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A glitch in the SEO matrix

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Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#111

Post by JohnFen »

lenzm wrote: post #71
titzer wrote: post #30

After having used computers for a few years (oh, about 30), and having grown up with the internet (first dialup at age 16 in 1996), I gotta say, Access to information should not have (ranked, optimizable, commercially-bent) search as its base interface. This is a cosmic, civilization-level screwup. Not only do you get the decades of SEO and advertising, but the whole system becomes lossy over time. You can't find wha…

What's the alternative? Manually curated directories lost to search. Anything completely manual isn't going to be "web-scale". Anything algorithmic is ranked and optimizable.

> Manually curated directories lost to search.

I rather suspect that they'll regain some popularity. Probably not general-purpose ones, but a variety of directories each covering a specific kind of site.

> Anything completely manual isn't going to be "web-scale".

True, but even so, it might still be an improvement. Especially if it's hundreds of different directories, each with their own tight focus.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#112

Post by JohnFen »

marklar423 wrote: post #77
firefoxd wrote: post #57

The majority of times when i search on google I'm looking for someone's personal take on a matter. Whether it's a software recommendation or alternative, a recipe, or experience with a tool. Google only has listicles, top x, or best in 202x. I used to search reddit, but the hostile mobile page ruined that for me. Now i go to yandex and navigate through malware to find what i want. It doesn't help that recent trend of…

I think it depends on the topic. On technical / software questions I do still find individual websites and blogs. For something like product reviews, my experience is exactly like yours and the only thing that shows up is the trash you mentioned. I don't think this is a search problem, I think Google is legitimately surfacing what's available on the Internet for given query. I think this is the dead internet theory a…

> I think Google is legitimately surfacing what's available on the Internet for given query.

Google certainly omits quite a lot, though. Especially smaller sites run by actual people.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#113

Post by NegativeK »

chongli wrote: post #93
lenzm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the alternative? Manually curated directories lost to search. Anything completely manual isn't going to be "web-scale". Anything algorithmic is ranked and optimizable.

Wikipedia is a pretty decent, manually curated repository of encyclopedic information. Google search gets worse and worse every year but Wikipedia is pretty stable over time. Sure, it has its own problems with edit wars and editor politics, but compared to the cesspool of SEO spam on Google, Wikipedia is an information paradise.

Wikipedia is a barest, insignificant smidge of the knowledge that's available on the internet. Yes, it's incredibly useful, but no, you can't stay within its bounds of knowledge for any appreciable time if you're actually trying to accomplish something beyond falling into a Wikipedia hole.

For manually curated content, Google and other search companies were solving that in 1998 because manual curation wasn't feasible for the amount of content on the internet. It's been 25 years since then, and we're not exactly producing less content online.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#114

Post by JohnFen »

chusmeria wrote: post #46
arbuge wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not just ads at all. SEO drives traffic. There are many ways to monetize such traffic, and ads are just one. A lot of SEO is driven by local business owners who hire SEO people with dubious track records that make big promises. They invariably clutter up their websites with 10,000 articles along the lines of "best plumber in dallas". It's funny you mention ads though. One reason that it's so hard to find an S…

> It's funny you mention ads though. One reason that it's so hard to find an SEO person that's actually worth anything is that if they were really good at what they did, they could just throw up their own websites with ads and make a much better living that way than selling SEO services. They don't of course, which should tell you something about how good they really are. That doesn't even make sense. SEOs exist to m…

> SEOs are a cottage industry to help companies deal with the ongoing enshittification of search

SEO is a $122 billion/year industry. That doesn't seem like a cottage industry to me. And it exists in order to get companies to rank higher in search results.

I think the SEO industry is a large force helping to make the web much worse.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#115

Post by JohnFen »

jklinger410 wrote: post #75
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #23

The root cause of all this madness: Ads. As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse. A genuine desire to help incoming traffic doesn't really matter either. Anything helpful will be infinitely cloned, as long as there…

The internet as you know it would not exist without ads.

True! That's the problem with ads. They changed the web for the worse.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#116

Post by JohnFen »

rchaud wrote: post #43
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #37

The whole Cisco courses, blog spam, SEO industry are some of the worst things to exist in technology. I hope all of them gets burned by a massive fire. Who even thinks of becoming a SEO consultant?

SEO is the player, ad-funded search is the game. Hate not.

Why not? It's totally valid to hate both the game and those who are willing to play it. They perpetuate the game, after all.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#117

Post by dahwolf »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #23

The root cause of all this madness: Ads. As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse. A genuine desire to help incoming traffic doesn't really matter either. Anything helpful will be infinitely cloned, as long as there…

The web is still a zero-sum game without money involved. Search has 5-10 slots for whichever topic and if you're not in it, you effectively do not exist.

This was even true before search, in web directories. It has a limited amount of slots, you need to be on it at all and as high as possible.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#118

Post by chongli »

NegativeK wrote: post #113
chongli wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is a pretty decent, manually curated repository of encyclopedic information. Google search gets worse and worse every year but Wikipedia is pretty stable over time. Sure, it has its own problems with edit wars and editor politics, but compared to the cesspool of SEO spam on Google, Wikipedia is an information paradise.

Wikipedia is a barest, insignificant smidge of the knowledge that's available on the internet. Yes, it's incredibly useful, but no, you can't stay within its bounds of knowledge for any appreciable time if you're actually trying to accomplish something beyond falling into a Wikipedia hole. For manually curated content, Google and other search companies were solving that in 1998 because manual curation wasn't feasible…

To further support my argument in favour of manual curation, I would like to ask: why, for the past few years, have people ‘in the know’ been appending “Reddit” to their search strings on Google? Because Reddit is the largest repository of manually curated links, discussions, and original non-encyclopedic information on the internet.

People want manually curated information. They don’t want automation which by its very nature, as a fixed set of parameters, can and will be gamed.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#119

Post by cwkoss »

cwkoss wrote: post #35
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #23

The root cause of all this madness: Ads. As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse. A genuine desire to help incoming traffic doesn't really matter either. Anything helpful will be infinitely cloned, as long as there…

Education is the path out of this: advertised products are ALWAYS worse value. You are overpaying to fund convincing the next sucker. The market is pretty efficient, and there are always alternatives. If you aren't lazy, you can save a huge amount of money by not buying advertised products. On the rare occasions I see an ad for something cool that I want, I search for it on aliexpress and 90% of the time find it for…

It's been fun watching the score of this post bounce up and down every time I refresh. People who earn their living off ads do NOT like being reminded that they are building a societal cancer.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#120

Post by actionfromafar »

cwkoss wrote: post #119
cwkoss wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education is the path out of this: advertised products are ALWAYS worse value. You are overpaying to fund convincing the next sucker. The market is pretty efficient, and there are always alternatives. If you aren't lazy, you can save a huge amount of money by not buying advertised products. On the rare occasions I see an ad for something cool that I want, I search for it on aliexpress and 90% of the time find it for…

It's been fun watching the score of this post bounce up and down every time I refresh. People who earn their living off ads do NOT like being reminded that they are building a societal cancer.

It's not only that, I think. Traditional full page ads, for instance, had a signal value:

"We may not be best. But we are credible and big enough that we make a shit-ton of money on our product and can afford this incredibly expensive ad."

Today, an ad possibly just means "Google matched two suckers with each other and will pocket the difference."

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