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As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

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Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unlike some of the houses that show up in that query, this house was not designed to appear melting, and I wasn't sure if it was even designed to look uneven, or had the foundation settled and they did nothing about it? So I was trying to explain the uneven wavy lines, rounded corners, and I was saying "it's almost as if it had melted", thinking "this is my personal interpretation, I'm just being descriptive" so that…

There is a difference here that you saw the house and she didn't and trusted your interpretation of it being melting which you didn't think to trust perhaps. You may not have considered that everyone else would also think it is melting, but as an outsider she was in a better position of judgment.

I think it comes from an attitude about a different era of the internet as well. When I was young, I would expect most of the information about say a particularly weird house comes from the website of the owner of the house, or maybe a blogger who is into local architecture, if its on the internet at all. In that context it makes sense to try to query with what you think the owner would self-describe as (so like find out what the proper name of the style is, then query with that). If you come from an era where most of the stuff on the internet is people talking about or sharing the minority of original content, it makes more sense to query using terms that the casual viewer of the house would use.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Google results are trash. Here are three examples from this week: - I Googled "speed work running", wanting some workout suggestions. I visited four or five results that either didn't have concrete suggestions, were poorly written, or overly verbose. I ended my search with little faith that I was getting good advice. I typed the same thing into ChatGPT and got a suggestion of 6 different workouts that all seemed…

You are using it right however your bias is evident on the results. A 20-something will just scroll through the blog content to get to the recipe at the end. No huss, no fuss. In fact, they’ll open multiple tabs of search results to compare recipes in the time it takes you to gawk at the fact that you have to scroll to the end. Where is the recipe? Why is there a video? Table of contents? No, a 20-something will just…

The fact that young people have gotten used to inefficiencies and have gotten good at partially working around them does not mean the inefficiencies aren't there.

This often works the opposite generational direction: when a young person has a flat tire they often call a road service and wait two hours, while the old guy would install the spare himself in less than 8 minutes. But either way, flat tires are inefficiencies that are best eliminated.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A 20-something will just scroll through the blog content to get to the recipe at the end. No huss, no fuss. In fact, they’ll open multiple tabs of search results to compare recipes in the time it takes you to gawk at the fact that you have to scroll to the end. Uh, I do that and I’m 37. But I don’t scroll, I click the button that says "recipe" that’s on pretty much every recipe site. IMO this is mainly about being…

The state of recipe sites is 100% driven by Google. Those sites add the fluff because that is what Google rewards. The actual recipe quality doesn't matter. If I use my example, the page contains: * Bio of the author - Google SEO rewards content written by "real humans", so this is there to appease the bot. * Giant images of overnight oats - This helps the page rank highly on Google Image Search. * Fluffy paragraphs…

100% agree that all the fluff is for the machines and not humans. The web has been broken this way since 2014. The feedback loop is real.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#224
yes, LLMs will have a massive impact on SEO

but the dirty secret here... GPT is trained pretty heavily on reddit data. theres a reason why there hasn't been an IPO and their api got crazy expensive. OpenAi is trying to build a moat with Reddit and with regulation. I really don't think its going to be that long till people figure it out, but who knows

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#226
A pet theory of mine is that google pushes SO clones because they contain ads and google gets revenue from sending users to sites with ads. Talk about perverse incentives. The pre double click acquisition search results were much better.

So can DuckDuckGo let me easily search for sites without ads?

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not yesterday, it was 20 years ago when Google excelled at exact keyword matches. It has been a constant evolution away from that. I hate the new Google as much as others, but if you don't adapt your search habits for 20 years when the whole ecosystem around you has been obviously changing, that's kind of on you. Just use another search engine that fits your use case. Personally I use Kagi and I haven't touched…

Does Kagi support queries like site, inurl, intitle, etc or have some similar capabilities?

Yes.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Speed work" is a class of running drills. The term is very common in running. I'll let ChatGPT explain. This was its response was given the same prompt, when I specifically asked it to give me options it's answer was more specific: Speed work in running is a type of training that focuses on improving your running speed and anaerobic fitness. It involves various structured workouts and drills designed to increase you…

If you search "speed work running drills" on Google, you get relevant results. It kind of sounds like you are cherry picking the "bad prompts" you sent to Google and comparing them to good prompts sent to GPT-4.

They specifically said that they used the same prompt. If I feed the exact string "speed work running" into ChatGPT 3.5 I get back essentially the same results that OP includes.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because th…

No, Google results are trash. Here are three examples from this week: - I Googled "speed work running", wanting some workout suggestions. I visited four or five results that either didn't have concrete suggestions, were poorly written, or overly verbose. I ended my search with little faith that I was getting good advice. I typed the same thing into ChatGPT and got a suggestion of 6 different workouts that all seemed…

FWIW, my human brain did not understand your first query, in the second you conflate voice search with Google, and re the last, if I try it, it shows me a dropdown to select what I meant…

(Generally just confused by how ppl always claim it’s trash or it got worse but there never is a solid benchmark)

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