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The internet is an SEO landfill

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Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#421

Post by rchaud »

pdimitar wrote: post #324
nickfromseattle wrote: post #311

This is 100% how search engine optimization works, the consultants are correct. As a marketer, when I search for marketing information on Google 70%-90% of the time all of the stuff on the 1st page generally isn't teaching me anything I didn't already know. But as someone who does this exact thing, I know how expensive good content is - hiring an author to write 3,000 words of valuable information for a reader can co…

What I don't like about your line of thinking is that creating such content should even cost money. Knowledge should be free at our point in time and supposed evolutional stage. But it's not. I'd gladly donate some local lectures on the stuff I know if I had the time. But I wouldn't charge money for it. Knowledge should be free. And internet should have become mega yellow pages on steroids like a decade ago.

Knowledge can be free, with the caveat that you'll usually get what you pay for. We think back fondly of the early Internet when there were all types of truly informative sites.

But we forget that few people even had the Internet back then, and it wasn't commerce-oriented in the way it is now. And back then, those with the capability to put websites online, without things like Blogspot, Wordpress, and the like, were a pretty select minority who had the technical chops and a desire to spread information without expecting any compensation.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#422

Post by rchaud »

el_dev_hell wrote: post #383
xkcd1963 wrote: post #115

Protagonist shames people who work in marketing, calls them bottom feeders, low skill workers and spammers. Protagonist’s product offers ‘marketing emails’ service

> Protagonist shames people who work in marketing, calls them bottom feeders, low skill workers and spammers True. > Protagonist’s product offers ‘marketing emails’ service Also true. Would you be happier if the protagonist was an entomologist or truck driver?

A truck driver's indignation would at least be understandable, but you have to assume that an email blast service has some knowledge about how the sausage of online marketing is made.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#423

Post by rchaud »

jeffk_teh_haxor wrote: post #117
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.

Once the curated list gains critical mass, it sells out, the list turns into garbage, and the cycle repeats itself. It's happened over and over and over.

Product Hunt comes to mind.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#424

Post by rchaud »

jen729w wrote: post #253
alltakendamned wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amazing! This does something that I wish they would all do — allows me to block a site. I never, ever, for any reason, want to see results from the Daily Mail. I don’t even care if it’s the most relevant content: I just never want to see that site in my results. I know I can block it in hosts or whatever, but that’s not what I want. I don’t even want to see the link. I wish DDG would give me this option.

I feel the same about sites like inc.com, fastcompany.com, entrepreneur.com, forbes.com. They are the absolute worst, shallowest content for business journalism, but they're right at the top of search results, and their blogspam fills up my Pocket "Discover" recommendations.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#425

Post by loco5niner »

apitman wrote: post #373
corodra wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are the absolute worst. A recipe with someone's jackass life story for 2000 words. You start to wonder if it's even a recipe at all. You have to scroll for a good minute, hoping you didn't miss the recipe. Then come the ads that reformat the size of the page. Everything jumps around and you have to rescroll again. Exactly why I stick to cookbooks in the past year or so. More and more, "fuck the internet", long…

Blame the web, not the internet

For most of us "the web" = "the internet"

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#426

Post by Mauricio_ »

philippoi wrote: post #183
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…

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…

Just curious: Did you ever find what you were looking for? If so, can you find it with Bing / DDG? It not, is it in the web at all? Maybe there just isn't a webpage for what you want.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#427

Post by bigmanwalter »

ip26 wrote: post #372
corodra wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely understand what you're getting at. But, I have a reason to disagree. I find cookbooks help expand the cultural horizons to cooking. Only because you can get "authentic" cookbooks of other countries. The Polish ones I have, are in Polish. So, that's easy. The French ones I have, though in English, are written either originally by Frenchies and translated or they also know English and have a good editor. S…

Although the trouble sometimes with "authentic" cookbooks is they occasionally depend on a certain level of shared intrinsic knowledge of the cuisine! That's a tough one to solve on your own.

It's amazing really. My other half's family is Greek and it took me years to get the hang of some of their simplest recipes. The whole time they were saying "It's only olive oil and salt! What can be so difficult?""

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#428

Post by com2kid »

jrumbut wrote: post #391
evilduck wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not a GoPro but Chinese food channels seem to fit this description fairly often. Here’s one https://youtu.be/fz_aSsuhg8Y

I learned a dozen things watching that video. Wow, thanks to you and the chef there.

If I live to be 90 I'll still never have the confidence to peel ginger like that...

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#429

Post by lostctown »

gpm wrote: post #386
lostctown wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm logged out by default and only log in to comment, which is rare. I don't like leaving my username up for display if a friend/family member has to borrow my laptop for something. I've engaged in a couple of communities that are a little more counter-cultural than my peers.

You can create another account, or another 10, reddit doesn't mind.

Done this. Eventually one account always becomes my main account and I'm back to square one. I don't care enough about reddit to keep up with 2 separate accounts.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#430

Post by MR4D »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #125
MR4D wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder though - is too much of the P2P universe now mobile devices instead of regular computers that it wouldn’t be feasible?

P2P can be done on mobile but you're fighting against limited resources (storage, bandwidth, CPU). The reason P2P got good on PC is because storage got cheaper, bandwidth was increasing and CPUs kept getting faster.

Right. So texting on P2P is easy and appropriate, but I can’t see how building a search engine on P2P would really work well given those limited resources.
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