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A glitch in the SEO matrix

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Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#181

Post by andersrs »

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…

I've had good luck promoting my game on social media but when someone hears the name and Google's it they'll get results like pic related where someone has embedded an ad-wrapped knock-off of the game which contains more adverts. https://imgur.com/a/mz07uyR

Personally I can't find much on Google if I'm actually searching for something I don't know about. Finding the local mechanic is fine but querying a programming question, health problem or recipe is absolutely fucked. I sold all my Google stock recently but should have done so sooner. The value they have is in gmail and gsuite accounts but I can see the search business is circling the drain.

Conspiracy theory: they love showing shitty sites because those sites display adverts making Google money.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#182

Post by nine_k »

drdaeman wrote: post #163
jklinger410 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead And then > Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. Ah, so they have all of the information and yet their ad products don't work. They don't know this?

> They don't know this? Of course they do, but people pay crazy money for this and it plays the important role in Google's market valuation, so it's in Google's best interests to continue chanting the Big Data Big Money mantra. It doesn't help that the myth/meme is strongly backed by the whole cyberpunk genre, as people love the dystopian themes of "big corporations know everything about you, down to your most secret…

If online ad campaigns did not bring sales, a lot of people would stop doing them. There are other advertisement media; there is organic-looking product placement, there is overt product placement and "influencers", etc.

Still, people buy a lot of AdWords and similar, and occasionally I see a relevant ad I click. BTW ads within Facebook are usually of much better quality (for me as a reader), likely because they can correlate.more sources inside FB.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#183

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Izikiel43 wrote: post #178
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with all that data/information, Google still cannot find a more sustainable business model. Despite the countless number of sustinable businesses humanity has produced, so-called "tech" companies just cannot find one. These are not creative people. "We'll just keep on playing eavesdropping intermediary ("middleman") until we have undermined every business, every government and society along with it." Sounds grea…

That’s the case mostly for Twitter, meta and google that only/mainly live based on as revenue. Amazon, Microsoft, Apple are more diversified.

With those companies, even with their non-data collection, non-advertising services business units, they continue to move more and more into personal data collection and advertising services.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#184

Post by skinner_ »

drdaeman wrote: post #166
hospitalJail wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The incentive isn't necessarily there to remove them. There is a reason people are using chatgpt as a replacement for google, or appending results with Reddit or Wiki

I'm waiting for a day there will be a capable LLM agent that would be able to crawl hundreds of results, read them all (working around all the obstacles, not spewing "reading content failed"), filter the marketing noise/SEO copypasta bullshit, find the meaningful bits, and present a nice summary.

Current LLMs can go crazy just by seeing a single well-chosen word, see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPeJE8bSo6rAFoLqg/solidgoldm... for an amusing exanple. I think we need some breakthrough in adversarial training before LLMs can survive the very adversarial environment of SEO.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#185

Post by yonatan8070 »

jrmg wrote: post #10

It wasn't written to answer someone's question or satisfy their search intent. It was just written to rank. Anyone who’s searched for reviews or tech questions recently has experienced this. And it’s slowly eating everything. The web is turning into nothing but potemkin content.

I've seen this being very prevelant in technical support, searching for an answer about "Windows blue screen error code 0xwhatever" will yield an infinite list of results telling you to reboot, run sfc /scannow, and reinstall Windows

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#186

Post by xarope »

jklinger410 wrote: post #109
JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

tongue in cheek, I don't remember any ads in gopher sites, back in the days.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#187

Post by anon25783 »

nine_k wrote: post #182
drdaeman wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't know this? Of course they do, but people pay crazy money for this and it plays the important role in Google's market valuation, so it's in Google's best interests to continue chanting the Big Data Big Money mantra. It doesn't help that the myth/meme is strongly backed by the whole cyberpunk genre, as people love the dystopian themes of "big corporations know everything about you, down to your most secret…

If online ad campaigns did not bring sales, a lot of people would stop doing them. There are other advertisement media; there is organic-looking product placement, there is overt product placement and "influencers", etc. Still, people buy a lot of AdWords and similar, and occasionally I see a relevant ad I click. BTW ads within Facebook are usually of much better quality (for me as a reader), likely because they can…

You occasionally click on "relevant" ads? I'm really curious why you would do that? Personally, I'll go out of my way to make sure that I don't buy anything referred to me by an ad, on the grounds that advertising is a vile and parasitic industry.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#188

Post by samwillis »

derefr wrote: post #147
jklinger410 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead And then > Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. Ah, so they have all of the information and yet their ad products don't work. They don't know this?

By "dead" the GP means "at the bottom of a race-to-the-bottom." People are paying $4 (to Google) per customer, to acquire customers with an LTV of $4, making them $0 per customer. That's the natural conclusion to competition under perfect information.

Yes. This is what I'm saying.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#189

Post by masklinn »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #183
Izikiel43 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the case mostly for Twitter, meta and google that only/mainly live based on as revenue. Amazon, Microsoft, Apple are more diversified.

With those companies, even with their non-data collection, non-advertising services business units, they continue to move more and more into personal data collection and advertising services.

Of course they do, soulless investors see monetisation options and go “free money when?”

They don’t care about good name and long term viability. As far as they’re concerned they can just sell when the stock tanks.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#190

Post by pcthrowaway »

nine_k wrote: post #182
drdaeman wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't know this? Of course they do, but people pay crazy money for this and it plays the important role in Google's market valuation, so it's in Google's best interests to continue chanting the Big Data Big Money mantra. It doesn't help that the myth/meme is strongly backed by the whole cyberpunk genre, as people love the dystopian themes of "big corporations know everything about you, down to your most secret…

If online ad campaigns did not bring sales, a lot of people would stop doing them. There are other advertisement media; there is organic-looking product placement, there is overt product placement and "influencers", etc. Still, people buy a lot of AdWords and similar, and occasionally I see a relevant ad I click. BTW ads within Facebook are usually of much better quality (for me as a reader), likely because they can…

If everyone in the world pays once for a product that doesn't work, you still get rich. They don't need repeat business, when they control they narrative. If they want to promote results touting the benefits of buying G-Ads, they can.
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