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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?

#281

Post by Lolaccount »

Chilko wrote: post #110
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…

Indeed, I've had to force myself to start searching in full sentences much more as the results from the old method of keyword searching have steadily deteriorated.

You mean, like how we interact with ChatGPT? ;-)

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

#282

Post by gureddio »

jrumbut wrote: post #213
algorias wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Java is particularly rough because there are several populations of Java users (students, Android developers, enterprise developers, among others) and their coding standards are universes apart.

That and it's been around so long that the language and it's standards have been through so many iterations

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

#284

Post by entropyie »

loveparade wrote: post #198
wslh wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep, it's time to give up on Google... Both the search engine and the company. Kagi Fastmail Rsync.net

These are worth paying for.

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

#285

Post by ethbr1 »

maronato wrote: post #204
amf12 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> E.g. Kagi over Google > Kagi could hypothetically be 25% superior in all searches. The difference is the business model. Except for a small minority of people in tech and with disposable incomes, the majority aren't willing to pay for Search. So if Kagi wants to increase their adoption they would need another business model. Advertising (in one form or another) is the easiest one.

I’m not sure the problem is the business model. Bing has the same business model as Google and has been trying hard to get some traction, even integrating ChatGPT, to no avail. Google is a verb, it’s the default, it’s the internet. Two whole generations grew up with it being their portal to information. There’s nothing Kagi can do to dethrone Google, unfortunately. Its only hope is to carve a niche for itself and cul…

They could build a phone operating system and hardware ecosystem, make themselves the default on that, and then pay their competitors billions to also choose them as the default? /s

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

#286

Post by remram »

amf12 wrote: post #152

"The alligator got my attention. Which, of course, was the point." ... "you can’t quite stop yourself from being curious". The first three sentences of the post basically counter the author's narrative. Clickbait is ruining the internet. It doesn't matter whether it is Google, or Tiktok or Facebook or whatever, what gets popular surfaces to the top. If people like clicking on clickbait content, why blame platforms?

What makes content clickbait is not that you don't want to click on it. It's that once you get there, it doesn't deliver.

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

#287

Post by rmbyrro »

shiroiuma wrote: post #232
CapricornNoble wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can use -site: to negate it. Pretty neat

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

#288

Post by LambdaComplex »

shiroiuma wrote: post #232
CapricornNoble wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, negation does work. Do -site: rather than site:

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

#289

Post by pclmulqdq »

lolinder wrote: post #229
pclmulqdq wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you search "speed work running drills" on Google, you get relevant results. It kind of sounds like you are cherry picking the "bad prompts" you sent to Google and comparing them to good prompts sent to GPT-4.

They specifically said that they used the same prompt. If I feed the exact string "speed work running" into ChatGPT 3.5 I get back essentially the same results that OP includes.

Bad prompts for google can have exactly the same words as good prompts for ChatGPT. The original commenter probably uses both of them at least 10 times a day, so it's not unreasonable to assume that they will run into those examples.

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

#290

Post by lolinder »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #289
lolinder wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They specifically said that they used the same prompt. If I feed the exact string "speed work running" into ChatGPT 3.5 I get back essentially the same results that OP includes.

Bad prompts for google can have exactly the same words as good prompts for ChatGPT. The original commenter probably uses both of them at least 10 times a day, so it's not unreasonable to assume that they will run into those examples.

I would typically assume that a three word prompt like that is better for Google than it is for ChatGPT. Google is supposed to be good at keyword search, and ChatGPT is designed for longer prompts.
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