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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?

#151

Post by permo-w »

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.

if you want that, go on reddit or 4chan or twitter or hacker news or even instagram to some degree. reddit, instagram and hacker news don't even require email validation afaik

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

#152

Post by amf12 »

"The alligator got my attention. Which, of course, was the point." ... "you can’t quite stop yourself from being curious".

The first three sentences of the post basically counter the author's narrative. Clickbait is ruining the internet. It doesn't matter whether it is Google, or Tiktok or Facebook or whatever, what gets popular surfaces to the top. If people like clicking on clickbait content, why blame platforms?

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

#153

Post by THENATHE »

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…

You literally just proved the point. You just don't know how to search on the modern google

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

#154

Post by escapedmoose »

robertlagrant wrote: post #22
escapedmoose wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s more than one reason to read an article. Often the story is the point.

That's true, but not great. "I'm here for you to subtly impute how I should feel about something by bypass my critical faculties" is a poor substitute for people who want to be informed.

Not that I have a horse in this race, but…

Your information is always going to be sourced and/or presented by humans with bias. Isn’t it better when that bias is transparent? A solo author draws their reader into a proxy conversation with them (which naturally lends itself to some level of persuasion most of the time). As a reader (I believe) your job is to pay enough attention to catch the author if they’re off-base or not playing fairly, so that you’ll walk away with more accurate understanding than you started.

I suppose if you don’t want to be challenged by a proxy dialogue then a better medium for you would be statistical analysis or a scientific, structured study, but unfortunately most topics just don’t get the dedicated resources to do that properly.

I’ve seen the aggregators and summary bots as well, but that seems even worse: Cherry-picking “facts” from an essay without seeing the context around them? A recipe for misunderstanding and/or getting the wool pulled over your eyes.

Maybe the best solution is for every article to have a comments section where folks can point out inaccuracies and inconsistencies to help each other out? Citizen fact-checkers? Then you wind up with… this same article, as-is, posted on Hacker News alongside intelligent debate ;)

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

#155

Post by THENATHE »

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.

If I wanted the docs, I would get the docs. The blogs are useful because the documentation is largely unhelpful due to being overly simplicity or extremely nondescript. The blogs are where it's at because you can see how someone else used that thing

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

#156

Post by CobrastanJorji »

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…

I think perhaps the problem was that when you were growing up, the Internet had a much higher percentage of authoritative writings related to a subject, and today's Internet looks a lot more like ChatGPT-generated drivel. Google's results might has changed, but I suspect less so than the Internet as a whole. Older Internet content was weird, and often wrong, but it wasn't an endless expanse of nothingness camouflaged to resemble human content.

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

#157

Post by potatolicious »

acheron wrote: post #140
ethbr1 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Search is the thing that pops up and they type into. You can even change that? To what? There are others? So we’re all still using Yahoo and Altavista?

I think that's their entire point - it took many years for Altavista and Yahoo to die, and Yahoo isn't even dead yet in some markets (see: Japan).

Google eclipsed their capabilities >25 years ago and yet some of them are still kicking around. Inertia is a very strong thing.

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

#158

Post by Wowfunhappy »

lolinder wrote: post #129
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 sy…

> Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap

I know people say it still doesn't work, but I find adding quotes completely effective for me when I need the precise keyword. Not sure what I'm doing differently.

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

#159

Post by adamc »

lolinder wrote: post #129
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 sy…

This is the best analysis I've seen in this thread.

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

#160

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

I think Google Search "works" in the same way local newspapers "worked": they provide easy access to what most people want to know in their daily life, including gossip, the weather, the popular events and discussion topics ("melting houses")

If you're a German living in Morocco trying to understand Quebec's immigration policies in the original text you'll be fighting the search engine at every turn.

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