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How SEO Ruined the Internet

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Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#101

Post by FiatLuxDave »

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!

Your personal solution sounds interesting. I'd be interested to know more details about it, and how it works for you. If it is how I imagine it, it could also be one of those things that could be built into a tool that could rival Wikipedia or search engines.

Based on your reply to handsomechad, you may think that it's easiest for people to just build one themselves. But there may be a business opportunity in providing a pre-packaged solution for the masses. In the same way that Dropbox provided a tool that was "trivial" to experts, but was difficult for non-experts (see the infamous comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), if you have a tool that is essentially a rival to Google Books for reference texts, that is interesting.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#102

Post by purerandomness »

ivanche wrote: post #66
purerandomness wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but let's say you want to find out the protein content of brussels sprouts. I would type `protein content brussels sprouts` (without quotes) because I fully understand that the information I'm seeking might be in some tabular form, or phrased in a way I don't anticipate. Most non-technical people however would type in `What is the protein content of brussels sprouts?` literally. This leads content creators wh…

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?

Because Google optimizes for "quality content" since at least the Penguin update. They're using NLP tools to assess the writing quality (similar to algorithms telling you at what school grade level your writing is).

This was good, because it cured all the copy&pastable 2000s era "tag cloud" sites which simply dumped tons of search keywords all over the place.

Ideally, it lead to a stronger emphasis on high-quality human-written content, but it turns out that this algorithm, again, is easily fooled by feeding it "SEO essays" that looks like prose, but is irrelevant text gibberish, but written coherently.

That lead content creators to expand data that would ideally be presented in tabular form on one page, to multi-page "SEO prose" that looks like it's written for humans, but is completely undigestible.

That, along with Google's auto-suggestion feature that finish your sentences after you type in some words, especially on mobile, lead to the impression that people actually like to search in full sentences.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#103

Post by helij »

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…

I am not logged in and I always get UK search results even if I search on google.com.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#104

Post by RobertoG »

RobertoG wrote: post #20

It kind of ruined content too. Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching for the answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO ruined content. Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are goin to explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading this post, you will know why SEO ruined content. In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of conten…

I just searched (1) "SEO ruined content" in duck duck go and this Hacker news page is the first entry.

We are very lucky that, as far as we know, an accumulation of irony doesn't create black holes.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=SEO+ruined+content&t=canonical&ia=...

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#105

Post by humanbeinc »

RobertoG wrote: post #104
RobertoG wrote: post #20

It kind of ruined content too. Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching for the answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO ruined content. Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are goin to explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading this post, you will know why SEO ruined content. In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of conten…

I just searched (1) "SEO ruined content" in duck duck go and this Hacker news page is the first entry. We are very lucky that, as far as we know, an accumulation of irony doesn't create black holes. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=SEO+ruined+content&t=canonical&ia=...

Awesome.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#106

Post by WalterSear »

mcv wrote: post #94
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So if AI ever takes over the world and kills us all, it will probably be because it failed to understand what we actually wanted.

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#107

Post by blaser-waffle »

trendscout wrote: post #21
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…

DDG doesn't work for me either when it comes to more general, not tech-ish stuff. One thing for news I found was https://yetigogo.com

Yeah DDG is hit or miss. Most (70% or more) DDG searches work but a lot of times Google or Bing does a better job.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#108

Post by spiritplumber »

RobertoG wrote: post #20

It kind of ruined content too. Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching for the answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO ruined content. Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are goin to explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading this post, you will know why SEO ruined content. In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of conten…

Thanks, I hate it

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#109

Post by spiritplumber »

Kye wrote: post #92
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe this is how AC finally reversed entropy. https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Insufficient data for an answer.
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