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The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

alexskra.com

251–260 of 359 posts

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#251
post #167
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sidenote but what do you think about Ahrefs? I'm doing some tests to see how easy it is to get ranked for keywords (with actual helpful content, not crap like this thread is about), but i find the Adsense keyword tool not that helpful as they delete many keywords when you search for them, which kinda voids that tool. But I currently feel that paying $100/mo for Ahrefs for something I do as a side project is a tad was…

ahrefs is the best in the business.

Ahrefs is the best data source but this is the most frugal approach

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#252
post #163
post #140

Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault. I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated sof…

I think it depends on what you’re searching for, for dev related stuff no other search engine I’ve tried comes close. But there are whole industries now that are so heavily SEO’d that finding useful information without knowing the exact keyword to search for is incredibly frustrating

I agree, and I‘ve read the opinion too that it‘s a problem people have with DDG. Yet google doesn’t feel excellent at that. Could it be worth competing with google there? I‘m not gonna say it‘s "easy", but maybe worthwhile and possible?

I don‘t think I have used more than 1000 different sites in all development searches ever. It‘s the stack exchange network, github, official documentation, non-github official issue tracking/communities and some high quality blogs. That seems very manageable. You could probably index that into one elasticsearch and one sourcegraph instance. Add a little more specific faceted search, add back powerful and precise query syntax and still maintain "just past in whatever and hit the first result" functionality. I‘m likely underestimating the breadth of other developer needs than my own. I don‘t know.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#253
post #147
post #140

Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault. I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated sof…

> And it's mainly not even their fault. It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users. Two examples just from top of my head: ignoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do. Another was ignoring completely the exact phrase search with double brackets.

How do any of those make people talk inside closed Discord groups instead of the open web?

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#254
I've noticed another trend recently where it seems that some websites write content for google SEO instead of optimized for human readability. E.g.: I've seen my exact search phrase repeated mutiple times and then a very long article about the topic when what I searched was a simple question with a few words answer.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they don't, that's explicitly their stance. There is no line. They host everyone equally. To do the opposite would require drawing a line.

That is not true. They do have a line specified here https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse/ It's just that the procedure is so useless that it might as well not exist.

IANAL, but I don't see a Cloudflare specified line anywhere on this page. I think this is just the bare minimum they are legally required to do.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just sick of seeing pintrest and quora as the top 8 results :/

Pinterest is the worst as you cannot see the results without registering… How can it be a relevant search result! Fortunately -site:pinterest.com make it useable.

Google should remove all Pinterest results, It makes especially image search a pain.

It is spam pure and simple.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#258
post #140

Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault. I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated sof…

You should try yandex.ru for all that interesting stuff. They don't censor any of it.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#259
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best they do is forward your complaint to the owner of the website, who is free to ignore it. Or worse. Since I have no way to know beforehand who I would be dealing with, this is actively dangerous - what if the mobster running this site is having a bad day and choses to retaliate ? Also what a stupid fucking policy that is. Even if you are not legally compelled to block content, what is the point of actively…

Because criminal scum pay their bills. You don't think 8Chan was on a free account do you? The sooner developers realize that Cloudflare is not saving the Internet the better.

At this point I'm convinced that at least 10% of all legitimate economic activity is actually money laundering for crime organizations, in various forms. I imagine that percentage goes even higher in the financial capitals of the world.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#260

For all that Google search has been utterly crap for going on a decade now, I have to admit part of the reason is that they get targetted relentlessly by SEO spam operations like this. I like DuckDuckGo for now, but I imagine as they get bigger they're going to be a target for these kinds of spam just the same.

> I have to admit part of the reason is that they get targetted relentlessly by SEO spam operations like this.

A bit of it is probably that.

Outright ignoring my queries: +, doublequotes, "verbatim" and all takes more than SEO tactics, it takes someone inside Google, either malicious or more probably incompetent on the inside.

Or more probably: someone was so busy trying to use AI in searches that no they haven't had time the last ten years to consider if it was smart.

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