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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?

#181

Post by NikolaNovak »

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…

That's the thing.

All the people I feel are "using Google wrong" and are just "fluking the right results by accident "... They're actually using it more efficiently than I am! Same with almost everything mobile. I like the control and certainty and size and detail of desktop computing and my ergonomic keyboard and 32" monitors. I cannot understand how people are using wonky apps and Imprecise directions and half-understood usage... And getting many things faster and easier than I would :)

I had an enlightment moment last night. I usd to run a photography studio so am pretty handy around a digital camera. I was setting up my phone's main camera with long shutter and trying to steady it to take a photo of a Halloween costume in the dark... When my friend just turned the phone to selfie camera, it automatically used it's screen as 6" flash, and he got a better photo faster and with less thought and kerfuffle. Was he "using it wrong", with lower res camera and single point direct flash (big no no!) and just not thinking it through at all? Maybe? No... He got a great result quickly and efficiently, I'm just stuck in stone age :-).

(There are still times and areas where understanding the how and why is useful. But in many mundane daily tasks I'll get beat by people who don't bother :)

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

#182

Post by CapricornNoble »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #178
rmbyrro wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, "site:" still works. I use "site:reddit.com/r/edh $cardname" any time I want to research Magic the Gathering combos. It also works far better than the same search string in DDG/Brave/Bing.

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

#183

Post by algorias »

Aunche wrote: post #176
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.

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.

Eh, I've had the opposite experience. If you search for anything slightly obscure in a language like Java, you'll get dozens of spam sites aimed at beginners that answer a much more basic question than the one you asked. That's because Java searches cater to a large population of people who can barely code.

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

#184

Post by gretch »

freediver wrote: post #127
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. Yet. Time is the enemy of ad-supported business models.

> Time is the enemy of

Time is literally the enemy of everything. The universe will experience heat death. The sun burns out. Nations will fall. You’ll die of old age.

The assertion you made is actually the most milquetoast safest prediction that anyone can make about the ad business and it’s obvious to everyone.

The thing that actually matters is “when?”

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

#185

Post by drekipus »

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…

> Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works.

uhh....

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

#186

Post by 7speter »

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…

We have google bard and chatgpt. We should have old google too.

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

#187

Post by mikewarot »

Long ago there was a slashdot story about someone who returned to their office to find a co-worker looking at a long printout with a number of peaks circled on it. This printout turned out to be a frequency spectra derived from a covert recording device monitoring the 3 phase feed into the facility. This turned out to be useful for estimating Uranium enrichment yield. I thought it was a damned cool story, but now I can't find it any more. 8(

Google won't help me find this story... but it did at least once in the past. And now I can't even find that reference to the earlier reference.

Also... try finding something about marking up hypertext documents... you can't... you have to know that "annotation" works instead... at least it used to. Who knows what Google will spit out these days. Google-fu isn't what it used to be, because Google goobered it up.

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

#188

Post by pradn »

zeruch wrote: post #17

I cant foresee a scenario where an endlessly growing mass of AI-generated noise, stacked upon itself, will be useful to anyone. Humans will invariably find a less contentious path (maybe its seeking out more localized options, maybe its balkanizing into various specialized domains, maybe its $NEWTHINGYETTOBESEEN, or all of the above. But the current trajectory cannot hold. Someone else mentioned the "reverse-takeover…

People keep saying the Internet is going to be flooded by AI-generated content. Is it going to be any different than the million Wikipedia/StackOverflow re-skins? A bunch of trash sites we learn to ignore in our search results?

Generative AI can also increase the amount of good content, too. If I knew that a particular human vouched for an AI-generated code snippet, I would trust it as much as a hand-written StackOverflow answer. You can bring the entire arsenal of community and reputation-building to have more people vouching for answers and double-checking others.

That's why the future of StackOverflow is more like Phind, the code-specific LLM that looks like a search engine. StackOverflow already has the community. Now, they need to keep people there to check AI-generated answers.

And there's second order benefits, too. You could have AI check old answers, even human ones, on a regular basis. Imagine if an answer is marked "obsolete" because the AI found a more modern solution, or if it found a security issue.

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

#189

Post by wslh »

THENATHE wrote: post #153
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…

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

Please read my reply...

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

#190

Post by loveparade »

wslh wrote: post #180
granzymes wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, you're missing the point of the poster above you. He's saying that the kind of technical searches you are trying to do are irrelevant to 99.99% of internet users and Google is optimized to give superficial but relevant-looking results to those kinds of people. For that metric Google does "work well"

So it's not that Google doesn't work, it's that you're using the wrong tool for your use case. If you want highly technical content or precise keyword search you shouldn't use Google. It's like you're going on Tinder to find a marriage partner.

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