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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?

#261

Post by coldtea »

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…

>It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want

I don't think so. I've been using the "full sentence questions" and fuzzy questions since forever, and very seldom use "site:" and other such more formal constraints you mention.

Despite that Google results have been getting worse for the past 5 years at least.

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

#262

Post by coldtea »

reactordev wrote: post #200
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…

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…

>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

I'm over 40 and do that (and the fuzzy stuff / open questions in the top comment).

In fact, most 20-somethings are much worse than this - some studies even pin them as worse with most computing use that is not about social media apps.

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

#263

Post by HlessClaudesman »

My preferred narrative for enshitification is death by 1000 bean-counters. A manager who needs to hit performance targets to get their 6-7 figure bonus is heavily incentivised to juice the stats this quarter. If they already show you 2 ads before a video, why not 3 or 4? Who cares if the platform as a whole slowly becomes less usable, my numbers are up!

What is required is strong vision at the top, telling the bean-counters to dial it all the way back, to be able to see when the golden goose is becoming a boiled frog. Google used to know that what's good for the internet is good for Google.

Sundar Pichai, you're not that guy pal.

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

#264

Post by peoplefromibiza »

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…

> It works better than before

for some definition of better that is not "the results are more relevant than before"

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

#266

Post by knallfrosch »

mikewarot wrote: post #187

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 c…

Happens to me a lot, but restraining Google to the site usually does more harm than good. Most often, I misremembered the site and even if not, there might be posts leading to the story on other sites.

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

#267

Post by nulbyte »

pests wrote: post #246
underwater wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is more on copyright law than Google. > Recipes can be protected under copyright law if they are accompanied by “substantial literary expression." https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte... So the fluff is both an attempt at that substantial literary expression, and a way to differentiate this version of the recipe from 1000 other versions of the _exact_ recipe because the recipe itself is n…

I think this is more about ads then copyright. All these recipe blogs I've seen still follow with an uncopyrightable list of ingredients and simple directions. The recipe still isn't worthy of copyright, even if the content accompanying it is. Sure, the author may be working on something they are passionate about, but the site itself is all about the ad revenue.

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

#268

Post by throwaway447 »

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…

- I searched Google for "how much caffeine is in coffee". It gave me a calculator that said, "40 mg" ... It turns out the calculator was normalizing the caffeine content to caffeine per 100mg of coffee."

Man, you have strong coffee. :-(

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

#269

Post by eloisant »

People trying to game search engine to rise to the top have always existed. Before Google it was easy, and search engine results were crap.

Then Google managed to return relevant search results despite all the people trying to game it... And at some point Google stopped trying. The problem isn't SEO experts successfully gaming the organic results, but Google mixing ads in a misleading way and giving up on fighting SEO.

So don't blame SEO experts for trying to get their pages to the top, that's their job. Blame Google for stopping doing the one thing that made them popular: return relevant search results despite everyone trying to game it.

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

#270

Post by robertlagrant »

escapedmoose wrote: post #154
robertlagrant wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but not great. "I'm here for you to subtly impute how I should feel about something by bypass my critical faculties" is a poor substitute for people who want to be informed.

Not that I have a horse in this race, but… Your information is always going to be sourced and/or presented by humans with bias. Isn’t it better when that bias is transparent? A solo author draws their reader into a proxy conversation with them (which naturally lends itself to some level of persuasion most of the time). As a reader (I believe) your job is to pay enough attention to catch the author if they’re off-base…

> Isn’t it better when that bias is transparent?

Yes. My point is those shows are presented as though they are telling you well-contextualised facts, and then they are making jokes about those facts. I think that presentation is deceptive.

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