How SEO Ruined the Internet

https://millionshort.com/about is an implementation of the idea of finding obscure content, but it seems not successful to me.

The article linked here has a good point it is trying to make, but makes a number of false points that undercut it's goal.

1998 - 2003 was one of the most difficult times to find what you were looking for, even on Google. Many searches for basic information would return results buried in spam pages, pornography, and scams.

Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or help your SEO.

The real problems are that Google is directing the bulk of traffic to certain brand name websites. Another real problem is that Google set a simplistic AI with a goal of increasing clickthrough from search results and decreasing bounce rates. This leads to developers building all those top 10 lists where you have to click through each item (harder to bounce that way), and some of the pages that disable the back button in various nefarious ways.

I also agree Google should be showing smaller websites more frequently - perhaps optimize for a different goal than the one listed above. More weight on keyword matching perhaps or maybe following only a few "authoritative" users CTR & bounce rate habits.

Wasn't SEO, it was a Google's "Suggest over Search" strategy, followed by the completely predictable bastardization of organic results by internal groups.

Biz ops says increasing revenue for [random Google bs] by ranking Y over Z in the results, so it happens. M&A says Rotten Tomatoes won't give us all their data, their users and their firstborns so they won't show up, even on page 2.

This is literally what antitrust was created for. Companies do this naturally when they get too successful, it's on us to remind them who pays the bills.

By us I mean the US govt so we're basically fucked.

To a certain extent, any search engine will be "better" for avoiding some SEO tricks than Google since somewhere between most to all SEO people are only concerned with how things rank in Google, thanks to its overwhelming majority usage on the English internet - where their pages rank in the results of Bing or Yandex isn't a matter of concern to them. Granted, many of the tricks to satisfy Google are going to satisfy other engines too, but not all of them, and not in exactly the same ways or degrees. (Getting a different result page from Google and from search engine X can be a feature, not a bug.)

I personally have been using DuckDuckGo for several years at this point and am quite satisfied with their results and their commitment to privacy. You shouldn't use any Google product if you have any serious measure of concern for your privacy (he hypocritically types while a YouTube video plays in the background - hey, at least I'm not logged in).

The article doesn't present complete facts. Regarding zero-sum game, this perhaps was true in the old pagerank algorithm. But I'd believe Google's ranking algorithm has advanced beyond simple keyword density, passing links. What I've noticed is it now gives much more emphasis to user experience. (With metrics like bounce rate meaning the searcher didnt find what he looked for and went back to search results)

We all like to shit on Google but there's no search engine even remotely close to the quality of results. Of course, there's a lot of spam associated with SEO, hacking attempts, spam comments, e.t.c. There are side effects of its algorithm of course, that are negative to web.