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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?

#171

Post by galangalalgol »

photonthug wrote: post #168
LtWorf wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To me what this shows is that it's really painful to try and use an "intelligent" algorithm for "content mediation" as if it were an actual search engine. Anything that spectacularly fails the "exact substring match" use-case is well on the way to becoming a content-mediator, and potentially as bad a content-moderator/thought-police/etc. Unfortunately even before anyone started talking about "semantic web" or whateve…

DDG seems unusually susceptible to highly ranking AI-generated overly verbose garbage. I can't recreate the same issue with google or bing, so I am not sure where it pulls it from. I can find those same results in google, it's just they are on the 2nd or 3rd page.

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

#172

Post by loveparade »

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 disagree, but it depends on your definition of "working well". Yes, Google works better for my mom these days if you measure whether she is happy with the results she gets. However, the results she gets are mostly misinformation or spam. She just doesn't realize that's the case and is happy with the results regardless.

Measuring whether or not results are relevant to the query is the wrong metric to use. You don't want highly relevant misinformation. You want good information.

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

#173

Post by ipaddr »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #136
ipaddr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are still contributing at a higher rate but google isn't including them. That's the difference not that suddenly professionals are fleeing because of something that has been happened since the beginning.

I dunno. In the few areas I think I know something, I contribute on GitHub and... Thats about it? Most of what I am interested in has moved to Discord or Telegram, or rotted away in deteriorating subreddits. A few others niches moved to YouTube, a spammy one way window. Any contribution I make just feels like shouting into the void (and not even the satisfying kind like here on HN). Is this not a common sentiment?

If you have your own site you can bring interesting people to you. Invite your discord communities.

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

#174

Post by rmbyrro »

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 miss the days of "site:", "intitle:", etc.

I'm thinking when our carefully curated prompts, chain-of-thoughts, and what else will stop working on ChatGPT because they optimized it for the technically uneducated users.

We'll meet here again. Missing the days of "Let's think step-by-step". Ah, this one in particular seems to be already over!

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

#175

Post by junar »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #170
neotrope wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noticed this as well. I've gotten so frustrated with poor results for things I need, I've been using "Verbatim" mode to force Google to stop interpreting my terms. This was a pain, so ended up installing an extension that forces verbatim on every search. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/oc...

Recently, I searched "(-)-BPAP" -- with the quotes -- looking for the chemical benzofuranylpropylaminopentane, which is typically referred to as (-)-BPAP. EVERY result was for a BiPAP ventilator. So I tried verbatim. It still didn't work. Verbatim + quotation marks. Still nothing. I guess New Google Search simply doesn't recognize the "(-)-" part of the search term. But this is characteristic of its recent performanc…

Per the grandparent comment: "Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works."

Searching "BPAP chemical", "BPAP chemistry", etc. seems to work fine.

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

#176

Post by Aunche »

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've never really found docs particularly useful. Usually, I just want a few simple examples to get the gist of how something works and docs tend to be very bad job of that. Meanwhile, the W3Schools SEO spam HN disdains tends to good job of that.

These days I use ChatGPT though.

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

#177

Post by qup »

golergka wrote: post #149
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #32

It's always surprised me that confirmed SEO shenaniganery doesn't bring an instant ion-cannon strike from Google. I know they are apparently allergic to having a human ever decide anything ever. It's just that if I were them, with an infinite data lake to find the vendors' traces, trillion-dollar C-suite morals and the SEO was messing with the bottom line, there would be no quarter when a nest is uncovered. Delist ev…

A lot of "SEO shenaniganery" is basically "make your website better, for robots and for users".

"This website made good use of H1s and captioned all its photos. Obliterate it."

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

#178

Post by LambdaComplex »

rmbyrro wrote: post #174
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 miss the days of "site:", "intitle:", etc. I'm thinking when our carefully curated prompts, chain-of-thoughts, and what else will stop working on ChatGPT because they optimized it for the technically uneducated users. We'll meet here again. Missing the days of "Let's think step-by-step". Ah, this one in particular seems to be already over!

> I miss the days of "site:", "intitle:", etc.

Those still work, don't they? I use site: all the time.

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

#179

Post by CapricornNoble »

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…

Yeah, gone are the days when you could enter a range of 16-digit numbers that started with "4", filetype:xls, and it would return a bunch of Excel spreadsheets from businesses that were storing credit card numbers in plaintext cells.

sighs wistfully

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

#180

Post by wslh »

granzymes wrote: post #122
wslh wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems like we live in parallel worlds but I will show you how I am right except you can really proof I am wrong:

At Google, they recommend to go to https://www.google.com/advanced_search so you can write all the keywords you want. In this case I searched for: kvt reverse exploit [1] you can quickly see that google search results are inaccurate and it shows first my HN post because it was very recent. Also the recent article where it is also mentioned and added after I post it here in HN [2] and the following results doesn't end in some correct previous post. I then try again [3] with a more precise search adding kconsole and only found three results without all the keywords while the advanced search says explicitly that all these keywords should be there.

Am I missing something?

[1] https://www.google.com/search?as_q=kvt+reverse+exploit&as_ep...

[2] https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security

[3] https://www.google.com/search?as_q=kvt+reverse+exploit+kcons...

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