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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?

#271

Post by throwaway447 »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #9

"The internet" doesn't really exist, now, now does it? 99% of users are living in an AOL-style world, where they live within walled gardens. Why leave twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit? There's nothing out there but a wasteland of crumbling has-been sites. Sometimes you'll find yourself on a blog or news article, but you just click/tap the back button to go back to the walled garden. Nobody is subscrib…

I wish your site would have an RSS feed. In our days you have to build your own scrapper

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

#272

Post by throwaway447 »

mikewarot wrote: post #187

Long ago there was a slashdot story about someone who returned to their office to find a co-worker looking at a long printout with a number of peaks circled on it. This printout turned out to be a frequency spectra derived from a covert recording device monitoring the 3 phase feed into the facility. This turned out to be useful for estimating Uranium enrichment yield. I thought it was a damned cool story, but now I c…

I have a 10TB hdd and if a website is interesting, I am likely to save it.

This site you would find under /data/u/uranium/uranium_enrichment_yielt.html

And I use recoll to find stuff https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/index-recoll.htm...

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

#273

Post by themoonisachees »

candiodari wrote: post #254
danmaz74 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with "SEO garbage" is that SEO is highly adaptive - whatever change Google does, SEO will almost immediately find a way to adapt and stay relevant. There is just too much money to be made for those involved.

No the problem is that Google did what they really, really promised never to do: to optimize for financial gain, keep people on the Google site, clicking on ads instead of telling them what they want to know. Like one of those 10-episode Netflix documentaries.

Precisely. The main problem with google is that it's extremely hard to align yourself with the goals of humans with human needs, so they have to look at proxy metrics to rank sites before anyone actually hits them. Their current proxy metric appears to be that there is a lot of human-sounding text on the page, and so people optimizing for that are going to put a lot of text on the page, factual accuracy be damned. In the naughts, their metric used to be that many sites linked to yours, and so people optimized that by creating webrings.

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

#275

Post by switch007 »

fsckboy wrote: post #38

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…

Maybe I'm reading too much in to it, but for me the poignant part is that she stopped engaging with you and reached for the phone, mid conversation. I've noticed this too. And before they even reach for their phone, it's as if you've lost them already, because they're thinking of searching and which app/keywords to use etc.

It's like their trust of the Internet is 100x higher than someone recounting something they've seen with their own eyes, and the value of knowing a bit of information or getting a dopamine hit is way way higher than having an engaging conversation with someone

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

#276

Post by lifeisstillgood »

acheron wrote: post #140
ethbr1 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN (and futurists in general) tend to significantly underweight inertia. People hate change, and absent a catalyzing event or order of magnitude advantage, it will take a decade for usage patterns to shift. E.g. Kagi over Google Kagi could hypothetically be 25% superior in all searches. Most people don't know and don't care. Search is the thing that pops up and they type into. You can even change that? To what? There…

> Most people don't know and don't care. Search is the thing that pops up and they type into. You can even change that? To what? There are others? So we’re all still using Yahoo and Altavista?

No the internet population at time of Yahoo was X (say 400 million desktop PCs) about year 2000. Then google started to gain ground and from 2000-2010 internet population went from 400M to 4Bn - and even if every yahoo user from 2000 stuck with yahoo they were just 10% of users - and those users defaulted to google (partly actual defaults, partly fashion, partly here is how you do a search")

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

#277

Post by prmoustache »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #99
prmoustache wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deleted my account only last year and for more than one decade I was using a generated icelandic name.

If your name meets Facebook's “real name” standards, it's not like Facebook is going to hunt down your birth records and see whether it Really Is your Actual Real Name™ (not that that's even a particularly coherent concept…). Did you manage to keep your account anonymous from Facebook – that is, not linked to any of your other identifiers?

Well I have been using firefox containers and adblocks but containers only appeared fairly recently and I couldn't use them on mobile so completely separate I don't think so. My FB account was only linked to my instagram account (also delete now) but under a pseudonym.

I prefer talking about pseudonymity rather than anonymity because you are very rarely truly anonymous on the internet, even using a non nominative handle, especially if law enforcement enter the chat.

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

#278

Post by nazka »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #88
fsckboy wrote: post #38

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…

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…

What are your sources for this?

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

#279

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #181
fsckboy wrote: post #38

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…

That's the thing. All the people I feel are "using Google wrong" and are just "fluking the right results by accident "... They're actually using it more efficiently than I am! Same with almost everything mobile. I like the control and certainty and size and detail of desktop computing and my ergonomic keyboard and 32" monitors. I cannot understand how people are using wonky apps and Imprecise directions and half-unde…

> He got a great result quickly and efficiently, I'm just stuck in stone age :-).

Knowing how to use a camera is not being stuck in the stone age. His photo was good because the phone automatically had a longer shutter time, did post processing HDR and did light light edits.

If you both set up RAW images on your phone, and put it on lightroom, yours will be editable into a perfect photo, his will be a mess of flash and AI generated artifacts by the phone to make it "just work".

Having things that "just work" is great for everyday tasks, but power users and technical people should still have their tools to do things right. Apple allows for RAW image and videofootage while still having many settings by default for most people. Spotify used to have a ton of cool audiophile options in the settings now its like 3 options and they are all terrible. Google has gone that same way, instead of enabling both, they have cut off power users by focusing everything on "everyday use" which makes their product largely useless outside of some scenarios.

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

#280

Post by JR1427 »

I hate the way Google answers the question it wishes you had asked, but didn't.

E.g. you search for something obscure or specific, but all the results are relating to a similar search, that has loads of results.

It's as if Google just want to give you lots or results, and not care if they answer the question.

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