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Did you try putting them in quotes? EDIT: I don't know why this being downvoted. This is a genuine question to understand if the problem is the size of the index or the fuzzing matching that search engines do.
Google blatantly disregard quotes.
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This is very much misguided. Many websites do have "hacked" (blackhat/shady) SEO, but these websites do not last long, and are entirely wiped out (see: de-ranked) every major algorithm update. The major players you see on the top rankings today do utilize some blackhat SEO, but it's not at a level that significantly impacts their rankings. Blackhat SEO is inherently dangerous, because Google's algorithm will penalize…
> Google's algorithm works for its intended purposes, which is to serve pages that will benefit the highest amount of people searching for a specific term. Does it? So for any product search, thrown-together comparison sites without actual substance but lots of affiliate links are really among the best results? Or maybe they are the most profitable result, and thus the one most able to invest in optimizing for rankin…
There is no "best result."
Any page falling under "thrown-together comparison sites without actual substance but lots of affiliate links" are temporal inefficiencies that get removed after each major update.
Will more pop up? Yes, and they will take advantage of any ineffeciency or edge-cases in the algorithim to boost their rankings to #1.
Will they stay there for more than a few months? No. They will be squashed out, and legitimate players will over time win out.
This is the dichotomy between "churn and burn" businesses and "long term" businesses. You will make a very lucrative, and quick, buck going full blackhat, but your business won't last and you will be consistently need to adapt to each successive algo update. While long-standing "legit" businesses will only need to maintain market dominance -- something much easier to do than break into the market from ground zero, which churn and burners will have to do in perpetuity until they burn out themselves.
If you want to test this, go and find 10 websites you think are shady, but have top 5 rankings for a certain search phrase. Mark down the sites, keyword, and exact pages linked. Now, wait a few months. Search again using that exact phrase. More likely than not, i.e more than 5 out of 10, will no longer be in the top 5 for their respective phrases, and a couple domains will have been shuttered. I should note that "not deep info" is not "shady," because the results are for the average person. Ex. WebMD is not deep, but it's not shady either.
I implore people to try and get a site ranked with blackhat tricks and lots of starting capital, and see just how hard it is to keep ranked consistantly using said tricks. It's easy to speculate and make logical statements, but they don't hold much weight without first-hand experience and observation.
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Good to hear your concerns. > The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. I intend to announce the alpha test of my search engine here on HN. My search engine is immune to all SEO efforts. > I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. In simple terms my search engine gives users content with…
cool story, bro
graycat is an elder here. He has an interesting history in technology, I dare say more interesting than most of us ever will. He deserves better than your reply (as would any other HN user). Check out these posts:
For those who might be misled like I used to be DuckDuckGo is just a proxy for Bing.
You're located in Berlin. It found a page on Reddit about buying phones in Berlin. Not saying you're wrong about the dates but... I dunno... seems like an odd query. "Phone to buy?" And why not just search Reddit? This site feels like we're just complaining about nothing these days. (Downvote away!)
I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surf…
> A new breakthrough heuristic today will look something totally different, just as meritocratic and possibly resistant to gaming. I wonder how much of this could be obtained back by penalizing: 1. The number of javascript dependencies 2. The number of ads on the page, or the depth of the ad network This might start a virtuous circle, but in the end, this is just a game of cat-and-mouse, and website might optimize fo…
I'll take the website that has exactly what I'm looking for but loads in 30 seconds over an irrelevant website that loads instantly.
I suppose these factors can help when you need to tie-break information super-commodities like a search for "dogs" where all other potential tie-breakers have already been observed with no affect, but nothing more.
> At any rate, I got annoyed at this point (mentioning for those who couldn’t tell), so I switched to DuckDuckGo. For those who might be misled like I used to be DuckDuckGo is just a proxy for Bing.
> DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources,[15] including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others.
Could you elaborate on your comment, I am sincerely interested in learning the details.
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You could even have all this under one roof: one common search spider that feeds this ensemble of different ranking algorithms to produce a set of indices, and then a search engine front end that round-robins queries out between the different indices. (Don’t like your query? Spin the algorithm wheel! “I’m Feeling Lucky” indeed .)
What if: SEO consultants aren’t gaming system, but the search and web is being optimized for “measurable immediate economic impact” that is ad revenue at this moment — due to web itself being in-monetizable and unable to generate value. I don’t like the whole concept of SEO, I don’t like the way the web is today, but I think we should stop and think before resorting to “immoral few is destroying things, we unfuck it…
So much is obvious. The discussion is about whether there is a less shitty metric.
So it's NOT a case study...