand, and their owners.

Sorry about the rant.

In summary: Yes, just get an ad-agency and pay them to help you get users. At least you have a valid product I assume and genuine value to provide in exchange for money.

vachina• 3 years ago

we can write articles all day

So you’re the reason why search results are spam nowadays

ipullrank• 3 years ago

I took a quick look at the sites in your profile. Guessing CoinFabrik is the one you care about? If so, you need more links.

soneca• 3 years ago

I never thought that SEO was dying, quite the contrary, I think a lot people learned how to game Google. That’s one of the reasons why I think helpful results on Google are dying (the other reason is ads, of course).

wkat42423• 3 years ago

The whole thing about Google selling search terms to the highest bidder is exactly why it doesn't work for me as a user. I want the thing I'm looking for in my area with the best quality and best price. Usually the shops that pays the most for the search term are nothing to do with that.

I've stopped using Google altogether for things I want to buy. I only search directly in the shops now.

yard20103• 3 years ago

But that's how monopoly works.

alvah2• 3 years ago

SEO still isn't dying, but low DR niche sites built for Amazon commissions and display ads, where the owner & writers have little- to no domain expertise, have been holed below the waterline by Google's latest updates. Correctly so IMO. From what I've heard, ecommerce, small business SEO etc. are unaffected.

ge964• 3 years ago

I don't get the argument about gpt replacing a search engine. If gpt trains from search engine data how does it get new data? I guess the usage of gpt over time.

postalrat3• 3 years ago

Why would gpt train from search engine data instead of the actual documents being indexed?

ge964• 3 years ago

Not just documents, everything, every website that becomes searchable information. How would that work in the future if people don't use search engines, how does the gpt/llm bring that info in. Not saying it's not possible, would there be an API people submit their content into...

Edit: actually I wonder if wikipedia will make one (model) they have so much info

ranting-moth2• 3 years ago

Google's search results have been poisoned by SEO.

A lot of the time when looking for information about X the search results are dominated either by someone trying to sell me X or they have very superficial information about X just so they can a bit further down try to sell me X.

(I'm talking about the unknown X, not Elon's failing project).

ge964• 3 years ago

I don't disagree with that. I hate trying to get a Towing service and it's a fake website/intercepting the request so they can charge on top/call the actual tow company I was trying to call.

adhesive_wombat• 3 years ago

It's always surprised me that confirmed SEO shenaniganery doesn't bring an instant ion-cannon strike from Google. I know they are apparently allergic to having a human ever decide anything ever. It's just that if I were them, with an infinite data lake to find the vendors' traces, trillion-dollar C-suite morals and the SEO was messing with the bottom line, there would be no quarter when a nest is uncovered. Delist everything to do with them, delete all their accounts and salt their persistent data profiles. Most of them are abroad and will struggle to do anything about it. After all, occasional Gmail or Android developer bans are meted out with various levels of capriciousness.

I guess it's good that they're not obviously going Judge Dredd left, right and centre, but it's still surprising to me that you can run up to them, slap them in the virtual face and stay online to do it again.

Or perhaps it is not messing with the short-term bottom line because the SEO sites are crawling with ads? And until ChatGPT what were you going to do? Use Bing?

qvrjuec• 3 years ago

Isn't this what happened with rap genius around a decade ago[0]? Maybe this was long before their policy of zero human intervention.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/25/5243716/rap-genius-plumm...

spookie2• 3 years ago

Their lengthy apology is.... I don't know how to describe it. It reminds me of relationship I had, in a bad way.

The part where they go on to say "We messed up" cracked me up. You don't "mess up" when you are fully aware of your actions, and perform them as planned.

Nition• 3 years ago

I notice the article says Hacker News first brought it to Google's attention![0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658

spookie2• 3 years ago

They'll only start noticing when it's too late. For now, I assume, the bling is still flowing enough to be as addictive to them as the SEO spam is for most.

Nextgrid• 3 years ago

SEO doesn't mess with the bottom line though. If anything, it could improve the bottom line by making the ads look more attractive if the organic search results have all been polluted to hell.

fy20• 3 years ago

Unpopular opinion: Without SEO polluting the algorithm, ads would be worthless, as the search algorithm would do a good enough job of finding the correct results.

dboreham2• 3 years ago

SEO shenaniganery doesn't bring...

That could be because their interests are aligned. Google makes money from ad spend, not from delivering useful results to users.

golergka2• 3 years ago

A lot of "SEO shenaniganery" is basically "make your website better, for robots and for users".

qup• 3 years ago

"This website made good use of H1s and captioned all its photos. Obliterate it."

fsckboy4• 3 years ago

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had said the house looked like it was melting, so she typed in "melting house", I think. Not that that's genius or quirky or anything, but I would never dream of typing in something I was thinking "informally", and her approach is more like "whatever whackadoo thing I'm thinking, probably other people think just like me" and she finds anything I ask her about. (I've pretested that query, and turns out that there are melting houses all over the world, just gotta look in your neighborhood)

so to the point here, I lament that Google doesn't work any more, but she doesn't, she thinks it works great. Now if I can just get her to stop finding restaurant recommendations on TikTok...

wildrhythms• 3 years ago

How would you have phrased that query?

fsckboy4• 3 years ago

unlike some of the houses that show up in that query, this house was not designed to appear melting, and I wasn't sure if it was even designed to look uneven, or had the foundation settled and they did nothing about it? So I was trying to explain the uneven wavy lines, rounded corners, and I was saying "it's almost as if it had melted", thinking "this is my personal interpretation, I'm just being descriptive"

so that's what I mean by "informal thinking" vs "explicit query"

it's also easy to explain this one case, but it is true in general, she just finds things much more quickly than I do, and when I ask her what was her query I'm always "why tf did you type that in?" If we used a formal language for search, I'd beat her, but she throws in a lot of extraneous terms that make me think either or both "you are overspecifying" or "you are ambiguating" with those extra terms, but she gets answers I don't get, I think because many other people are typing things in the way she does.

I had been trying to find it before I saw her, and since I knew the general neighborhood I was actually trying to "walk" around with streetview to find it, then I was wracking my brain for architectural terms I could use.

Raidion• 3 years ago

I think Google still deserves a ton of credit. Online shopping is tricky, but information is incredibly easy to access, especially if you do know how to avoid clicking on Quora or WebMD style sites.

Google does a great job of shepherding you towards information and at the very least gives you additional context that you can use to corroborate or tune your search.

userinanother2• 3 years ago

Information search works a lot better because it has no commercial value. Therefore no SEO attack

darkerside• 3 years ago

Odd, I find Quora and WebMD to have some of the more useful information out there.

pault• 3 years ago

Try searching for anything related to a recently released video game. Chat gpt spam has made it completely impossible. Even the reputable wikis are pushed down far enough to become very difficult to find.

AniseAbyss• 3 years ago

I always like to talk about how much I hate advertising but when I need a Thai restaurant Google Maps has my back.

But I'm also old and remember that the yellow pages used to bring in billions of revenue. Have things really changed on a fundamental level?

shiroiuma3• 3 years ago

Is that "advertising" though? Google Maps is an index: you enter a query, like "Thai restaurant near $location", and it shows you Thai restaurants in that location. Then, you can look at some of those restaurants' listings and see photos (usually uploaded by customers, but some from the business), pictures of menus (same), opening hours, a link to their website, etc.

I don't see how any of that qualifies as "advertising"; it's just a business directory. It certainly isn't "unsolicited advertising". The same goes for the old Yellow Pages: it was a business directory (though it had ads too). Businesses had to pay to be listed in it, but that's the cost of doing business: if people can't find you, you're not going to make any money.

I think when people say they hate advertising, what they really mean is unsolicited ads. If you're looking for a particular business, why wouldn't you want some info about them, or about the choices available?

genewitch4• 3 years ago

When i'm in my car, the only thing i use google maps for is "yellow pages" - get me the phone number, and about 20% of the time, the hours of operation.

In fact, when i am at home, and i need a phone number, i go to google maps. But i do use the maps as maps when i am not in my car.

hiddencost• 3 years ago

Try Eater.

pclmulqdq5• 3 years ago

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works.

The google we grew up with was a tool that allowed you to precisely retrieve authoritative writings related to a subject, but today's google is a lot more like ChatGPT than that.

sneed_chucker• 3 years ago

It all comes back to that "marginal user" blog post

Chilko• 3 years ago

Indeed, I've had to force myself to start searching in full sentences much more as the results from the old method of keyword searching have steadily deteriorated.

wslh5• 3 years ago

Google does not work. I can show you with a simple example with a few keywords together that does not find the specific resource.

I just give an example in another HN thread on a different context [1].

I am open for a 30' session showing a lot more examples.

Regarding less experienced people searching for information, try looking for health data and see what is in the top.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37961449

LtWorf4• 3 years ago

If you call "working" showing me an endless stream of blogs of some dude, an automatically translated russian clone of stackoverflow, a completely unrelated stackoverflow question, above the actual official documentation that it should be showing me… sure then it works.

CobrastanJorji• 3 years ago

I think perhaps the problem was that when you were growing up, the Internet had a much higher percentage of authoritative writings related to a subject, and today's Internet looks a lot more like ChatGPT-generated drivel. Google's results might has changed, but I suspect less so than the Internet as a whole. Older Internet content was weird, and often wrong, but it wasn't an endless expanse of nothingness camouflaged to resemble human content.

makeitdouble• 3 years ago

I think Google Search "works" in the same way local newspapers "worked": they provide easy access to what most people want to know in their daily life, including gossip, the weather, the popular events and discussion topics ("melting houses")

If you're a German living in Morocco trying to understand Quebec's immigration policies in the original text you'll be fighting the search engine at every turn.

neotrope• 3 years ago

Noticed this as well. I've gotten so frustrated with poor results for things I need, I've been using "Verbatim" mode to force Google to stop interpreting my terms. This was a pain, so ended up installing an extension that forces verbatim on every search.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/oc...

MrRolleyes• 3 years ago

The trick is that Google actually works great.

This would be true if we could exclude commercial results. SEO is absolutely destroying search quality.

loveparade3• 3 years ago

I disagree, but it depends on your definition of "working well". Yes, Google works better for my mom these days if you measure whether she is happy with the results she gets. However, the results she gets are mostly misinformation or spam. She just doesn't realize that's the case and is happy with the results regardless.

Measuring whether or not results are relevant to the query is the wrong metric to use. You don't want highly relevant misinformation. You want good information.

CapricornNoble2• 3 years ago

Yeah, gone are the days when you could enter a range of 16-digit numbers that started with "4", filetype:xls, and it would return a bunch of Excel spreadsheets from businesses that were storing credit card numbers in plaintext cells.

sighs wistfully

drekipus• 3 years ago

Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works.

uhh....

7speter2• 3 years ago

We have google bard and chatgpt. We should have old google too.

underwater3• 3 years ago

No, Google results are trash. Here are three examples from this week:

- I Googled "speed work running", wanting some workout suggestions. I visited four or five results that either didn't have concrete suggestions, were poorly written, or overly verbose. I ended my search with little faith that I was getting good advice. I typed the same thing into ChatGPT and got a suggestion of 6 different workouts that all seemed coherent.

- I asked Google Home "How do I make overnight oats". It replied, "I found a result for [...], should I read it?" then "The first ingredient is Nutella". That's it, that's all it said. I tried the same search on the web, and every result Google result was spam that was 20 paragraphs of inane blog content with a recipe tacked on the end. Again, ChatGPT then gave me a sane, baseline, recipe.

- I searched Google for "how much caffeine is in coffee". It gave me a calculator that said, "40 mg" and then a suggestion an alternative search for "Q: How much caffeine is in an average cup of coffee? A: between 80 to 100 milligrams". It turns out the calculator was normalizing the caffeine content to caffeine per 100mg of coffee.

I'm using Google exactly how their product is training me to use it, but the failure modes are all consistent. Google's AI features has not real understanding of the world, so their instant answers are frequently nonsensical. And Google clearly can't filter out SEO garbage.

Even if they could filter out SEO garbage, Google's early success killed the golden goose. 99% of web publishers are publishing content for Google, not for their readers and web publishing has become a cynically commercial affair. Individual publishers have by and large moved on from the web to other creator-focused platforms. So, the quality and experience of web content is absolute rubbish. Results are filled with cookie banners, ads, signup prompts, verbose SEO filler, poor writing, lack of authority, etc.

wayfinder• 3 years ago

I’m sorry but are you trying to speak for all highly educated and technical people?

Because as far as I know, I’m both and I find Google just as good as ever, if not much better.

The only place I see people complaining about Google is Hacker News and certain parts of Reddit and by no means are the opinions on these sites anywhere near universally shared by most people.

And by all means, I think calling yourself highly educated but not being able to adapt slightly when a tool isn’t working right a little rich…

otabdeveloper42• 3 years ago

Google is shit. It finds the 1 percent of the most commonly searched pages, and totally ignores the 99 percent long tail.

They should drop the charade and do a directory listing instead, like the "portal" pages of yore.

reaperman• 3 years ago

Counterpoint (NSFW):

No results: "vector plus phallophile" / "vector plus phallophile reviews" / "vector plus phallophilereviews" / "phallophilereviews.com vector plus"

vs.

Correct results: "site:phallophilereviews.com vector plus"

Yes, I have SafeSearch turned OFF. This is happening to pretty much anything that's remotely NSFW on both google.com and amazon.com -- it's getting completely impossible to search for perfectly legal things that are NSFW.

kristopolous• 3 years ago

Google does this so people will execute more queries, stay longer on the search results, and see more ads. It's classic monopoly exploitation of abusing a captured user for increased profit.

They're perfectly capable of making things better, it's just more profitable if they don't.

coldtea4• 3 years ago

It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want

I don't think so. I've been using the "full sentence questions" and fuzzy questions since forever, and very seldom use "site:" and other such more formal constraints you mention.

Despite that Google results have been getting worse for the past 5 years at least.

peoplefromibiza• 3 years ago

It works better than before

for some definition of better that is not "the results are more relevant than before"

nazka• 3 years ago

What are your sources for this?

lobocinza• 3 years ago

It doesn't work like ChatGPT at all.

okdood64• 3 years ago

A lot of HNers are pretty out of touch with how the vast majority of people use the internet.

ShamelessC• 3 years ago

A lot of HNers are pretty out of touch.

antod• 3 years ago

Is it wrong to want to be even further out of touch?

otabdeveloper42• 3 years ago

Yes, they visit one of their three daily social networks, and Google is just a fancy way to type the URL. (A sad ncessity, because the OG address bar has no way of showing ads.)

We know.

devin2• 3 years ago

Username is fsckboy.

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc.

Checks out.

ssgh• 3 years ago

"fsck - check and repair a Linux file system" (https://linux.die.net/man/8/fsck) The -b -o -y must be undocumented flags.

wkat42423• 3 years ago

Hmm yes but that melting house is not something a SEO buyer would pay for.

The problem is Google monetizes search terms and thus show the highest bidders and not the most relevant results.

This manifests itself the most for things people want to sell (products or services)

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

The problem I have is that I need a way to just get webpage results. I did a search on my phone for “what’s the best colossal sword in Elden ring?” just now and I got:

- full screen of those “intelligent” answers that is just naming swords from Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3.

- two SEO spam sites

- two decent results

- a full page of YouTube suggestions

- two more SEO pages

- a section of “people also searched for”

- four more YouTube videos

- another “people also searched for”

- a block for Reddit posts discussion this question (finally what I really kind of wanted, maybe I just stop using Google…)

- about 10+ more decent-looking websites.

Perhaps your assistant is just paid enough not to be annoyed by this garbage way of getting to the answer. And perhaps she doesn’t know what great really feels like. I wonder if there’s a generation of people who only know of the Internet as being this bazaar that’s absolutely glowing with neon ads like some blade runner undercity.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 3 years ago

My results from the same query are related to yours but substantively different.

Top result: article from GameRant on the best colossal weapons (I have no idea what this means)

6 "intelligent" answers, the first of which when expanded lists the "Elden Ring: All 11 Colossal Swords, Ranked By Physical Strength"

Article from The Gamer called "Elden Ring: 14 Best Colossal Swords, Ranked"

4 YT videos

Reddit block

....

lolinder5• 3 years ago

I don't think it's a question of levels of formality in your search terms, I think whether you find Google useful depends on what topics you typically search for.

Google is fine for memes, news, and the other things that normal people regularly look for on the internet. Where it really breaks down is where it used to shine—finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics. Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap for finding any content with a target audience smaller than a few million people, and while stripping out advanced search operators may smooth the path for the 80th percentile of searches, it cripples the remaining 20 percent.

If your assistant stays firmly within the 80% that work, then yeah, Google is better than ever. But they made the 80% work seamlessly by giving up entirely on the 20% that people on forums like this really cared about.

Wowfunhappy• 3 years ago

Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap

I know people say it still doesn't work, but I find adding quotes completely effective for me when I need the precise keyword. Not sure what I'm doing differently.

adamc• 3 years ago

This is the best analysis I've seen in this thread.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 3 years ago

3 months ago, I needed to figure out how to get the UK government to tell a multinational's pension service managers that I am not subject to taxation on a 35 year old pension plan because I am a US tax resident. It involves first getting the US government to certify my residency to the UK. If that's not niche, I don't know what is.

Google was excellent, the process took me about 2-3 hours to get everything clear in my head, the documents went off in the mail, and the certification has been issued in the UK.

So yeah, I don't know what your experience is, but it's not mine.

Mistletoe• 3 years ago

I think a really perverse form of the Pareto principle has been working against us since at least the Eternal September. But I get it, I’m never the target audience for anything and everything I like is always discontinued. I wouldn’t have it any other way, as the alternative is quite scary.

Ferret7446• 3 years ago

That "finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics" needs to actually exist on the Web and not on the dark Web; that is, linked from somewhere so a search engine can crawl it.

That is generally no longer true, due to human nature and the rise of walled platforms and/or non-Web platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Medium, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. Most content is either private, or public as part of an offhand comment/discussion thread. Actual public pages with high quality content are near extinct.

In the few cases where it may be true, the results are sorted for the common denominator, especially since most people who would be looking for such niche information have disabled personalization, so Google can only assume that you are an average person who wants common denominator results.

noizejoy• 3 years ago

The revolution devoured its children:

In the early years, technically inclined individuals / power users were the early adopters of the Internet and Google and thus arguably a high percentage of users. So it adapted to that user demographic.

The early demographic (as is so often the case) enabled the revolution, and it became mainstream. And the early demographic is left behind.

Google (with all of it's measuring, automation and various generations of algorithmic and machine accelerated learning evolved from being optimized for early adopters to being optimized for the mainstream.

Maybe some of these links will help? ;-)

https://www.google.com/search?q=learn+to+talk+like+a+teenage...

golergka2• 3 years ago

I don't google as much, but I regular develop my random thoughts like that with ChatGPT. If I heard about your melting house, I'd try to generate it's picture with Dalle.

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

Google predicts too much about local things, in that case it works extremely well in that example, it was in your neighborhood google biased the results to something local and that worked specifically for her and that scenario

This works for most people most of the time and is exactly what we’re finding frustrating

But knowing what you can still use it for is 90% of the battle, my latest common use case is just fact checking AI right now but my primary queries are all to sandboxed language models

rmbyrro2• 3 years ago

I miss the days of "site:", "intitle:", etc.

I'm thinking when our carefully curated prompts, chain-of-thoughts, and what else will stop working on ChatGPT because they optimized it for the technically uneducated users.

We'll meet here again. Missing the days of "Let's think step-by-step". Ah, this one in particular seems to be already over!

LambdaComplex2• 3 years ago

I miss the days of "site:", "intitle:", etc.

Those still work, don't they? I use site: all the time.

NikolaNovak• 3 years ago

That's the thing.

All the people I feel are "using Google wrong" and are just "fluking the right results by accident "... They're actually using it more efficiently than I am! Same with almost everything mobile. I like the control and certainty and size and detail of desktop computing and my ergonomic keyboard and 32" monitors. I cannot understand how people are using wonky apps and Imprecise directions and half-understood usage... And getting many things faster and easier than I would :)

I had an enlightment moment last night. I usd to run a photography studio so am pretty handy around a digital camera. I was setting up my phone's main camera with long shutter and trying to steady it to take a photo of a Halloween costume in the dark... When my friend just turned the phone to selfie camera, it automatically used it's screen as 6" flash, and he got a better photo faster and with less thought and kerfuffle. Was he "using it wrong", with lower res camera and single point direct flash (big no no!) and just not thinking it through at all? Maybe? No... He got a great result quickly and efficiently, I'm just stuck in stone age :-).

(There are still times and areas where understanding the how and why is useful. But in many mundane daily tasks I'll get beat by people who don't bother :)

Arkhaine_kupo• 3 years ago

He got a great result quickly and efficiently, I'm just stuck in stone age :-).

Knowing how to use a camera is not being stuck in the stone age. His photo was good because the phone automatically had a longer shutter time, did post processing HDR and did light light edits.

If you both set up RAW images on your phone, and put it on lightroom, yours will be editable into a perfect photo, his will be a mess of flash and AI generated artifacts by the phone to make it "just work".

Having things that "just work" is great for everyday tasks, but power users and technical people should still have their tools to do things right. Apple allows for RAW image and videofootage while still having many settings by default for most people. Spotify used to have a ton of cool audiophile options in the settings now its like 3 options and they are all terrible. Google has gone that same way, instead of enabling both, they have cut off power users by focusing everything on "everyday use" which makes their product largely useless outside of some scenarios.

dicriseg• 3 years ago

I’m in my 40s so Google wasn’t my first search engine but it’s definitely been what I’ve used the most. And I do think it has changed similar how to you describe it. But I see the change more as:

You used to go to Google and effectively be asking, “Google, find me information about X.” Today you’re implicitly asking, “Google, show me ads related to X.” You just kind of accept that what it shows you will be the thing that is most fine tuned to appear most related to X - and the most common reason to do that fine tuning in the first place is to deliver an ad.

So you gotta search in natural language like an ad, and hope that someone in that first page of results decided to SEO some particularly good content so they could get you there to look at more ads.

coldtea4• 3 years ago

While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had said the house looked like it was melting, so she typed in "melting house", I think. Not that that's genius or quirky or anything, but I would never dream of typing in something I was thinking "informally", and her approach is more like "whatever whackadoo thing I'm thinking, probably other people think just like me" and she finds anything I ask her about.

I've been doing that "informal" since Google existed - surely it's quite common. You describe what you want in fuzzy terms, and add more qualifiers to narrow it down.

So, "melting house halloween" would be my first search, or rather "melting house halloween <city>". Similarly if I wanted to search for say Eugene Levy and didn't remember his name, I'd write something "comedian big eyebrows" (he's the second match after Groucho) or "big eyebrows american pie" (first match), and so on.

Out of curiosity, how would you search for that house?

switch007• 3 years ago

Maybe I'm reading too much in to it, but for me the poignant part is that she stopped engaging with you and reached for the phone, mid conversation. I've noticed this too. And before they even reach for their phone, it's as if you've lost them already, because they're thinking of searching and which app/keywords to use etc.

It's like their trust of the Internet is 100x higher than someone recounting something they've seen with their own eyes, and the value of knowing a bit of information or getting a dopamine hit is way way higher than having an engaging conversation with someone

landmass• 3 years ago

DuckDuckGo also suffered from the SEO infection, but recently - the last week or so, perhaps - it has improved. SEO probably still controls it, but when I put in "-Amazon" it does not present Amazon findings - remarkable! I'm also seeing a significant number of "no result" results. It isn't perfect but it's much better than six months ago.

huytersd• 3 years ago

You’re old? Your other comments have you railing on “normies”. Not to mention your username…

mushufasa• 3 years ago

I can see AI decrease some of the traffic for content writers who relied on SEO taking a hit; like political blogs or various sites that paid for ads to drive traffic and then essentially sell more ads to those users on their own site. But the writers/platforms that have great content can also use AI to improve their own content, so I don't think this is going to be a 'fall off a cliff' style event.

I don't think that SEO is going to be decreasing anytime soon for e-commerce, which is probably the best use of SEO. AI generation images and content are no substitute for physical goods, like shoes.

legitster• 3 years ago

My first job out of college was writing SEO articles for [unnamed failed startup]. It was exactly the sort of daft, fluffy, "let me Google that for you" content you would think a 20 something SEO writer would come up with.

And it's these kinds of fluffy, non-clickbait content that people are complaining about when they talk about Google's search results these days. I don't think the real problem are two-bit hustlers sneaking in bait-and-switch content here and there - it's that Google's own rules encourage mediocre and non-authoritative content.

So one of the reasons people gravitate towards ChatGPT (or, to a similar degree TikTok) is that both will give you strong and authoritative advice (even if it's wrong!)

I don't necessarily believe the internet is worse today (if you have any false nostalgia, try searching a forum for an answer to a technical problem). But experts who were actually putting out good content and information were consistently getting ripped off by knockoffs for decades and we shouldn't be surprised that nobody is contributing anymore.

ipaddr2• 3 years ago

People are still contributing at a higher rate but google isn't including them. That's the difference not that suddenly professionals are fleeing because of something that has been happened since the beginning.

brucethemoose2• 3 years ago

I dunno. In the few areas I think I know something, I contribute on GitHub and... Thats about it?

Most of what I am interested in has moved to Discord or Telegram, or rotted away in deteriorating subreddits. A few others niches moved to YouTube, a spammy one way window. Any contribution I make just feels like shouting into the void (and not even the satisfying kind like here on HN).

Is this not a common sentiment?

Havoc• 3 years ago

Until the LLM stuff scales sufficiently to replace free Google searches at scale SEO will stay.

And judging by everyone and their dog in ai space running at a loss even when charging id say that’s not imminent

dragonwriter• 3 years ago

Until the LLM stuff scales sufficiently to replace free Google searches at scale SEO will stay.

I mean, it might be renamed something other than "SEO" then, but the same people will still be optimizing for a content selection and presentation algorithm.

An LLM trained (or using in context learning on, or some mix) a dataset isn't immune to manipulation by the people supplying the data.

Sindisil• 3 years ago

Hopefully, it'll die in a fire?

Not that I really think that. There's too much incentive to fine new and exciting ways to game the system, instead if actually just being relevant.

Google and, to a lesser extent, other search engines, deserve some of the blame for having easily gameable ranking algorithms. Still, it's mostly on the bad actors doing the gaming, and the people hiring them to do it.

MarkusQ• 3 years ago

I began to think that the reason I found them
endearing and not evil was that while many had
made quite a bit of money, almost none had amassed
significant power. Unlike the Elon Musks and Jeff
Bezoses of the world, who went from geeky teenagers
to masters of the universe, the dorks who grew up
to do SEO have stayed the butt of the joke,
beholden to the fluctuations of the algorithm,
frantically pulling levers behind the scenes
but ultimately somewhat hapless.

Translation: they were "endearing" because, instead of actually trying to build something, they just made piles of money ruining things for everyone else. Sure, they're parasites, but at least they aren't (god forbid) _productive_.

phkahler• 3 years ago

> Why does it always seem to surprise me, even after all these years, that the way we behave on the internet is often quite different from how we act in real life?

Because you don't actually know the people you interact with on the internet. Anonymity invites deception, which builds a sort of distrust over time whether people realize it or not. Authenticity is rare on the net.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

I appreciate the author trying to humanize these people who have profited off of ruining the web. I freely admit, with moderate shame, that I hoped the story ended with the floor of the party collapsing.

tambourine_man• 3 years ago

I feel like there’s a place for smaller, more niche products and that the pendulum is swinging back to it. A few million users only. No expectation of ever becoming a hundred billion business.

Something like Kagi, the old Dropbox, old Twitter. It’s never going to appeal to most people by design.

collaborative2• 3 years ago

Traffic to our anti-SEO search engine has quadrupled in the past month but we're still losing money

Hard to beat ad-supported search

throwaway4474• 3 years ago

Do you have a link?

collaborative2• 3 years ago

I try not to link because it bothers me when people accuse me of self promoting. It's in the profile :)

amf123• 3 years ago

"The alligator got my attention. Which, of course, was the point." ... "you can’t quite stop yourself from being curious".

The first three sentences of the post basically counter the author's narrative. Clickbait is ruining the internet. It doesn't matter whether it is Google, or Tiktok or Facebook or whatever, what gets popular surfaces to the top. If people like clicking on clickbait content, why blame platforms?

remram• 3 years ago

What makes content clickbait is not that you don't want to click on it. It's that once you get there, it doesn't deliver.

mikewarot• 3 years ago

Long ago there was a slashdot story about someone who returned to their office to find a co-worker looking at a long printout with a number of peaks circled on it. This printout turned out to be a frequency spectra derived from a covert recording device monitoring the 3 phase feed into the facility. This turned out to be useful for estimating Uranium enrichment yield. I thought it was a damned cool story, but now I can't find it any more. 8(

Google won't help me find this story... but it did at least once in the past. And now I can't even find that reference to the earlier reference.

Also... try finding something about marking up hypertext documents... you can't... you have to know that "annotation" works instead... at least it used to. Who knows what Google will spit out these days. Google-fu isn't what it used to be, because Google goobered it up.

ravetcofx• 3 years ago

I tried a bunch of keyword combinations with site:slashdot.org with no luck. I wonder if the story was removed

knallfrosch• 3 years ago

Happens to me a lot, but restraining Google to the site usually does more harm than good. Most often, I misremembered the site and even if not, there might be posts leading to the story on other sites.

throwaway4474• 3 years ago

I have a 10TB hdd and if a website is interesting, I am likely to save it.

This site you would find under /data/u/uranium/uranium_enrichment_yielt.html

And I use recoll to find stuff https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/index-recoll.htm...

schaefer• 3 years ago

The ship has sailed on “isn’t useful”. Today’s Google is user-hostile.

jppope• 3 years ago

yes, LLMs will have a massive impact on SEO

but the dirty secret here... GPT is trained pretty heavily on reddit data. theres a reason why there hasn't been an IPO and their api got crazy expensive. OpenAi is trying to build a moat with Reddit and with regulation. I really don't think its going to be that long till people figure it out, but who knows

randomdev3• 3 years ago

Yeah it has been pretty bad for a decade. I wish it just searched exactly for what I type in without assuming anything.

wood_spirit• 3 years ago

A pet theory of mine is that google pushes SO clones because they contain ads and google gets revenue from sending users to sites with ads. Talk about perverse incentives. The pre double click acquisition search results were much better.

So can DuckDuckGo let me easily search for sites without ads?

3seashells• 3 years ago

The parasite kills the host and then withers, dies and mutated to poison llms?

aszantu• 3 years ago

now that you mention it... I went away from google a while ago, duckduckgo was okay for a while, but nowadays, I find myself using hackernews or just youtube(disapointing me a lot xD) before I google

WalterBright• 3 years ago

I simply gave up on SEO and don't think about it anymore. We just tell interested people to go to dlang.org.

DanielHB• 3 years ago

LLMEO obviously, people are already doing that on reddit

coldtea4• 3 years ago

SEO was always snake oil, equivalent to "hi fi cables".

HlessClaudesman• 3 years ago

My preferred narrative for enshitification is death by 1000 bean-counters. A manager who needs to hit performance targets to get their 6-7 figure bonus is heavily incentivised to juice the stats this quarter. If they already show you 2 ads before a video, why not 3 or 4? Who cares if the platform as a whole slowly becomes less usable, my numbers are up!

What is required is strong vision at the top, telling the bean-counters to dial it all the way back, to be able to see when the golden goose is becoming a boiled frog. Google used to know that what's good for the internet is good for Google.

Sundar Pichai, you're not that guy pal.

est• 3 years ago

This made me think, people use machine parsable formats to accommodate crawlers.

If the "crawler" turns out to be a LLM, should websites serve vector files instead?

If so, we need a standardized tokenizer at w3c.

eloisant• 3 years ago

People trying to game search engine to rise to the top have always existed. Before Google it was easy, and search engine results were crap.

Then Google managed to return relevant search results despite all the people trying to game it... And at some point Google stopped trying. The problem isn't SEO experts successfully gaming the organic results, but Google mixing ads in a misleading way and giving up on fighting SEO.

So don't blame SEO experts for trying to get their pages to the top, that's their job. Blame Google for stopping doing the one thing that made them popular: return relevant search results despite everyone trying to game it.

JR1427• 3 years ago

I hate the way Google answers the question it wishes you had asked, but didn't.

E.g. you search for something obscure or specific, but all the results are relating to a similar search, that has loads of results.

It's as if Google just want to give you lots or results, and not care if they answer the question.

dusted• 3 years ago

*begins to realize

john-radio• 3 years ago

Maybe an SEO professional would get attacked by a gigantic, prehistoric-looking reptile right there in front of me.

Props to the author for having the ability to bang out her damn essay without getting bogged down in every little rabbit hole. If she were prone to compulsively editing-instead-of-writing she probably would have found out that alligators are not just prehistoric-looking; they're prehistoric itself. They appeared "94 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous" (wiki) and in fact their clade, Crocodilia, is only surviving sibling clade of Dinosauria, and so crocodiles & alligators are the closest living relatives of birds.

As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

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