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How SEO Ruined the Internet

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Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#81

Post by newsbinator »

thomas wrote: post #60
greggman3 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are definitely sites who's results I wish I could ban from my results. I won't visit them so they are just a waste of space. My short list, thillist, collider, vulture. Also related to SEO I think is every cooking recipe seems to be 6 to 8 large images and a bunch of unneeded text followed by the recipe 8 to 12 screens down. AFAICT it's entirely not related to me getting to the recipe and instead either a patte…

A Pinterest ban would greatly improve google results.

I'm surprised Google's own Search team doesn't get frustrated enough by Pinterest results contaminating their own day-to-day searches that they'd consider ranking Pinterest results lower.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#82

Post by wizzwizz4 »

mcv wrote: post #40
eitland wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it seems the problem with Google goes far deeper than struggling with bad SEO. - For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in. This is not dependent on SEO spammers at all, only on Googles unwillingness to accept that not every user is equal and some of us mean exactly what we write, especially when we take the time to enclose our queries in doubl…

> "For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in." Good lord, yes. If I type two words, I want preference for sites that contain both of them, yet the first results all have either one or the other, because surely I must be more interested in a popular site that uses only one of these, right? Google is sometimes too smart, trying to interpret exact words…

> I don't think AI is in any danger of taking over the world just yet.

The scary thing about AI is that, even as the algorithms have greater and greater intelligence, we're still not much closer to teaching them to do what we want them to do. They can game the system better than ever, and then the universe is tiled with surgical masks.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#83

Post by ivanche »

gsich wrote: post #77
ivanche wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Why do you think that content creators wouldn't see `protein content brussels sprouts` in "keyword analysis tools"? Why do you think they wouldn't create millions of blog posts containing words `protein content brussels sprouts` or countless variations thereof?

They do, but the whole-sentence fraction is probably in the majority. Which leads to degraded search results and optimisation in the wrong direction.

One can easily make them minority by creating a script which issues keyword-only searches to Google and let it work 24/7/365 from a few hundred machines.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#84

Post by nieve »

comzilla wrote: post #59
mcv wrote: post #5

I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find. I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a…

How are you meant to find the most obscure content? If it's obscure, it probably means it is not relevant to your search. How would a search engine like that even work? Tweaking importance of some sites seems like a nice idea though, but it could also be a bad thing.

I'm very confused by your definition of obscure. If I search for something rare and not covered very well using as set of precise search terms Altavista and company used to give me almost exclusively relevant results. Modern Google will give me windows helpdesk questions for a query about a linux driver using lots of of quoted terms, at most one of which will appear in the results. Rare results are _exactly_ the time that precise queries give higher quality hits. Substituting a different word will swamp them. Specifying sites to avoid or prefer is an extra signal to help with that

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#85

Post by gsich »

ivanche wrote: post #83
gsich wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do, but the whole-sentence fraction is probably in the majority. Which leads to degraded search results and optimisation in the wrong direction.

One can easily make them minority by creating a script which issues keyword-only searches to Google and let it work 24/7/365 from a few hundred machines.

No, you can't solve it that way.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#86

Post by goatinaboat »

mattowen_uk wrote: post #56

A MAJOR problem with google is it's assumption that if you search in English you don't care if the top results are American. I've noticed that on google.co.uk, unless you add 'uk' at the end of your search query you'll always get US sites first [1]. Google clearly lump all English based queries into the same geo-graphical bucket - they never used to do this. --- [1] Yes, I am logged in, and Google knows where in the…

Yes, I am logged in, and Google knows where in the world I am.

They never seem to know where you are in a way that would actually be useful to you, but always do for their own creepy tracking reasons.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#87

Post by rwmurrayVT »

blunte wrote: post #37

The situation has gotten so dismal that I often have to look past page 1, and sometimes page 2 of search results. Especially when looking for technical things or reviews on practically anything, the top 5 results are garbage sites (with content written or modified by people with names suggesting an SEO "content" factory in a particular region of the world).

The r/juststart crown strikes again.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#88

Post by handsomechad »

durnygbur wrote: post #57

Google with default settings is useless and using more sophisticated queries quickly walls off the user with increasingly annoying captcha. The "world's knowledge under you fingertips" motto is still valid and brilliant though. My personal solution is library of OCR-ed PDFs with most established books from various domains, git repository for each domain. Greppable in miliseconds, locally. Hijack this, SEO experts!

do you have a link to this solution

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#89

Post by inshadows »

blunte wrote: post #37

The situation has gotten so dismal that I often have to look past page 1, and sometimes page 2 of search results. Especially when looking for technical things or reviews on practically anything, the top 5 results are garbage sites (with content written or modified by people with names suggesting an SEO "content" factory in a particular region of the world).

Recently, on page 2 and later, and sometimes even on page 1, I see lots of *.it links that just dump a wall of text that seems like it's been scraped from legit resources but all tags content got smashed into one text block. Examples pages that now return 404:

http:// axlk.bebanni50.it/debian-i915.html

http:// bpnq.circoloambientalepiemonte.it/nfsv4-uid-mapping.html

IOW, if it's not on page 1 it's mostly crap (spam).

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#90

Post by Kye »

mcv wrote: post #5

I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find. I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a…

Recent example: I wanted to find out why the directions on those Banquet pot pies say to let it stand for five minutes. The words on the box say it finishes cooking in those five minutes. I want to find out more about that: why didn't it finish in the oven? Is it cover for liability, so people don't get burned?

All Google returns is page after page of recipes and posts about Banquet pot pies that have no connection to my input. Google used to be so good at this kind of thing. I know the answer exists somewhere because I found it once a long time ago searching for answers to the same question. Google found it then.

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