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As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

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Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#71

Post by darkerside »

Raidion wrote: post #54
fsckboy wrote: post #38

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…

I think Google still deserves a ton of credit. Online shopping is tricky, but information is incredibly easy to access, especially if you do know how to avoid clicking on Quora or WebMD style sites. Google does a great job of shepherding you towards information and at the very least gives you additional context that you can use to corroborate or tune your search.

Odd, I find Quora and WebMD to have some of the more useful information out there.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#72

Post by Sindisil »

Hopefully, it'll die in a fire?

Not that I really think that. There's too much incentive to fine new and exciting ways to game the system, instead if actually just being relevant.

Google and, to a lesser extent, other search engines, deserve some of the blame for having easily gameable ranking algorithms. Still, it's mostly on the bad actors doing the gaming, and the people hiring them to do it.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#73

Post by barrysteve »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #9

"The internet" doesn't really exist, now, now does it? 99% of users are living in an AOL-style world, where they live within walled gardens. Why leave twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit? There's nothing out there but a wasteland of crumbling has-been sites. Sometimes you'll find yourself on a blog or news article, but you just click/tap the back button to go back to the walled garden. Nobody is subscrib…

Showing up on the internet and subscribing isn't enough to scratch the itch.

Games are the place to go and 'show up'.

The internet is no longer used for sharing relatable information. It saturated and walled off valuable information a decade ago.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#74

Post by dragonwriter »

Havoc wrote: post #68

Until the LLM stuff scales sufficiently to replace free Google searches at scale SEO will stay. And judging by everyone and their dog in ai space running at a loss even when charging id say that’s not imminent

> Until the LLM stuff scales sufficiently to replace free Google searches at scale SEO will stay.

I mean, it might be renamed something other than "SEO" then, but the same people will still be optimizing for a content selection and presentation algorithm.

An LLM trained (or using in context learning on, or some mix) a dataset isn't immune to manipulation by the people supplying the data.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#75

Post by ranting-moth »

zenincognito wrote: post #25

SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents. Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bri…

> Business is booming

I can believe that. But it also has the equivalent of stage 1 or 2 cancer.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#76

Post by ethbr1 »

gretch wrote: post #60
preommr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve Do you actually think this or is this just a polite way of saying lots of HNers are out of touch?

I'm not the OP you replied to, but there's a scene from the movie the big short that really punched the understanding into my head: Michael Burry: I may have been early but I'm not wrong some exec: It's the same thing! I believe that a lot of HN posts are probably "right", but they are so far in the future and so non-applicable to day-to-day life, that it's indistinguishable from wrong. For example, everyone predicti…

HN (and futurists in general) tend to significantly underweight inertia.

People hate change, and absent a catalyzing event or order of magnitude advantage, it will take a decade for usage patterns to shift.

E.g. Kagi over Google

Kagi could hypothetically be 25% superior in all searches.

Most people don't know and don't care. Search is the thing that pops up and they type into. You can even change that? To what? There are others?

Firefox had tabs.

Chrome had faster javascript. (Although moreso substantial free marketing on highly-visited webpages)

That's the sort of thing it actually takes to shift users.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#77

Post by pault »

Raidion wrote: post #54
fsckboy wrote: post #38

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…

I think Google still deserves a ton of credit. Online shopping is tricky, but information is incredibly easy to access, especially if you do know how to avoid clicking on Quora or WebMD style sites. Google does a great job of shepherding you towards information and at the very least gives you additional context that you can use to corroborate or tune your search.

Try searching for anything related to a recently released video game. Chat gpt spam has made it completely impossible. Even the reputable wikis are pushed down far enough to become very difficult to find.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#78

Post by wizzwizz4 »

smeagull wrote: post #55
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #6

The internet was ruined when it was de anonymized by Facebook and LinkedIn etc. I remember growing up in a completely anonymous internet. You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally. Then you would go back to society as the real you and temper yourself a bit to fit in and work with others and that was ok because you could blow off steam on the internet.

Get this - you can have an anonymous facebook and linkedin account too.

Have you tried running an anonymous Facebook account in the past decade? Facebook lets you use it for a few weeks (or months), then suddenly refuses to let you in unless you provide identifying information that it never asked for before, and refuses to give you your data back until you “verify it's you” (might be quoting Google or Microsoft there, but Facebook has similar wording) even though they have no records with which to compare it to, so that can't possibly be a valid justification.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#79

Post by layer8 »

gretch wrote: post #60
preommr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve Do you actually think this or is this just a polite way of saying lots of HNers are out of touch?

I'm not the OP you replied to, but there's a scene from the movie the big short that really punched the understanding into my head: Michael Burry: I may have been early but I'm not wrong some exec: It's the same thing! I believe that a lot of HN posts are probably "right", but they are so far in the future and so non-applicable to day-to-day life, that it's indistinguishable from wrong. For example, everyone predicti…

I’d say that some HNer predictions will inevitably turn out to be right, but you can’t necessarily tell which ones, at this point.

To the specific topic: Even if users predominantly switch to AI assistants for search (and there will always be search because users want to find stuff), the search will still be based on an index over third-party data, and the third parties will still be trying hard to optimize that data to be more prominent in applicable searches.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#80

Post by wizzwizz4 »

dustincoates wrote: post #11
thegrim33 wrote: post #3

This is a meta-level comment, but a technique I've been using for a while now, which I've found pretty helpful/useful, is that if an article starts off with an anecdote I immediately know not to bother reading it. It shows you that the author is more interested in pushing a feeling/emotion/story rather than relaying actual information. They're trying to manipulate how you think about the topic from the very beginning…

A "fun" game I like to play with articles from the Verge is how many words until there's a first person pronoun. (It's almost always in the first sentence.) Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't need the journalist's backstory before I get the meat of the article.

Four! :-P
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