The internet is an SEO landfill • Hacker News Board

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#261

Post by stordoff » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 9:06 PM UTC

vntok wrote: post #108

inetknght wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think search engines need to realize the value of raising their results' quality by allowing users to tell them which sites they think are scummy.

Make it an easy-to-click report button and pretty much every site whose politics I disagree with will get a downvote... every article by a person I disagree with as well. The question is: how useful is that to the search engine, or indeed to myself?

> pretty much every site whose politics I disagree with will get a downvote

If this happens to all sites, wouldn't only the poorer sites stand out? I don't see why one strand of politics would be significantly more likely to downvote.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#262

Post by notatoad » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

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…

Subscribing to r/baking has been enlightening. The people who write those pages of text you have to skip over to read their recipes actually think they're adding value and that the readers of their recipe blogs are there for the stories as much as for the recipes.

Maybe they're right and some people do love the stories, but they're definitely not just there for SEO anymore. At the very most cynical interpretation, scrolling through the story is the "cost" of the recipe - the blogger gets an ego boost thinking thousands of people want to read all about their life, and the readers get a recipe.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#263

Post by x0x0 » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

dageshi wrote: post #44

jacquesm wrote: post #17

This is a direct effect of using search engines to navigate the web. If we'd stuck to following links curated by actual people (link-rings and other nice inventions) then we'd have never had this problem in the first place. Unfortunately the garbage is here to stay and the good content is totally drowned in a sea of trash.

If search engines were never invented the web wouldn't be a fraction as useful or popular as it actually is today. I know it's fashionable to hate Google nowadays but come on.

Google search was and is a big improvement, but we could use another couple Panda s.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#264

Post by x0x0 » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

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.

I don't think it's a conflict of interest; we're just seeing sites tuning themselves to rank highly in google. I also think google doesn't actually like the extreme SEM optimization, but rather can't figure out how to discourage it.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#265

Post by JMTQp8lwXL » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

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…

I thought I was the only one doing this.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#266

Post by Anthony-G » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 9:10 PM UTC

alltakendamned wrote: post #104

jacquesm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One nice solution would be a search engine that throws out anything related to commerce or linking to commerce.

Not entirely throwing out commerce, but I sometimes use https://millionshort.com/ where you can remove up to the top 1 million websites from the results.

Hey, thanks. That's a great site! You get some very interesting search results and – even better – there's no third-party JavaScript or other trackers.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#267

Post by luckylion » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #249

luckylion wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you have needed fast home internet without the web being popular though? Granted, they didn't look as good, but I know plenty of sites that loaded more quickly 15 years ago when my internet speed was less than a percent of what it is now. Of course, the past is always rosy, especially when you were young, and new things are always exciting and lose their novelty when you get used to them, but I found the intern…

I was trying to download shareware from various freeware ftp sites (infomac mirror sites). It was painfully slow over 56K dialup. It took literally hours to download a five minute QuickTime video clip. Streaming audio kind of worked but streaming video with RealVideo was painful. Surprisingly enough, graphical remote access to a remote Windows computer actually worked decently well over dialup with PCAnywhere. I thin…

Yeah, I remember the times I didn't dare move because it might kill my download, back before resuming and download managers were a thing. Still, costly things feel more valuable, so I'd take a good hard look at what I really wanted before I committed to an 18 hour download for an installer ISO, and I'd certainly use it. Ubiquitous availability diminishes perceived value, for me at least. The large shift was from dialup/ISDN to DSL, I think, because it gave me more than ten times the speed (instead of the small increased with 9.6 => 14.4 => 28.8 => 56k => 64k).

Sadly, just turning down the bandwidth doesn't turn back time - I've experienced that first hand when somebody killed the box connecting the building to the ISP and I had to fall back on mobile... it was like playing Tetris on level 99 and then being thrown back to level 01.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#268

Post by hombre_fatal » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 9:16 PM UTC

FutureSpec wrote: post #206

philippoi wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been lamenting this demise of Google over the last year or two, but it's been especially foul the last few months. Similar to your biking anecdote, I was trying to find any simple trouble shooting help for a home coffee brewer that suddenly stopped working. I couldn't find any results in the first 4-5 pages that weren't trying to sell me a new machine. The manufacturer is also partly to blame, because I couldn't…

I find that hard to believe. I used the phrase "home coffee brewer stopped working" just now in Google and see nothing but troubleshooting articles and forums from the very first result onward.

I don't even understand the thread-OP's complaint. Googling "bike forums" gives me pages of what they say they can't find.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#269

Post by Havoc » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

It does seem to have worsened lately. Especially the crappy Consent to cookies things that block half the screen with an advert covering the other half. Even with a adblocker and pi hole it's becoming unbearable

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#270

Post by bdcravens » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

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.

I don't think the problem is lack of conflicts of interest. The issue is that content creators have far different needs than content consumers. I'm not convinced that Google isn't incentivized to address this, or that a non-profit would have better results (at least not without heavy, expensive curation)