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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?

#191

Post by underwater »

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…

No, Google results are trash. Here are three examples from this week:

- I Googled "speed work running", wanting some workout suggestions. I visited four or five results that either didn't have concrete suggestions, were poorly written, or overly verbose. I ended my search with little faith that I was getting good advice. I typed the same thing into ChatGPT and got a suggestion of 6 different workouts that all seemed coherent.

- I asked Google Home "How do I make overnight oats". It replied, "I found a result for [...], should I read it?" then "The first ingredient is Nutella". That's it, that's all it said. I tried the same search on the web, and every result Google result was spam that was 20 paragraphs of inane blog content with a recipe tacked on the end. Again, ChatGPT then gave me a sane, baseline, recipe.

- I searched Google for "how much caffeine is in coffee". It gave me a calculator that said, "40 mg" and then a suggestion an alternative search for "Q: How much caffeine is in an average cup of coffee? A: between 80 to 100 milligrams". It turns out the calculator was normalizing the caffeine content to caffeine per 100mg of coffee.

I'm using Google exactly how their product is training me to use it, but the failure modes are all consistent. Google's AI features has not real understanding of the world, so their instant answers are frequently nonsensical. And Google clearly can't filter out SEO garbage.

Even if they could filter out SEO garbage, Google's early success killed the golden goose. 99% of web publishers are publishing content for Google, not for their readers and web publishing has become a cynically commercial affair. Individual publishers have by and large moved on from the web to other creator-focused platforms. So, the quality and experience of web content is absolute rubbish. Results are filled with cookie banners, ads, signup prompts, verbose SEO filler, poor writing, lack of authority, etc.

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

#192

Post by geoelectric »

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…

Quoting as ` kvt “reverse exploit” ` gets me only a few results on Google, period. That’s true even telling it to include ones omitted as redundant. They’re all either your HN comments or blogs mirroring them. The original doesn’t appear.

That tells me that the main problem may simply be that the BugTraq post on seclists.org isn’t indexed by Google at all.

While that’d be annoying, I think it’d more likely be a specific configuration or robots.txt issue with that site than being a general issue with how searches are performed.

FWIW, the same query in Kagi found the original as the second result, just under a blog mirror of your 10/20 comment and above the comment itself. Since Kagi sources from Bing (along with Google) results, that reinforces the theory that it’s an issue specific to Google’s crawl.

Contrary to your other replies, I do think your style of query continues to work well on Google (where indexed of course)—-and so do full sentences.

I honestly think the issues when there are problems finding things usually come more down to 25-plus years of searchable internet history accreting a lot of clutter (especially in spaces like tech where old info ages out but never gets deleted), along with cynical SEO from low value sites deliberately skewing results for as long as the site remains indexed.

Neither is a Google problem, and the recency bias you observed is arguably the best way to combat both. Ads and site promotion are another story, and the reason I’m on Kagi, but I don’t think that hits tech as hard as consumer spaces.

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

#193

Post by mym1990 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #160
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…

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.

This feels like a good take. I’ve recently been trying to find more information on caveats of Section 179 of the US tax code, and at almost every turn the consensus is to go to a professional(which is what I should do), but for some nagging off hand questions, I was hoping to find some meaningful discourse on it.

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

#194

Post by wslh »

loveparade wrote: post #190
wslh wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When was the change? These pages were indexed by Google years ago, Google removed them obviously, and the search worked fine in the past.

You are saying one day you use your mobile phone for calling and the next day the device only work for calling 0800-*?

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

#195

Post by pclmulqdq »

makeitdouble wrote: post #160
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…

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.

Exactly. Google search is not a knowledge finder for power users, it's a content finder for normal people. The fact that it was good at finding knowledge for 10 years or so is entirely incidental to the goals of modern Google.

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

#196

Post by [deleted] »

btown wrote: post #53
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…

> still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the past 3 years. The more Google trains its normal users that “generic queries will get you spoon-fed generic-ness, so you have to be specific to get what you want…” the more valuable placement on long-tail keywords will become. People aren’t going to stop searching, they’ll just hate Google more…

[deleted]

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

#197

Post by bobsmooth »

antod wrote: post #132
okdood64 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of HNers are pretty out of touch with how the vast majority of people use the internet.

Is it wrong to want to be even further out of touch?

No, it's the normies who are wrong.

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

#198

Post by loveparade »

wslh wrote: post #194
loveparade wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When was the change? These pages were indexed by Google years ago, Google removed them obviously, and the search worked fine in the past. You are saying one day you use your mobile phone for calling and the next day the device only work for calling 0800-*?

It's not yesterday, it was 20 years ago when Google excelled at exact keyword matches. It has been a constant evolution away from that.

I hate the new Google as much as others, but if you don't adapt your search habits for 20 years when the whole ecosystem around you has been obviously changing, that's kind of on you. Just use another search engine that fits your use case. Personally I use Kagi and I haven't touched Google for the last year at all.

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

#199

Post by bobsmooth »

postalrat wrote: post #45
amadeuspagel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many anonymous websites, like 4chan, and you are free to create your own, which is itself something you can do anonymously.

How are people you to find your forum if sites indexing sites like google apparently won't link to your site: https://www.google.com/search?q=anonymous+English-language+i...

Like we used to do it, through word of mouth. Check out rdrama.net

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

#200

Post by reactordev »

underwater wrote: post #191
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…

No, Google results are trash. Here are three examples from this week: - I Googled "speed work running", wanting some workout suggestions. I visited four or five results that either didn't have concrete suggestions, were poorly written, or overly verbose. I ended my search with little faith that I was getting good advice. I typed the same thing into ChatGPT and got a suggestion of 6 different workouts that all seemed…

You are using it right however your bias is evident on the results. A 20-something will just scroll through the blog content to get to the recipe at the end. No huss, no fuss. In fact, they’ll open multiple tabs of search results to compare recipes in the time it takes you to gawk at the fact that you have to scroll to the end. Where is the recipe? Why is there a video? Table of contents? No, a 20-something will just flick their screen wildly until they are at the bottom, and scroll up. Give me the results and backtrack to where I’m at. This I think is a result of their upbringing and everyone’s focus on results rather than process. So you may believe you are doing everything correct but you are just going through the motions. The web today is different than it was even 5 years ago.

I wish I could search like I used to but we are where we are.

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