Live data from Hacker News

The internet is an SEO landfill

docs.sendwithses.com

151–160 of 438 posts

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#151

Great intro, but where’s the actual article? (Also it’s pretty harsh to say that it takes “little talent” to become an SEO expert. Like all industries, there are charlatans selling snake oil, but there are experts who have invested a lot of time in developing their skill sets, and it’s not nice to be so dismissive.)

If it requires so little talent why in 2019 is the quality a lot of websites so poor?

some examples is why do sites still misuse H tags or have problems like creating a simple xml site map that handles escaping characters when required

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#152

I append "reddit" to any query not meant for a productive task. Except now the internet is mostly reddit for me, which kinda bums me out. Especially given the new js-heavy design. In 2019, if I want reliable search about something I know nothing about I must first search on google, then try again with "reddit" appended, then change www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com, then parse through what are often questionable answe…

> then change www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com

You can opt-out of the redesign in your settings so www.reddit.com and old.reddit.com both show the old reddit, and you can use new.reddit.com to view new-only pages.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Much like a spam-filter. Seems straightforward enough. What am I missing?

What you're missing is the fact that larch search engine companies have no profit motive to do this. They get the vast amount of their money from commercial ad sales -- ads for commercial results. Why would they purposefully castrate their highest paying customers? And if you think the answer is to create and host a new, independent engine, you will be hard pressed to develop a good one, and to find the money to keep…

How about a layer over Google? Take Google's search results and filter them. Any obvious barriers to that?

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#154
post #18

Search results are so heavily weighted toward commerce, products and services because those are the people that can spend money on SEO. It's made the internet, seen through the eyes of search results, seem like an aggressive, shady market bazaar. I try searching for anything remotely bike related, bike community, mechanical information, or just general cool bike stuff and I can't find the human community underneath a…

For many topics I now go straight to search Reddit. It avoids all those articles that SEO the shit out of a topic where I was just looking for a two sentence answer.

Edit: I'm often surprised how search engines fail to exclude obvious SEO farms. Especially looking at articles about stock, you frequently just find a ocean of what send to be clearly autogenerated articles.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#155
post #62
post #18

Search results are so heavily weighted toward commerce, products and services because those are the people that can spend money on SEO. It's made the internet, seen through the eyes of search results, seem like an aggressive, shady market bazaar. I try searching for anything remotely bike related, bike community, mechanical information, or just general cool bike stuff and I can't find the human community underneath a…

Our culture is a frog nailed to the floor. The nail is commerce. The frog can still sorta function. Wiggle in little circles. It ain't pretty or healthy or free. No hopping. I wonder what it would be like to not have that nail through us.

Commerce -> revenues -> viable businesses -> sustainable jobs -> peaceful livelihood prospects.

No commerce -> no jobs -> unrest -> violence and wars (citation: centuries of human history).

Maybe, commerce is the nail which constrains humanity both in a good and a bad sense - by providing a peaceful alternative to violent lifestyles and by creating a consumerist culture?

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#156
This is just the flip side of what was at the time a revolutionary search strategy: prior to Google search results were even worse than they are now. Altavista and the rest were just indexing content and providing naive text search over their cache of the Internet and spammers had ensured that only very specific searches having nothing to do with commerce were discoverable.

Then Google came along with PageRank, which rated pages based on which and how many other sites linked to them. Suddenly the Internet was usable again. For a few years. But spammers caught on and the algorithm has had to become more complex. But companies are so desperate for attention and there’s so much money floating around that the huge swaths of entirely fake content have sprung up and become more and more sophisticated.

Unfortunately Google still rules and it takes some unsavory activity to get a new product or service to surface effectively. That’s not actually a new phenomenon, it’s just different mechanisms. But I feel sorry for anyone in the situation described here. I would not be able to bring myself to do effective PR in this or any other age.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the "showing results for Y, click here to search for X" when X is what you actually wanted to search for. It's ironic that, in trying to make search "human friendly", Google has also succeeded in giving it all the negative traits of a human --- the "human" that is more like a commissioned salesperson. I know the argument is that humans frequently make mistakes so "we should just show them what we think t…

> Search was much better when ... If you really believe that, maybe it is a nice startup opportunity for you :)

Trying to make money is precisely the reason Google is the way it is. I don't think starting another business is the answer.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#159
post #86
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing about cookbooks is that the massive barrier to actually publishing and distributing is a natural filter for credibility; most cookbooks have tried-and-true recipes and are either authentic or a genuinely good adaptation by a skilled chef author. The internet is full of garbage recipes that either just don't work, inauthentic, and uncreative, all at the same time. As far as murdering trees go -- let's not fo…

The flip side of this is that the cookbooks rarely have super niche recipes. Even some of the highest rated "authentic" cookbooks have the flavor level tuned way down to be more "suitable for American tastes". The best cooking tutorials are barely translated Youtube videos. Or even better, recipes going through Google Translate. (Or get a multi-lingual friend... :) ) Cook's Illustrated also does some 100% legit inter…

I absolutely understand what you're getting at. But, I have a reason to disagree. I find cookbooks help expand the cultural horizons to cooking. Only because you can get "authentic" cookbooks of other countries. The Polish ones I have, are in Polish. So, that's easy. The French ones I have, though in English, are written either originally by Frenchies and translated or they also know English and have a good editor. Same goes for Japanese, Thai and German. But I also look for keywords about their grandmother. Best way to know the authentic level of a cookbook in English is how much they admit they're stealing from their grandma. The higher, the better. Especially if they talk about struggling to get the right ingredients.

Honestly, I miss absolutely nothing from the internet when it comes to cooking. But I also wanted to be a chef. So I studied how to properly cook long ago and I cook almost every day... so I'll admit in already an outlier. Still, the way the internet treats cooking is retarded. It doesn't surprise me that people don't like to cook if they grew up with the internet as a learning resource. All these people overcomplicate easy recipes and substitute anything because it makes them feel like pretty snowflakes.

Post reply on HN