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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?

#231

Post by lolinder »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #156
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 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…

While this is true, Google itself is in large part responsible for the internet turning into this wasteland. Most of that garbage content is produced in the name of SEO.

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

#232

Post by shiroiuma »

CapricornNoble wrote: post #182
LambdaComplex wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There should be an inverse, "nosite:" selector, to avoid results from a site.

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

#233

Post by shiroiuma »

AniseAbyss wrote: post #66
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 always like to talk about how much I hate advertising but when I need a Thai restaurant Google Maps has my back. But I'm also old and remember that the yellow pages used to bring in billions of revenue. Have things really changed on a fundamental level?

Is that "advertising" though? Google Maps is an index: you enter a query, like "Thai restaurant near $location", and it shows you Thai restaurants in that location. Then, you can look at some of those restaurants' listings and see photos (usually uploaded by customers, but some from the business), pictures of menus (same), opening hours, a link to their website, etc.

I don't see how any of that qualifies as "advertising"; it's just a business directory. It certainly isn't "unsolicited advertising". The same goes for the old Yellow Pages: it was a business directory (though it had ads too). Businesses had to pay to be listed in it, but that's the cost of doing business: if people can't find you, you're not going to make any money.

I think when people say they hate advertising, what they really mean is unsolicited ads. If you're looking for a particular business, why wouldn't you want some info about them, or about the choices available?

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

#234

Post by Mistletoe »

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…

I think a really perverse form of the Pareto principle has been working against us since at least the Eternal September. But I get it, I’m never the target audience for anything and everything I like is always discontinued. I wouldn’t have it any other way, as the alternative is quite scary.

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

#235

Post by fy20 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #41
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…

SEO doesn't mess with the bottom line though. If anything, it could improve the bottom line by making the ads look more attractive if the organic search results have all been polluted to hell.

Unpopular opinion: Without SEO polluting the algorithm, ads would be worthless, as the search algorithm would do a good enough job of finding the correct results.

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

#236

Post by Semaphor »

underwater wrote: post #211
Semaphor wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Uh, I do that and I’m 37. But I don’t scroll, I click the button that says "recipe" that’s on pretty much every recipe site. IMO this is mainly about being…

The state of recipe sites is 100% driven by Google. Those sites add the fluff because that is what Google rewards. The actual recipe quality doesn't matter. If I use my example, the page contains: * Bio of the author - Google SEO rewards content written by "real humans", so this is there to appease the bot. * Giant images of overnight oats - This helps the page rank highly on Google Image Search. * Fluffy paragraphs…

Sorry, I might not have been precise enough, I did not mean to say that this is not because of Google, only that knowing how to use recipe sites is very distinct from knowing how to google, you even encounter those sites no matter what SE you use (I haven’t used Google in years).

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

#237

Post by onion2k »

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…

if they could filter out SEO garbage

I think the problem with Google is that 'garbage' is highly subjective, and what you think is awful is actually highly engaging for a lot of users. Google has massive amounts of data about what results users click on, how much time they spend on a website, how much scrolling they do, etc. To technical people we see that as SEO 'trapping' people to push engagement rankings up, but the reality is that it's just engagement. People could leave a site of they wanted to, but they don't. They scroll through those 20 paragraphs of recipe back story. That data means Google are finding accurate results.

If anything this shows that Google's results personalization isn't taking your engagement into account. A problem that will get worse as more people block analytics.

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

#238

Post by shiroiuma »

potatolicious wrote: post #157
acheron wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yahoo! Japan isn't related to anything outside of Japan: the brand was bought by SoftBank a while ago. Also, I've never heard of anyone actually using it for search, though maybe older people still do (the same people who use fax machines at home...). Everyone I've met uses Google.

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

#239

Post by wayfinder »

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’m sorry but are you trying to speak for all highly educated and technical people?

Because as far as I know, I’m both and I find Google just as good as ever, if not much better.

The only place I see people complaining about Google is Hacker News and certain parts of Reddit and by no means are the opinions on these sites anywhere near universally shared by most people.

And by all means, I think calling yourself highly educated but not being able to adapt slightly when a tool isn’t working right a little rich…

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

#240

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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…

Google is shit. It finds the 1 percent of the most commonly searched pages, and totally ignores the 99 percent long tail.

They should drop the charade and do a directory listing instead, like the "portal" pages of yore.

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