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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?

#251

Post by candiodari »

smsm42 wrote: post #247
reactordev wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Looks like what you're saying is that the results are garbage but people who don't know it could be better are fine with it, because they learned it's how the world works and can't be otherwise. While the ones who are cursed with the knowledge that it can be are left to complain.

I learned a trick recently. If you want "copyright-challenged" results, or exact results, try Yandex. It's a worse search engine and, therefore, better at matching exact text.

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

#252

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#253

Post by Ferret7446 »

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…

That "finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics" needs to actually exist on the Web and not on the dark Web; that is, linked from somewhere so a search engine can crawl it.

That is generally no longer true, due to human nature and the rise of walled platforms and/or non-Web platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Medium, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. Most content is either private, or public as part of an offhand comment/discussion thread. Actual public pages with high quality content are near extinct.

In the few cases where it may be true, the results are sorted for the common denominator, especially since most people who would be looking for such niche information have disabled personalization, so Google can only assume that you are an average person who wants common denominator results.

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

#254

Post by candiodari »

danmaz74 wrote: post #249
underwater wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem with "SEO garbage" is that SEO is highly adaptive - whatever change Google does, SEO will almost immediately find a way to adapt and stay relevant. There is just too much money to be made for those involved.

No the problem is that Google did what they really, really promised never to do: to optimize for financial gain, keep people on the Google site, clicking on ads instead of telling them what they want to know. Like one of those 10-episode Netflix documentaries.

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

#255

Post by reaperman »

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…

Counterpoint (NSFW):

No results: "vector plus phallophile" / "vector plus phallophile reviews" / "vector plus phallophilereviews" / "phallophilereviews.com vector plus"

vs.

Correct results: "site:phallophilereviews.com vector plus"

Yes, I have SafeSearch turned OFF. This is happening to pretty much anything that's remotely NSFW on both google.com and amazon.com -- it's getting completely impossible to search for perfectly legal things that are NSFW.

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

#256

Post by kristopolous »

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 does this so people will execute more queries, stay longer on the search results, and see more ads. It's classic monopoly exploitation of abusing a captured user for increased profit.

They're perfectly capable of making things better, it's just more profitable if they don't.

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

#257

Post by vachina »

wslh wrote: post #81
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…

> SEO agency owner here Could we speak? I run a bootstrapped company for more than two decades and [natural] SEO explained part of our growth. Nowadays it is not working as expected after trying a lot of stuff and agencies. It feels like we can write articles all day without moving the needle except peaks sharing in Reddit that go down quickly. It seems like I need to apply a giant budget to move those metrics. I und…

> we can write articles all day

So you’re the reason why search results are spam nowadays

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

#260

Post by coldtea »

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…

>While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had said the house looked like it was melting, so she typed in "melting house", I think. Not that that's genius or quirky or anything, but I would never dream of typing in something I was thinking "informally", and her approach is more like "whatever whackadoo thing I'm thinking, probably other people think just like me" and she finds anything I ask her about.

I've been doing that "informal" since Google existed - surely it's quite common. You describe what you want in fuzzy terms, and add more qualifiers to narrow it down.

So, "melting house halloween" would be my first search, or rather "melting house halloween ". Similarly if I wanted to search for say Eugene Levy and didn't remember his name, I'd write something "comedian big eyebrows" (he's the second match after Groucho) or "big eyebrows american pie" (first match), and so on.

Out of curiosity, how would you search for that house?

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