It would exist as we knew it back in the 90s / early 00s. It would consist of Wikipedia, McMaster Carr, BBS forums, and weird guys' hobby blogs. It would be one million percent better.
Webrings, the original Web 1.0 that many gush about on this site, were partially designed to farm adsense revenue. AOL started putting ads on your dashboard less than 2 years after it launched. There wasn't a very long period of ad-free internet.
Static banner ads with no (user) tracking aint such a bad thing IMHO.
I wonder how this could be implemented at a technical level. How do you avoid gaming the system?
You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool/software etc because everyone has gamed the "Best software for xyz" etc. But what's the alternative ? None. There are these "review" websites like Capterra/Software Advice/G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT…
There is no alternative. People talk about alternatives but everyone I've checked is even worse. Bing, DDG etc. All give complete garbage results. Perhaps not as gamified, but usually that just means you're going to a wordpress of a less competent admin.
They appear to work just well enough to keep you hooked while they increasingly eat your margin.
My 2 cents - in the past, there were bigger inefficiencies that advertisers could exploit. So they could buy a click for 10 cents, and profit 25 cents from it. Google has gotten better and closed that gap, so now you pay 15 cents (and due to increased competition, you might only profit 20 cents) The opportunities are still there in local minima, places where it's too small for Google to optimize. But the trend is cle…
A perfectly optimized ad algorithm reflects the market, and offers little opportunity that isn't present in the business itself.
Costs go up because winners have been found. Like monopolies in capitalism.
You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool/software etc because everyone has gamed the "Best software for xyz" etc. But what's the alternative ? None. There are these "review" websites like Capterra/Software Advice/G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT…
There is no alternative. People talk about alternatives but everyone I've checked is even worse. Bing, DDG etc. All give complete garbage results. Perhaps not as gamified, but usually that just means you're going to a wordpress of a less competent admin.
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.
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 ve…
Because they want a bias-filtered selection of the internet. It is very obvious looking at the reddit comments that most are made by bots and not humans, the difference is that most behave similarly and the upvoting favors sameness.
The alternative for users is Kagi, which is superior to Google for search results. For businesses, there is no good alternative to Google. Many are investing a lot of effort and money in social media, but the returns are very low compared to Google.
I’ve been heavily considering the 1k Kagi but the limit thing has been giving me pause. I’ve yet to try to trial tho so that should help give context how quickly I burn thru 100
I've noticed that there's a huge misunderstanding among people interested in Kagi: You're not banned from searching after passing the limit in your plan, instead subsequent searches will cost 1.5 cents each. So nothing to sweat.
> 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.
That's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of marketing at 5 trillion. SEO is surely making the internet worse, but google is also incentivizing the absolute hell out of it by dedicating resources and promoting personalities a la John Mueller and other Search Advocates within the space. Currently, Google's inability to assign value to pages in a coherent way is making it worse. The Google SEO guidelines, proliferation of tools like lighthouse, AMP pages, and an outdated search algorithm encourage the homogenizing of the web, too. It's a bit like if Google built a factory in the tropics where they organize pools of water. Their goal is to encourage more water, stagnant or not, because their job is to organize pools... but then folks complain about the mosquitos as if they weren't invited. Welcome to the jungle.
My 2 cents - in the past, there were bigger inefficiencies that advertisers could exploit. So they could buy a click for 10 cents, and profit 25 cents from it. Google has gotten better and closed that gap, so now you pay 15 cents (and due to increased competition, you might only profit 20 cents) The opportunities are still there in local minima, places where it's too small for Google to optimize. But the trend is cle…
A perfectly optimized ad algorithm reflects the market, and offers little opportunity that isn't present in the business itself. Costs go up because winners have been found. Like monopolies in capitalism.
Naive question, but if a winner had been found in a given niche, wouldn't there not be as much bidding competition and thus costs would go down?
Concretely: if I am the only pie baker in the world (I won), who else would bid against me for "place to buy pie"?
My unsubstantiated hypothesis is that google has gotten better at cross-promoting - so they could target people who like cake, increasing the market and competition for bids, making prices go up.
I am waiting for the era when SEO world is totally disrupted or destroyed by AIGC
The SEO world is gonna love AIGC. I'm sure it's already in wide usage there; it makes the convincing-but-fake review websites trivial to stand up in quantity. It's the real content that's going to get disrupted/destroyed.
If I search by key works and only get AI generated contents, why not directly ask AI, why waste time on Google