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The internet is an SEO landfill

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Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#171

Post by hansjorg »

RestlessMind wrote: post #155
swayvil wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It might be possible to have both commerce and some form of democracy though.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#173

Post by 50656E6973 »

RestlessMind wrote: post #141
userbinator wrote: post #78

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 :)

Nah, it wouldn't be profitable, at least not in terms of money

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#174

Post by superasn »

ehnto wrote: 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…

Though I'm no expert at this but these days negative SEO has also become a part of the search engine optimization. What this means is that some competitor can create thousands of bad links to your site causing your site to incur a penalty in search ranking.

Google has created a disavow tool for this but for someone who runs a blog and not super tech savvy may not know about it and regardless it is still a burden for anyone to keep up with all this.

Again, I'm not an expert at this and I'm doubtful that a billion dollar search engine can be tricked by such shenanigans but it may be something worth looking into. if your site traffic drops

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#175

Post by SahAssar »

mythrwy wrote: post #139
lostctown wrote: post #121

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…

Am I the only one who thinks Reddit really sucks? It's a cesspool of kiddie memes, shock, ill informed opinion and political posturing. Besides, if I wanted to search Reddit I'd go to Reddit. It being front page for _everything_ I search for now is so annoying.

Reddit has a lot good communities sharing good info for niche subjects. The top 100 or so subreddits are as you say, but there are some good ones further down. And the reason to not use reddits search engine is that it still is very bad.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#176

Post by baddox »

Typhon wrote: post #118
codetrotter wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would pay a massive amount of money for a search engine with a “no commercial results” switch. Yeah but what does that even mean. How do you define commercial? Who is going to go through all of the pages and categorizing them into commercial and non-commercial? And how do you keep shills and “influencers” from littering your results with seemingly innocent but actually commercial content?

Here's an idea : do the 0.1 version by crawling and indexing the web in a perfectly standard way, apply the usual, run-of-the-mill search algorithms, then diff it against the Bing/Google/etc first results which will be biased towards commercial stuff. The higher a page is among their results, the higher the probability that it's commercial in some sense.

So...you want to build a Google except each query starts on the last page of results?

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#177

Post by wbl »

mostlyjason wrote: post #94
nitrogen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original designers of the web envisioned a world where every user could have their own chosen "agent" to navigate the web for them. This is where the User-Agent HTTP header comes from. There would be search agents, data mining agents, and interactive browsing agents. We missed out on like 90% of what the information revolution was supposed to bring to users, and instead the data giants have captured all the value…

We expect everything on the web, including our user agent, to be free as in no cost. The only way to pay for the development cost is to sell to third parties aka advertisers. If people actually paid money to develop more advanced user agents there would be a market for them. Why do people prefer free over paid? I think people underestimate the influence of advertisers and underestimate the value of their own time spe…

The guy who posted the story of splicing a 500kW cable wasn't looking for money. He wanted to amuse people and thanks to him we got amused endlessly. The costs of putting things online are $5 per month at Digital Ocean.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#178

Post by ajmurmann »

mythrwy wrote: post #139
lostctown wrote: post #121

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…

Am I the only one who thinks Reddit really sucks? It's a cesspool of kiddie memes, shock, ill informed opinion and political posturing. Besides, if I wanted to search Reddit I'd go to Reddit. It being front page for _everything_ I search for now is so annoying.

> It's a cesspool of kiddie memes, shock, ill informed opinion and political posturing.

You could make the same generalization about the internet as a whole. Reddit has so many communities and there is a lot of variety. r/fountainpens for example has none of the ills you describe.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#179

Post by Filligree »

1123581321 wrote: post #128
mostlyjason wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We expect everything on the web, including our user agent, to be free as in no cost. The only way to pay for the development cost is to sell to third parties aka advertisers. If people actually paid money to develop more advanced user agents there would be a market for them. Why do people prefer free over paid? I think people underestimate the influence of advertisers and underestimate the value of their own time spe…

If you use a Mac, DevonThink and its associated products are great examples of paid user agents that seek out and organize information for you. Their free trials are fairly generous.

I don't use a mac. Is there any equivalent for other platforms?

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#180

Post by edoceo »

highace wrote: post #105
dheera wrote: post #32

It would be awesome if Google had up/downvote buttons like Reddit and use them to eliminate all the fluff in search results, even if on a targeted community basis. For example if a recipe has no pictures, too many ads, not clear instructions, or no equivalent volume measurements (e.g. "4 grams sugar (about 1 tsp)") I'm likely to downvote it, and those properties can be learned from multiple downvotes.

This already exists. If you navigate back to the search results then that counts as a downvote. If you don't navigate back, that's an upvote.

Hmm, I open result pages in a new tab. I don't "back", just close tabs
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