I append "reddit" to any query not meant for a productive task. Except now the internet is mostly reddit for me, which kinda bums me out. Especially given the new js-heavy design. In 2019, if I want reliable search about something I know nothing about I must first search on google, then try again with "reddit" appended, then change www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com, then parse through what are often questionable answers from anon users, possibly still influenced by marketers, and then maybe, I get the answer or next lead that I was looking for.
The internet is an SEO landfill
121–130 of 438 posts
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#122Google any recipe, and there are at least 5 paragraphs (usually a lot more) of copy that no one will ever read, and isn't even meant for human consumption. Google "How to learn x", and you'll usually get copy written by people who know nothing about the subject, and maybe browsed Amazon for 30 minutes as research. Real, useful results that used to be the norm for Google are becoming more and more rare as time goes by…
Re: recipes, you might be interested in this browser extension, which skips to the actual recipe text:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#123I have the solution!
If the domain contains a shopping cart then filter it out.
What do you think?
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#124This is a service for spammers complaining about SEO LOL
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real cost is in the infrastructure needed to run it unless you go full P2P
I wonder though - is too much of the P2P universe now mobile devices instead of regular computers that it wouldn’t be feasible?
P2P can be done on mobile but you're fighting against limited resources (storage, bandwidth, CPU). The reason P2P got good on PC is because storage got cheaper, bandwidth was increasing and CPUs kept getting faster.
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#126I just wish search engines would let me block sites. There are maybe a dozen SEO land grabs in my domain that are trashing my search results and provide no value.
I use a user script called Google Hit Hider by Domain that adds this functionality to pretty much every major search engine. Can't imagine searching without it these days.
This is perfect. Perma-ban, so sweet. Thanks GraemeL!
Too bad search engines aren't using this to improve search results.
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#127I'm always at aw at how people can psychologically say SEO is easy. Getting to the top of many SERPs can mean millions of dollars in monthly revenue. If it's so easy, and the author is so smart about it, why doesn't he just take it? It's like people who say 'well of course CRO is easy, you just make it easy for people to check out and check the stats and iterate'. Overly arrogant engineers many times think everyone e…
The author is annoyed that the game is who can produce the most garbage, not that they think they could personally win at it (or not).
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
The original designers of the web envisioned a world where every user could have their own chosen "agent" to navigate the web for them. This is where the User-Agent HTTP header comes from. There would be search agents, data mining agents, and interactive browsing agents. We missed out on like 90% of what the information revolution was supposed to bring to users, and instead the data giants have captured all the value…
We expect everything on the web, including our user agent, to be free as in no cost. The only way to pay for the development cost is to sell to third parties aka advertisers. If people actually paid money to develop more advanced user agents there would be a market for them. Why do people prefer free over paid? I think people underestimate the influence of advertisers and underestimate the value of their own time spe…
If you use a Mac, DevonThink and its associated products are great examples of paid user agents that seek out and organize information for you. Their free trials are fairly generous.
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
One nice solution would be a search engine that throws out anything related to commerce or linking to commerce.
Not entirely throwing out commerce, but I sometimes use https://millionshort.com/ where you can remove up to the top 1 million websites from the results.
Jeez, that's surprisingly (and kind of tragically) effective!
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#130Search results are so heavily weighted toward commerce, products and services because those are the people that can spend money on SEO. It's made the internet, seen through the eyes of search results, seem like an aggressive, shady market bazaar. I try searching for anything remotely bike related, bike community, mechanical information, or just general cool bike stuff and I can't find the human community underneath a…
Huh. Maybe we need two distinct search modes: library vs. bookstore.
And not just the "shopping" tab but a fundamentally different set of algorithms for page ranking.