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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?

#121

Post by aaron695 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #88
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…

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because th…

[dead]

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

#122

Post by granzymes »

wslh wrote: post #113
pclmulqdq wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because th…

Google does not work. I can show you with a simple example with a few keywords together that does not find the specific resource. I just give an example in another HN thread on a different context [1]. I am open for a 30' session showing a lot more examples. Regarding less experienced people searching for information, try looking for health data and see what is in the top. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379…

I think you just proved the parent post’s point.

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

#123

Post by LtWorf »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #88
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…

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because th…

If you call "working" showing me an endless stream of blogs of some dude, an automatically translated russian clone of stackoverflow, a completely unrelated stackoverflow question, above the actual official documentation that it should be showing me… sure then it works.

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

#124

Post by yard2010 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #99
prmoustache wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deleted my account only last year and for more than one decade I was using a generated icelandic name.

If your name meets Facebook's “real name” standards, it's not like Facebook is going to hunt down your birth records and see whether it Really Is your Actual Real Name™ (not that that's even a particularly coherent concept…). Did you manage to keep your account anonymous from Facebook – that is, not linked to any of your other identifiers?

Don't be so sure, these pricks are all over the place with their spying agency.

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

#125

Post by alvah »

userinanother wrote: post #61
Raidion wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Information search works a lot better because it has no commercial value. Therefore no SEO attack

That's not correct. When programs such as Amazon Affiliates cut their commissions a few years ago, many SEOs pivoted to info content monetized by display ads. The $ per page view is less, but it was still wildly profitable, at least until the most recent Google update frenzy.

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

#126

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#127

Post by freediver »

ethbr1 wrote: post #76
gretch wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Most people don't know and don't care.

Yet. Time is the enemy of ad-supported business models.

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

#128

Post by tambourine_man »

I feel like there’s a place for smaller, more niche products and that the pendulum is swinging back to it. A few million users only. No expectation of ever becoming a hundred billion business.

Something like Kagi, the old Dropbox, old Twitter. It’s never going to appeal to most people by design.

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

#129

Post by lolinder »

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 don't think it's a question of levels of formality in your search terms, I think whether you find Google useful depends on what topics you typically search for.

Google is fine for memes, news, and the other things that normal people regularly look for on the internet. Where it really breaks down is where it used to shine—finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics. Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap for finding any content with a target audience smaller than a few million people, and while stripping out advanced search operators may smooth the path for the 80th percentile of searches, it cripples the remaining 20 percent.

If your assistant stays firmly within the 80% that work, then yeah, Google is better than ever. But they made the 80% work seamlessly by giving up entirely on the 20% that people on forums like this really cared about.

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

#130

Post by itishappy »

LtWorf wrote: post #123
pclmulqdq wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because th…

If you call "working" showing me an endless stream of blogs of some dude, an automatically translated russian clone of stackoverflow, a completely unrelated stackoverflow question, above the actual official documentation that it should be showing me… sure then it works.

I bet more people are looking for blogs than docs.
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