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The internet is an SEO landfill

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Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#221

Post by dreamcompiler »

habnds wrote: post #168
dreamcompiler wrote: post #132

The Internet needs a good non-profit search engine that has no conflicts of interest. It could be funded by a foundation like Wikipedia or by the government like PBS, but the world sorely needs this resource.

Wouldn't that be "optimized" for as much as any other? Seems like google wants non-SEO results as much as us, if only so that advertisers are forced to spend their money directly with Google.

> Wouldn't that be "optimized" for as much as any other?

Not with good algorithms and curation. Sure, it will be an arms race. But another benefit is that it would be completely open, so people could build better algorithms on top of it without having to write their own crawlers, which nobody can do now with Google (at least not for free.)

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#222

Post by hombre_fatal »

dheera wrote: post #114
vntok wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing is a literal filter bubble, where very soon your only exposure to content will be seeing content you are already liking, ideas you are already adhering to, people you are already looking to. A bubble where ideas and people that you and people like yourself don't like automagically get hidden from you so that you never get exposed to them. A nightmare.

I think this can be done a little more intelligently. Up/downvotes should be based on the structure of the site and more so than the meaning of the content. An downvote should not mean "I disagree with this author" but rather "this site was useless spam" or "I derived no information from this site because it threw 5 popups in my face". Or if I downvote a bunch of paywall sites it should stop showing me paywall sites.…

What you're proposing in this comment doesn't even work on Reddit/HN. People don't even agree what each star represents in 5-star rating systems.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#223

Post by dreamcompiler »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #203
dreamcompiler wrote: post #132

The Internet needs a good non-profit search engine that has no conflicts of interest. It could be funded by a foundation like Wikipedia or by the government like PBS, but the world sorely needs this resource.

Do nonprofits really lack conflicts of interest? Mozilla for example? I have no idea.

Probably nobody has no conflicts of interest ever. But right now Google is heavily biased toward advertising and data collection which is not good for -- pretty much everybody.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#224

Post by visarga »

nightski wrote: post #158
RestlessMind wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've been thinking about a distributed search where each participant in the network crawls and answers queries related to a part of the web. Make search more like bittorrent. Is there such a project?

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#225

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

You can have greasemonkey fix the Reddit links for you.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#227

Post by jddj »

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…

In my recent experience, the only thing which causes me to tag a !g onto my duckduckgo searches is a need for recent results (as in, the last couple of hours -- for the results of a sports match for example).

Anything else seems to be served by the other providers just as well/poorly, and occasionally better.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#228

Post by hombre_fatal »

ajmurmann wrote: post #162
caiocaiocaio wrote: post #14

Google any recipe, and there are at least 5 paragraphs (usually a lot more) of copy that no one will ever read, and isn't even meant for human consumption. Google "How to learn x", and you'll usually get copy written by people who know nothing about the subject, and maybe browsed Amazon for 30 minutes as research. Real, useful results that used to be the norm for Google are becoming more and more rare as time goes by…

What I don't understand is why Google doesn't hell ban these pages. It seems trivial, at least as a human, to detect them. You don't even need to do this for all of them. Just banning a few hundred will deter everyone else.

What exactly is being hellbanned here? Any web page with an uninteresting preamble like most articles and blog posts online?

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#229

Post by detaro »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #161
caiocaiocaio wrote: post #14

Google any recipe, and there are at least 5 paragraphs (usually a lot more) of copy that no one will ever read, and isn't even meant for human consumption. Google "How to learn x", and you'll usually get copy written by people who know nothing about the subject, and maybe browsed Amazon for 30 minutes as research. Real, useful results that used to be the norm for Google are becoming more and more rare as time goes by…

Re: recipes, one of the potential reasons for this is that bare recipes are not copyrightable by law. Courts see them as algorithms, almost -- e.g., there are only so many ways to cook a grilled cheese sandwich. > 17 U.S.C. 102(b): In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of…

That's not quite the same as the pattern the parent describes I think: There's a longer post before the recipe, not integrated into the recipe.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#230

Post by inimino »

phkahler wrote: post #138
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…

Grep the internet and sort by pagerank was great. Then everyone removed links that went offsite. Then link farms. The fake blogs and influencers are the evolution of link farms. Unfortunately sellers will game the system. How do we create a way for buyers to game it?

Pagerank was great when it was new because it had never been used before. Once Google got popular enough to be worth gaming, it became an example of Goodhart's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

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