Just because you observe a problem doesn't mean you have a solution. That doesn't remove the value from the observation, as long as it's not a way to just regularly complain at everything without a goal.
We tried paying a big SEO consultant with a long track record of big-name successes (allegedly) $10k/month and the poor results we’re getting had as much to do with the whole hiring high paid consultants who waste your time in weekly meeting busywork than actual SEO not working. Not a good idea for small businesses or startups, even if you can afford it, IMO.
SEO is still a long term investment that every company needs to make for the benefit of their users, helping people find you and your information on search engines is a good thing (assuming you’re providing real value).
The only problem are the spam sites who still succeed occasionally on the fringes. Which was why we were motivated to get SEO (and SEM) help in the first place - as one of our biggest competitors is a shameless gray/black hat spammer that their poor customers keep finding on Google.
I kind of agree, and I think nowadays it's hard to promote a product on the Internet or even get noticed without putting a lot of effort. When the Internet was smaller, I guess it's been easier.
I think it’s possible, it just doesn’t get a lot of attention because the scale is small.
I have friends who run small businesses and just have simple sites and blogs about their customers and they have more business than they can handle. Granted it’s just a living, but it’s almost all traffic through google through organic results.
Interestingly, their competitors frequently have these bullshit, SEO sites that come in below and able their organic results. They come and go but my friend has been around for 10 years.
Customers do mention that they like a “real” site.
I wonder if the web will saturate and clog, start to cost more to keep up and maintain and lose users that feels walking around and talking is simpler.
(Also it’s pretty harsh to say that it takes “little talent” to become an SEO expert. Like all industries, there are charlatans selling snake oil, but there are experts who have invested a lot of time in developing their skill sets, and it’s not nice to be so dismissive.)
I don't even think the author is talking about charlatans. I think the point is the barrier to entry is pretty low, and how do you define what is an "expert"? "SEO expert" is just a few letters you stick on your LinkedIn profile or business card; some will be experienced, ethical experts that get results for sure. I see it the same way I see network marketing: yes, some turn Mary Kay or essential oils into viable careers, but that doesn't invalidate the common criticisms.
From my personal experience with SEO people: the experts make large sums of money running their own sites. The non-experts run around with lofty promises and "consult" for other's sites.
There isn't. It is another article that will end up in the SEO landfill the author is complaining about along with other "spammy" articles that already exist in the landfill.
In essence, this is another "spammy" article to promote his product cleverly disguised as an anti-spam/anti-SEO article.
I suspect an SEO agency actually told him to write this article to generate conversation (people who resonate with the intro will share it on all social circles and cause it to go "organically" viral). As they say, all publicity is good publicity.
But why is that? Do search engines rank better when a text is longer? Or is it that with more words there's a higher possibility that one will match with what the user is searching? And doesn't it all just make users waste more time searching for something concrete?
Maybe there's space for search engines that can summarize a page if it's long and give the user what they want.
On the one hand, that sounds like a good thing, rather than a bad thing. On the other hand, that doesn't match up with my experience at all. There's far too much nonsense out there that sounds like the latter and exists to waste your time.
> Unfortunately SEO ruins great, witty and brief marketing texts.
SEO content marketing is basically a descendent of direct marketing -- the stuff you used to get in the mail, in two-page spreads in Reader's Digest and so forth.
Direct marketers have known for a very long time that long-form copy sells better. They had the numbers to prove it long before "analytics" was a common idea -- the very term A/B testing refers to the "A" and "B" sides of a newspaper print roller being able to print two versions of an advertisement.
Source: Tested Advertising Methods by Caples. A fascinating, if depressing, read.
That was the beauty of it. As the newsprint passes through, one paper will get A, the next will get B, the next A and so on. The plates are otherwise identical for each page being printed.
This perfect 50/50 split pretty much controls for all the plausible variables. Location, time of day, you name it, the odds of a reader seeing either A or B was exactly 50%.
No it doesn't it has nothing to do with that. However, if you think an article should be a paragraph long then you probably didn't have anything worth creating the page for anyway.
Plenty of ecommerce sites ranks with very little text on their pages. What you are saying is just wrong.
I agree that paying for SEO is probably pointless; unless you're just paying for some Google ads yourself.
But the problem with your product isn't SEO, it's that anyone who knows what SES is, also knows how to use it for the thing you're selling, without paying an additional fee.
It started off strong, nicely illustrating the background leading to this mess, but then the conclusion falters, in particular the accusation of: "Don’t the makers of Search Engines know this? Of course they do. It’s just not in their interest to bring clarity." without any suggestions on what they could be doing to achieve that clarity.
To me, it sadly seems like a losing war between the SEO-spammers and the search engine developers. There's no law of nature making it possible to separate fake content from true content. If The spam is good enough, I'm not even sure a human can do it.
Maybe the concept of trust-less content distribution will have to come to an end at some point and we will start ranking searches based on more or less manually maintained trust graphs?
No, it's not. Good spam looks like real content, but isn't accurate. It's an article about the most eco friendly kitchen appliance that reads just fine, but littered with factual inaccuracies and exists solely to give the impression that somebody has taken the time to write an actual article on the topic. It's often below GPT2 level, and I'm sure we'll have great fun with autogenerated SEO content in the future.
Yes, more or less. But with the difference that it doesn't even attempt at being true.
We've been spoiled by the internet of old, where geeky types wrote blogs and created web sites sharing their intricate knowledge of their favourite topic. Of course there's a fair share of conspiracy theorists and incorrect ideas, but it was generally in good faith and somewhat easy to filter.
Now you won't find those anymore, instead we get SEO-optimising sites with text sourced via Fiverr resembling meaningful content but without any ambitions whatsoever of correctness nor meaningfulness. Best case, it just ends up in frustration as you realise that it's just filler, worse case, it actually misleads you with some made-up fact that you couldn't see any reason to lie about.
And yet, this site had two pages made — I suspect — primarily for SEO purposes: Mailchimp Alternative and Sendgrid Alternative.
Organic search is the highest or second-highest source of traffic for every startup I know. Yes there are too many SEO charlatans, but to ignore such a large traffic source is not smart.
> And yet, this site had two pages made — I suspect — primarily for SEO purposes: Mailchimp Alternative and Sendgrid Alternative.
The author opens with exactly that gripe:
> I have a product that can be explained in one or two sentences. It is fairly well documented. Yet i’m being asked to write 4,000 word articles describing and comparing my product with the competition. Why? Because SEO.
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.
We're bombarding ourselves with walls of human-unreadable English that we're supposed to ignore. It's like something from a stupid old sci-fi story.
Site searching Reddit can at least give some ideas for different words to try. Most of my problems finding things on Google stem from its declining ability to make a reasonable guess based on what I put in. It's not enough to have a word anymore. You have to know the right keyphrase or it shows a whole different world of results.
It used to show its best guess, then branch off from it with less specificity and more variety and, in general, a result reflecting what I meant within a few pages. Now Google is so desperate to get it right on result #1 that it never admits failure no matter how many pages you go.
There’s a reason that works (sorta, mostly, and when it does).
The infrastructure of web navigation and search is foundationally built on textual, first party published content that enjoys some presumptions of good faith authorship: that it was written to be read, by a reader, and meant to be informative, persuasive/argumentative, or recreational/entertaining.
Think: journal articles, Usenet debates, faq compilations, RFCs, product spec sheets, forum postings, IRC logs, ur-blogs, even the original social media content types (tweets, wall posts, comments).
The cycles and epicycles of architecting atop this “real” content gives us mechanisms that reward and incentivize content produced neither for the ends of the writer writing nor any reader reading, but rather in service of manipulating search and driving ux patterns of various darkness.
All the good stuff on the internet is reborn in a spasm of returning to people creating content they care about for other people who care. Then eventually with success it gets polluted into shit with bots, seo, mass media and agencies, influencers, etc.
One silly rubric I use is: could this page / app / venue have been there in 1999? If so it’s probably worth reading. If not, who knows.
(Of course there are cesspools that qualify too, like the chan world and certain subreddits, but there were cesspools in the early days of the web as well.)
When I search for free software I usually put forum in the search terms as it helps filter out the malicious sites and the software where they clearly ripped off the free software but ask for money to unlock the pro version. Plus I get to read why people recommend the software.
yes, at the beginning Google got a huge market share because they were able to return the better result and don't return spammy and unrelated results.
but they are not doing that anymore, it is really hard to find a not spammy (what you described) result on Google these days.
and other search engines are only copying the Google algorithm we need to get back to judging a web page by its content, AI should be able to help now or soon.
Why doesn't Google disrupt itself -- the most concise, cleanest pages that focus on what the user is actually looking for (recipe, not a narrative) should be #1. It's even in Google's interest!
I think their market share encourages them to do nothing. You actually have to offer a good product to grow market share, then slowly run it, then users switch to a new product which originally starts good, and the cycle repeats.
Nobody would start using Google Search in its current format.
It has, and that's mentioned in the article. If you want to be #1 on the search page, buy an ad, because that will always appear above every "organic" search result.
Ads are Google's bread and butter, and has been for the entirety of its existence as a public company.
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 live murdering trees.
One thing about cookbooks is that the massive barrier to actually publishing and distributing is a natural filter for credibility; most cookbooks have tried-and-true recipes and are either authentic or a genuinely good adaptation by a skilled chef author.
The internet is full of garbage recipes that either just don't work, inauthentic, and uncreative, all at the same time.
As far as murdering trees go -- let's not forget that libraries and e-books exist.
In my experience, ebook cookbooks get annoying when you have dirty fingers and the screen goes dark because you forgot to switch it back to always on. And there's a great tendency that the recipe is always fucking formatted so you have to scroll more or "turn the page". Cookbooks, at least the ones I own, are all formatted so you never have to turn the page. Seems silly, but that's important.
Yeah library, to check if you want to buy it or just write down a handful of recipes.
The flip side of this is that the cookbooks rarely have super niche recipes. Even some of the highest rated "authentic" cookbooks have the flavor level tuned way down to be more "suitable for American tastes".
The best cooking tutorials are barely translated Youtube videos. Or even better, recipes going through Google Translate.
(Or get a multi-lingual friend... :) )
Cook's Illustrated also does some 100% legit international recipes, they are smart enough to A/B test against the country of origin and try to match up the flavor profile with ingredients that are available in America, which can be more work than just directly translating to "closest cultivar of a plant".
I've also enjoyed the organic explosion of low carb cooking that has happened online. I have been witness to the community growing from its very beginnings less than a decade ago when it was just some people trying to make weight loss taste good, to professional level chefs jumping in with their recipes. It is now possible to source low-carb recipes online that can go toe to toe with any other genre of food (e.g. https://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/chocolate-hazelnut-sandwic...).
Of course there is also an explosion of low-carb blog spam. Ugh. I do sometimes miss when everyone in the community was there because they loved just trying new things out and sharing their experiences. The same SEO problems exist...
> The best cooking tutorials are barely translated Youtube videos.
Yeah I love those. The "random grandma with a gopro" tutorials always work, modulo language barrier. The video editing is crap and you sometimes have to keep fast forwarding while stuff is cooking but the recipes are good.
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. Same goes for Japanese, Thai and German. But I also look for keywords about their grandmother. Best way to know the authentic level of a cookbook in English is how much they admit they're stealing from their grandma. The higher, the better. Especially if they talk about struggling to get the right ingredients.
Honestly, I miss absolutely nothing from the internet when it comes to cooking. But I also wanted to be a chef. So I studied how to properly cook long ago and I cook almost every day... so I'll admit in already an outlier. Still, the way the internet treats cooking is retarded. It doesn't surprise me that people don't like to cook if they grew up with the internet as a learning resource. All these people overcomplicate easy recipes and substitute anything because it makes them feel like pretty snowflakes.
Cultural is just one dimension. I've had to change my diet drastically recently for health reasons and the niche I fall into (no starch, no dairy, very low sugar others known as no dairy keto) is barely catered for, even on the Internet.
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?""
is how much they admit they're stealing from their grandma.
Does that still work? Most people's grandmas today where very much alive and cooking in both the 70s, 80s and even 90s and thus as steeped as anybody in all the international influences and 'foreign' ingredients that those decades brought.
the way the internet treats cooking is retarded.
And here you and I disagree. I like the way that 'modern' cooking is willing to revisit well established and 'sacred' truths about food and put them to the test. Perhaps a housewife in the 1920s isn't the authoritative source on the best way to prepare a dish, and even if she is there is no way to know without someone actually testing that hypothesis. Sites like Serious Eats and all the sites they begat bring both rigor and the joy of experimentation back into cooking. I mean why not substitute one thing for another just to see what happens or apply the 'wrong' technique to a standard dish? Many a dish that is considered a 'classic' today no doubt got their start that way.
>> "I've also enjoyed the organic explosion of low carb cooking that has happened online. I have been witness to the community growing from its very beginnings less than a decade ago when it was just some people trying to make weight loss taste good"
This is way older than a decade. I knew people getting into it and sharing recipes on Usenet. The current boom is new, but online low carb communities are ancient in internet terms.
It wasn't very palatable back then, but people sure did try.
I don't know about that - for every one 'Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat' there's 99 'middle aged white persons easy diet fad of the year 5 minute meals'. Published cook books dont really seem better to me.
There seems to be two distinct 'genres' of cookbooks. One written by people who have studied cooking, and one written by people that have studied marketing.
My strategy is to bookmark the sites of the people who have good published cookbooks. You have a much better chance of getting good recipes from someone who knows what they are doing, as you said, but you also get the additional convenience and variation from being able to search online.
In my experience, these sites tend to be less spammy too, but there's certainly variation there too.
We started using an app called Paprika that parses the page and extracts the recipe.
Although, I will admit, my youngest daughter and I get a kick out of the stories. We even try to predict which theme the writer will go with. Some are like Christmas Hallmark movies. lol.
It gets better. Or, well, worse. Last time I ran into one of those, I wanted to make curry. After the 2000 words gushing about how it was the most delicious thing ever and how they "couldn't even", the recipe was to pour a jar of premade curry over rice.
The reality is these stupid recipe websites are just reproductions of other people's recipes anyway. Look for an "adapted from" credit - it will only have minute changes. Maybe they halve the cream somewhere "because it's too rich for their family" or something.
> 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.
And here I just thought people were basically self-absorbed wankers.
My most recent impression:
"I first learned about this recipe from my dog's aunt who was a lenape indian during the pre-cambrian era and she something something memories of childhood blah blah dinosaur steaks yap yap tedious digression on gritty herbs fluff fluff and so I was talking to my local grocer who put me onto an organic vegan gluten free biomagnetic interspordidial hyperflorpic gmo-free meg-free bpa-free taste-free free-free that reminded me of the time that..."
People are lazy and mostly do not want to write a 1000 words essay around the recipe they want to share.
It takes a very unique kind of person to write those things. And those are the ones Google is giving all the voice, while taking it away from normal people.
Recipes are really bad on Google. There are also some odd aggregator sites I guess? Or just seem to copy from other places. Idk what their story is but they have tons of low effort recipes
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 the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
So it's been a tradition in the recipe space for decades to include lots of descriptive "filler" text when you're writing your recipe book/blog. That filler text is copyrightable, which gives you legal recourse against people who might try to wholesale copy your work.
Of course, in the modern world, it's definitely true that they can also help with SEO. And honestly I wouldn't completely discount the idea of people actually reading them -- I know my wife has gone through phases where she has a couple different blogs bookmarked and will read through them to get ideas, but also because she liked the writing of the author.
Ya, I believe the OP was talking about the five pages of story-telling before the recipe that requires you to annoyingly scroll until you find the recipe ingredient list. I came here for a cookie recipe, not a story about how you discovered you liked oatmeal cookies when you were 12, but then became a raisin-cookie fanatic, before moving back to chocolate chips, when you suddenly remembered your Grandma baked you peanut butter cookies as a kid. /sic
Oh, you forgot all their allergies. Every cook on the internet has an allergy to everything but the substitute. "That's when I found out I'm allergic to flour, eggs, milk, butter, salt, chocolate, meat and fruit. Here's my healthy recipe for chocolate chip cookies made from tofu, himalayan sand, gerbil presents and wheatgrass." No! First, it's not a chocolate chip cookie then! It's an unholy abomination of sadness. Wheatgrass is just lawn clippings! Something is wrong with you!
Look, I have the very sad allergy to hazelnuts... I love hazelnuts... but they don't love me. Also soy. Soy is borderline deadly to me even in small amounts. So, I can't have asian food without cooking it myself. Fish sauce sans soy fermentation is my substitute. I do get the allergy issue and being left out in many foods. But I find it so damn hard to believe that all these people are allergic to everything but these "healthy alternatives" that end up being nutritionally empty. Then they wonder why they're suddenly anemic. Then they don't get enough sun because their skin "suddenly" became sensitive. Then they have depression issues. Then they can't shit straight. Then they start cutting back on other foods. Then they have to live on horse pills.
Sorry, rant. Got angry.
Fun argument to have with the next anti-vaxxer you meet. If they argue about mercury or lead being in vaccines, agree with them. Just flat out agree with how terrible it is. Then ask if they like Himalayan sea salt. There's like a 99.9% chance they love it, along with essential oils. "You do know there are more trace amounts of mercury and lead in Himalayan sea salt than in vaccines?" You will then agree with me that mental gymnastics needs to be in the next Olympics. It's amazing how they'll talk around it. Make some popcorn, open a beer and watch the show.
oh please. the text is not there for copyright reasons. it’s there to satisfy the google bot so the article ranks higher. you’re going completely off base by thinking this is a copyright thing. nobody is thinking that far.
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.
Many essays-before-recipes summarize the experimentation process, what worked and what didn't, why an unconventional ingredient is used, why no stock is used when traditional recipes call for it. Without the context, many recipes just seem wrong and some real gems would be passed over
When those are the case, I really like it. Things like The Food Lab are joys to read, because they go into the detail of why ingredients are present and what variations/substitutions preserve the flavor of the dish. But those are few and far between. Most of the time, the filler consists of stories and anecdotes about the childhood memories that the recipe invokes, followed by the exact same recipe as is on a dozen other sites.
What I don't understand is why Google doesn't hell ban these pages. It seems trivial, at least as a human, to detect them. You don't even need to do this for all of them. Just banning a few hundred will deter everyone else.
Google makes more money from you flailing around and fruitlessly searching over and over than giving you the right answer the first time.
That will work right up until the time somebody comes along and build a search engine (or other app) that will just "give you the right answer the first time."
For all their size and power, there's really nothing - in principle - stopping somebody from coming along and doing to Google, what Google did to Altavista. Yes it would be hard to execute, which may be why it hasn't happened... yet.
To be honest, I just tend to use one recipe site now - BBC Good Food. I ended up subscribing to the magazine since I was getting so many recipes from there. The user ratings on the recipes don't seemed to be gamed either - since there is no incentive to do so.
This starts happening the instant a medium becomes a potential source of revenue. Look at most average TV: endless repetitive nonsense plots, drama, and other filler to serve as a medium for ads.
You could always, stay with me here, pay for content. Cooks Illustrated (no affiliation) is an awesome resource for those interested in recipes that are proven without the garbage.
Ya, but how do you deal with it? You're just fighting a tug of war. Unless we go hack to curated content or paid, it is always going to be algorithm against SEO in an infinite race.
On the other hand, if you Google "How to do X" you will often find a youtube video in the top results. But it will skip the intro and jump right to the important part.
Sure there is a lot of garbage out there (e.g. everyone uploading 10 minute videos to hit the YouTube optimzation algorithm) but it does seem like Google does try to cut through some of the SEO garbage to get you the useful info faster.
The fact you have to skip the intro to YouTube videos speaks to Google's algorithms. Even if people don't have ten minutes to say about a particular topic, they'll upload it.
When people find out the metrics to getting more views, they become meaningless.
Google any recipe, and there are at least 5 paragraphs
I just Googled Peking duck to try something at random. Of the links on the front page, one was to wikipedia, one was to an article about Peking duck, and the rest where recipe sites (BBC Food, Allrecipes, Serious Eats etc.) or serious looking/sounding food blogs that had the recipe front and center. I don't know if it's a geographic thing (I'm in Europe) or if Google has learnt my preferences, but finding 5 reasonable sounding recipes for Peking duck with Google was trivial.
Edit: Played around some more and spotted an interesting pattern. If a look up typical US dishes, like Key lime pie or BBQ brisket, then I got results more like the ones you describe. But looking up more 'international' dishes like Peking duck or coq au vin then the results where almost all good quality recipes.
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.
I was “on the internet” before Google and a little before the web became popular when all you had was Gopher, Usenet, and Veronica. The internet was much less useful then.
On top of that, without the web becoming popular, there wouldn’t have been the investment in fast home internet or fast cellular data.
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 internet much more interesting back then.
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 think I first had high speed internet around 2002 via FreeDSL and when that went kaput, DirecTV owned a company called Telestream that offered DSL service.
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.
Just start using curated link sites instead of google. Make your own curated link site about something you know and care about. Nobody is making you google anything.
Sadly, this was LookSmart back in 1998. It was an in-house edited directory, but I told the CEO we should build a pagerank that diffuses to unlisted sites as well.
A pretty good web directory at the time was cheap, about $12 million a year for editors, but Google had 10+ years where it did better with unsupervised algorithms, so nobody spent any time on integrating human curators.
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 all the fluff articles trying to sell me shit. The internet, as free as it is, has been overflowed with commercial activity. Which pretty closely reflects the real world, but damn that's a shame.
My favorite parts of the internet have no relation to ads or commerce at all.... including wikipedia. When you’re looking for information commerce is a massive distraction.
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.
It's important enough, and currently wastes enough of my time (read: SEO crap, Medium and Reddit are top results for... everything) that I'd happily pay for a good search engine!
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 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.
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.
What you're missing is the fact that larch search engine companies have no profit motive to do this. They get the vast amount of their money from commercial ad sales -- ads for commercial results. Why would they purposefully castrate their highest paying customers?
And if you think the answer is to create and host a new, independent engine, you will be hard pressed to develop a good one, and to find the money to keep it running.
One can't really build a robust and comprehensive (server-side) search engine on top of Google's search API. In other words, Google Inc isn't going to provide an API so powerful that one can build an "alternative to Google" with it.
On the other hand, if you're talking about a "client-side" filter instead of a new search engine, (e.g. a client-side webscraper that flips through the Google results pages), you'd run into multiple problems. E.g. random CAPTCHAS screwing up the automation script, and the difficulty of creating a "rules engine" (e.g. machine learning) on your local computer that recognizes blog articles with a commercial slant.
>Wikipedia is basically an information search engine without commerce or social media.
The problem is that your results page is the article itself, and you need to scroll to the bottom to get to an external site.
>It's theoretically possible to change the UI or analyze Wikipedia to make a pretty solid search engine powered by millions of person-years of curation.
>user smt88 offered a fabulous idea :
>Wikipedia is basically an information search engine without commerce or social media. The problem is that your results page is the article itself, and you need to scroll to the bottom to get to an external site.
Using wikipedia as a data source for a "search engine" does not fulfill gp's (jacquesm) request of "One nice solution would be a search engine that throws out anything related to commerce or linking to commerce."
- one of the external links points to IMDB.com -- a commercial website owned by Amazon.
- another link points to Punxsatawney Groundhog Club website that's advertising a $30 beer tasting event (Hogtoberfest).
- another link points to a souvenir shop
To continue the example of commercial links, a lot of math articles on wikipedia point to MathWorld which has advertising for the commercial Wolfram Mathematica software package.
IMO, I don't believe a search engine based on wikipedia's list of external sites (even with ignoring the commercial links) is going to be useful for the mainstream audience. I probably do 50+ searches on google every single day and maybe 1% might be answerable from a "wikipedia search". For example, I needed a DIY answer to disassemble a Moen faucet and Wikipedia has zero articles with those instructions. In contrast, the Google (and Youtube) search results has the information I was looking for even though it has the unwanted ads and "content marketing" blogs from plumbing brands.
This is what happens when you don’t give users control over how search works. The weighting is blatantly user hostile by default because it’s so directed towards people who pay for your eyes. I would pay a massive amount of money for a search engine with a “no commercial results” switch.
Of course paid search introduces class issues. I think we should view search like a public utility because it’s absolutely necessary for surviving the world.
The original designers of the web envisioned a world where every user could have their own chosen "agent" to navigate the web for them. This is where the User-Agent HTTP header comes from. There would be search agents, data mining agents, and interactive browsing agents.
We missed out on like 90% of what the information revolution was supposed to bring to users, and instead the data giants have captured all the value.
We expect everything on the web, including our user agent, to be free as in no cost. The only way to pay for the development cost is to sell to third parties aka advertisers. If people actually paid money to develop more advanced user agents there would be a market for them.
Why do people prefer free over paid? I think people underestimate the influence of advertisers and underestimate the value of their own time spent researching and dealing with crappy products. It’s almost like a psychological bias.
I like the idea of a better user agent but would I pay for one? Judging by my refusal to pay for quality journalism I’m guessing it’d be a hard sell. That’s another thing I should be willing to pay for but don’t for some weird reason.
If you use a Mac, DevonThink and its associated products are great examples of paid user agents that seek out and organize information for you. Their free trials are fairly generous.
The closest I’ve ever found is https://www.zootsoftware.com/ - famously championed by James Fallows of The Atlantic. I don’t believe its web crawling tools are as sophisticated as Devon Technologies’, but it can do a lot and has a lot of power tools to process what it ingests. I haven’t used it since 2010, so my information may be out of date.
The guy who posted the story of splicing a 500kW cable wasn't looking for money. He wanted to amuse people and thanks to him we got amused endlessly. The costs of putting things online are $5 per month at Digital Ocean.
> The costs of putting things online are $5 per month at Digital Ocean.
Plus the knowledge you can, and non-trivial technical expertise like: registering a domain, DNS configuration, setting up web software (even if "one click"), and maintaining it over time.
Web browsers used to cost money. I vaguely remember getting a boxed copy of IE from an MS rep that came to my school as a kid. ISPs started bundling Netscape if I remember right, then MS started giving IE away for free with the OS. In the end we got Firefox, so I'm glad for that, but we can blame the browser wars in part for the unwillingness to pay for agent software.
> We expect everything on the web, including our user agent, to be free as in no cost.
I don't think this was an accident. Back in the 90's I paid for Netscape Navigator and for email. People used to even pay money to indexed by search engines (like paying to be in the Yellow Pages). Companies started "giving these things away" in a calculated move that I guess the nascent web population was just not cynical enough to reject.
> I would pay a massive amount of money for a search engine with a “no commercial results” switch.
Yeah but what does that even mean. How do you define commercial? Who is going to go through all of the pages and categorizing them into commercial and non-commercial? And how do you keep shills and “influencers” from littering your results with seemingly innocent but actually commercial content?
Here's an idea : do the 0.1 version by crawling and indexing the web in a perfectly standard way, apply the usual, run-of-the-mill search algorithms, then diff it against the Bing/Google/etc first results which will be biased towards commercial stuff. The higher a page is among their results, the higher the probability that it's commercial in some sense.
Agreed that it’s semantically tricky but if you give me a bag of heuristics to work with it’d be worlds better than what we have now.
Keep in mind there is incentive to have a commercial meta tag so that when I’m actually looking for a good or service I’d be able to easily find it (or see the lack of it). The other 99% of the time ads and products are just an annoying distraction and a waste of money to serve.
TBH google kind of sucks for looking for stuff, amazon + reddit recommendations are my main source of surfacing things I want to buy.
No commerce -> no jobs -> unrest -> violence and wars (citation: centuries of human history).
Maybe, commerce is the nail which constrains humanity both in a good and a bad sense - by providing a peaceful alternative to violent lifestyles and by creating a consumerist culture?
No, commerce doesn't have to be a nail. It's just restricting the utility of the internet at this point, which is limiting commerce. The internet used to be an antidote to the shopping mall, but now it has become one.
When there's a trade that makes both sides better off that increases the happiness in the world. It's a Pareto improvement.
When marketing convinces someone to buy something that ends up being a bad trade (i.e. the person that buys it is not made better off) then there is no such improvement and the world is not made better off.
This hints at a common sentiment I see on HN. The idea that everything you and I buy and do is very considered and intelligent. But the great unwashed masses don't put such thought into their purchases, and are being "duped" by evil conspiratorial marketing. If only everybody else was as smart as us, right?
Have you considered that maybe the majority of successful companies in the world are fulfilling customer wants and needs and thus making what you call Pareto improvements? And maybe it's just that the other "dumb people" derive joy from different stuff?
The market sorts these things out. It is mostly efficient. Not perfectly. But mostly. A company that is providing net-negative value to the world is a short-lived company.
It needs some citations if it were an academic reference perhaps. As a response to a comment that is speculating without evidence on the similarity between on our culture and a nailed from, it seems sufficient.
The likelihood for an individual to die by violence has been much greater for most of human history and prosperity and peace typically go hand in hand. I could provide references for these claims, but I think they are well known and references for the counter claim haven't been provided.
It’s just totally ascientific thinking. You’re connecting things with no evidence of connection.
And evidence aside, your analysis is so coarse it’s basically impossible it could be true. Nothing that coarse is true.
And one last point: I have no doubt your head is filled with examples from history that back up your claim. What you almost certainly don’t have is evidence that there isn’t an equal raft of examples that contradict it.
Don't forget the "showing results for Y, click here to search for X" when X is what you actually wanted to search for.
It's ironic that, in trying to make search "human friendly", Google has also succeeded in giving it all the negative traits of a human --- the "human" that is more like a commissioned salesperson.
I know the argument is that humans frequently make mistakes so "we should just show them what we think they wanted", but that's just opening the door for manipulation.
Search was much better when it was closer to a "grep the Internet". IMHO machines should remain "dumb" (for lack of a better adjective) and leave the important decisions to the users, keeping the latter in control.
Grep the internet and sort by pagerank was great. Then everyone removed links that went offsite. Then link farms. The fake blogs and influencers are the evolution of link farms. Unfortunately sellers will game the system. How do we create a way for buyers to game it?
Curation-as-a-service could even become a viable market. It's arguably already happening to a certain extent through various platforms, creators, and aggregators; but it's not really split off as its own service yet.
Pagerank was great when it was new because it had never been used before. Once Google got popular enough to be worth gaming, it became an example of Goodhart's Law.
I've been thinking about a distributed search where each participant in the network crawls and answers queries related to a part of the web. Make search more like bittorrent. Is there such a project?
I remember the days of hiding text in the same color font as the background so that grepping would make your page the top result. So I’m not sure those days were better.
The dumber search is, the easier it is for the bad actors to game it and drown out the legit sources.
Maybe page rank (mentioned in a sibling response) helped address this, but then it’s really no longer just a dumb grep.
I remember the days of hiding text in the same color font as the background so that grepping would make your page the top result.
A simple "-site:somesite.com" removes those, or just scroll past them. Keyword spam is easy to ignore because the title of the page, the domain, or the path often has nothing to do with what you're searching for, and the preview text is nonsensical.
The dumber search is, the easier it is for the bad actors to game it and drown out the legit sources.
The dumber search is, the easier it is for users to ignore the crap and find what they're looking for, even if it's not the first result. The "smart" omission of results has the effect of removing a lot of useful ones too. Google's claims that they have X number of results for a search is essentially meaningless if you can't actually see them all.
I find some of my top 'competitor' blogs are worse quality, but somehow perform better due to having tons of links/content.
Something like 'Save Money on Food', I am positive I am best-in-class, but I am only front page google, on occasion. Without a doubt, I should be the number 1 result, and instead, well SEO'd mom-science wins.
Btw, does this mean google should be looking for crappy code/design=genuine website?
The catch of course is that anything search engines start looking for, SEO will start optimizing for. If crappy code == genuine website, then get ready for a shitstorm of shitty looking SEO-enhanced pages.
Come to think of it, that might be kind of funny for a day or two.
For many topics I now go straight to search Reddit. It avoids all those articles that SEO the shit out of a topic where I was just looking for a two sentence answer.
Edit: I'm often surprised how search engines fail to exclude obvious SEO farms. Especially looking at articles about stock, you frequently just find a ocean of what send to be clearly autogenerated articles.
Any time I want to search reddit, I use Google and put “reddit” at the end of the query (I know about the site: query, but there’s really no point to type the 5 extra characters).
Same tactic to find genuine content, but I find Google’s results to be better than Reddit’s own search.
Though I'm no expert at this but these days negative SEO has also become a part of the search engine optimization. What this means is that some competitor can create thousands of bad links to your site causing your site to incur a penalty in search ranking.
Google has created a disavow tool for this but for someone who runs a blog and not super tech savvy may not know about it and regardless it is still a burden for anyone to keep up with all this.
Again, I'm not an expert at this and I'm doubtful that a billion dollar search engine can be tricked by such shenanigans but it may be something worth looking into. if your site traffic drops
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 find anything remotely relevant either on the product page or in the PDF owner's manual.
It's a shame what these tools have become when they could be so much more.
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.
If you put in an exact model then I suspect the results will be very different.
The other infuriating thing that's related is if you're trying to find a schematic or service manual, Google thinks you're just looking for the (often useless) user manual. Searching for the user manual does not make it think you're looking for the service manual... it's absolutely idiotic, because who would search for "service manual" but actually want a user manual? Beyond some weird conspiracy theory involving anti-right-to-repair, I can't explain why.
I’ve tried switching over to DuckDuckGo.com a bunch of times over the years, but this time the move has stuck.
I think one of the reasons is that I do not get a bunch of the ‘smart’ stuff that Google tries to do for me. In a way it’s like using a search engine from 10 years ago ... and it’s better.
There are things that I do miss — quick cards for things like currency conversion, flight details, that sort of thing - but the mighty Duck is getting better at those, and if I need to reach in to Google I can always just !g it.
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.
In my recent experience, the only thing which causes me to tag a !g onto my duckduckgo searches is a need for recent results (as in, the last couple of hours -- for the results of a sports match for example).
Anything else seems to be served by the other providers just as well/poorly, and occasionally better.
Pretty much captures it. That was the founding principle of Blekko which was that humans could curate a core set of 'good' websites for a topic and all the crap would not have a foot hold to show up on the page.
So to share some of the challenges with that (if anyone out there wants to try again) they are as follows:
* 'Search' means different things to different people, and we've been trained that a 'search engine' finds anything on the web (for the most part). The product Blekko built could more accurately be called a 'reference' engine which was used successfully by people trying to find facts or data and were not generally trying to find things to buy.
* Have your own advertising system, all in house, where you don't have to "revenue share" with anyone if you don't want to. At its peak Blekko was serving over 10M queries per day which, if we had owned all the advertising revenue on those searches would have kept us going and growing. That said, building an advertising system is both difficult and fraught with patent risk / bad-actor risk.
* Don't let anonymous users use the service. This is perhaps the hardest thing, most people won't give up an email address for even the most useful of services, however since you're spending money serving up search queries you don't want to waste that money serving up queries to bots and other bad actors. At any given time when I went through the logs there were between 5% up to nearly 18% of the queries were 'suspicious' or likely bots. That is 18% of your capacity you can't give to "real" humans if you can't control that traffic.
* Build a relevancy ranking system rather than a popularity ranking system. Search results have two metrics of interest, precision and recall. For a reference engine you want to focus on precision over recall. And while existing search engines use the "virtuous cycle" of search & click to track popularity (which can be an indicator of precision but is better at indicating click-baityness) build your ranking engine using NLP based evaluations.
* Your document index size should target 5 billion documents with a goal of 10 billion documents. Scale your cluster and algorithms to process a query to that index in 100mS or less.
Do that and win :-) Or find the next barrier to creating a useful way to search the web for information.
I wonder if there's a ripe market for a search engine that specializes on "clean" search results. Google grew into its current titan status by, in part, providing the results with higher relevancy and accuracy than the competition, and avoiding the primitive SEO cheats of those days (like spamming the page with irrelevant keywords to capture traffic). Maybe that's the time for an engine that could avoid modern, more sophisticated SEO cheats.
And it has resulted in communities like the ones you mention moving to aggregators like Reddit, Facebook, or even HN. And I’m ok with that - it’s like how communities IRL gather in churches, bars, or other areas.
I've noticed the same with song lyrics when I try to find a particular song I've heard somewhere. Hundreds of results of the same handful of "top" pop music industry artists but anything alternative is hard to find, even if the search query very clearly is not a good match for those popular results. I know the stuff I'm look for is out there, but it just won't show up.
The mere existence of a blogpost by a guy complaining that it's a hassle to shill his thing that generates spam on the Internet on the Internet makes the point better than anything written in it - it's almost the pure essence of SEO garbage itself. Whether the irony is unintended or it's deliberate marketing, it's a perfect embodiment.
I'm always at aw at how people can psychologically say SEO is easy.
Getting to the top of many SERPs can mean millions of dollars in monthly revenue.
If it's so easy, and the author is so smart about it, why doesn't he just take it?
It's like people who say 'well of course CRO is easy, you just make it easy for people to check out and check the stats and iterate'.
Overly arrogant engineers many times think everyone else is stupid for not being an engineer, but forget that more than just engineers are needed. I'm guessing that is how you end up with Google +.
It reminds me of myself and my nerdy friends in high school.
We would say 'being a football player is so easy you just run and grunt, not like us who love math... math is for those who are REALLY smart'.
It took me a long time before I could look back at that attitude and cringe at the arrogance and lack of understanding of the complexities of the world.
The fact that this article is getting upvoted while my comment is getting downvoted is telling.
>If it's so easy, and the author is so smart about it, why doesn't he just take it?
The title suggests one possible answer to that question - the author has moral qualms about turning the Internet into a landfill. (Then again, given that this article is itself almost certainly supposed to double as shitty SEO marketing / clickbait, I have my doubts.)
But it's not exactly that. Volume doesn't win in SEO. That's like talking about lines of code and whoever writes more can win as a programmer. It's... an oversimplification that doesn't quite fit.
Are incentives misaligned? Sure. But saying it is easy, while not succeeding at it, just feels a bit... arrogant. No other word for it.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I dislike how sausage is made. You can talk all you like about how bad the mafia is. Doesn't mean being a top mobster is easy. Are they intellectually smart like a brain surgeon? No. But they are smart in ways that brain surgeons aren't. Considering them stupid would be a grave mistake. It also would be arrogant, it takes a certain type of person to see someone else's job and say 'that's easy' when they never practice that job ever, let alone succeeded at it.
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." Sun Tzu.
It would be awesome if Google had up/downvote buttons like Reddit and use them to eliminate all the fluff in search results, even if on a targeted community basis. For example if a recipe has no pictures, too many ads, not clear instructions, or no equivalent volume measurements (e.g. "4 grams sugar (about 1 tsp)") I'm likely to downvote it, and those properties can be learned from multiple downvotes.
Its a really nice idea, but I wonder if it would work in practice:
1. Would a significant amount of real humans who actually cared about the content cast a vote (up or down)?
2. Would it be even remotely possible to protect against fraudulent voting at Google scale? (remember they can't even prevent fake business listings on Google Maps, which is at least theoretically closer to verifiable from, for example, business records)
I don't think it will work in practice. Reddit and other voting platforms require a login to prevent spam voting and do people want Google to know which articles you like and don't? Reddit works because anonymity which Google will not provide.
But Reddit, along with most major sites now, is also rife with the same marketing manipulators and "influencers" the article is commenting on. Digg tried something similar before Reddit and was pretty much ruined by biased organized vote manipulation (brigading). Not that I agree with Google's "trust us plebes we know better than you" model of secrecy either. The SEO problem is the prime example of why this doesn't work also. Search engines have become a vital resource for the modern internet. We need an open, publicly funded non-profit search engine.
1. If the upvote button somehow stuck on later after navigating to the site, I probably would. I realize this would probably make Chrome even more tied to Google in a potentially slightly evil way though, but it might improve search quality drastically
2. I think Google could do it. They're pretty damn good at detecting bots on Google.com just by analyzing whether your behavior looks human or not, and they also have logic in place to detect fraudulent ad clicks. I think they could do a much better job with fake business listing detection but it's probably just not their focus. Search, on the other hand, is their lifeblood.
But then a lucrative business of selling upvotes would be created for people willing to pay (usually businesses) to promote their content. And that's SEO all over again.
I initially believed the "O" in SEO was misleading, as this kind of promotion is not optimisation (at least not for everybody), It turns out it's another letter that's misleading: "S" should be for Sales, not Search.
I would love for that to work but I'm skeptical that there would be a lot of signal in that sea of noise. We're talking about well over a billion monthly active users; for every HNizen annoyed with the state of the modern web, there are thousands of ordinary people that probably don't mind J. Peterman-esque recipes laden with product placement and somehow incorporating a listicle - as long as they get their recipe.
And once you open the floodgates of allowing user feedback to influence search results, the arms race begins, with every major news site checking the referrer for Google and begging you via popover to upvote their search result, and armadas of malware-controlled botnets being launched to generate authentic-looking feedback, and so on.
* Make your upvotes only influence your own search results, and other users like you (similar search history, similar geography, similar past upvote pattern). The fraudster upvoters would just improve SEO for their own fraudster circle. They would see their fraud-upvoted site as #1 within their own circle but it wouldn't change the ranking for me. The programmer circle gets programmer-vetted results on technical help. You know they are a programmer from their search history.
* Sites begging to upvote get a massive SEO hit of -10000 downvotes. Google's NLP should be good enough for this already.
What you are describing is a literal filter bubble, where very soon your only exposure to content will be seeing content you are already liking, ideas you are already adhering to, people you are already looking to.
A bubble where ideas and people that you and people like yourself don't like automagically get hidden from you so that you never get exposed to them. A nightmare.
I think this can be done a little more intelligently. Up/downvotes should be based on the structure of the site and more so than the meaning of the content.
An downvote should not mean "I disagree with this author" but rather "this site was useless spam" or "I derived no information from this site because it threw 5 popups in my face". Or if I downvote a bunch of paywall sites it should stop showing me paywall sites.
It's still relative. I hate paywalls, some people may prefer to just pay. I hate popups with a passion, so much that I will leave the site, but Average Joe probably just clicks them away.
That's because those rating systems naively apply the ratings across the entire population. The average of the star ratings should be weighted by the normalized dot product of each rater's style and your rating style, or the similarity between each rater and you. A 0-star rating from someone whose preferences are orthogonal to you should not influence the average rating you see.
I fear that would be worse as it would just get super-SEOd with paid upvotes.
This would be good if you could filter using only votes from people you know. Then you could mix in maintained lists like “all active HN users” from various communities.
then SEO would turn towards having an army of bots upvoting your product and downvoting the competitor. And if you have something in between to detect bots, users wouldn't want to use it (who would solve a captcha to help optimize search results?) and SEO would find ways around it
I know this is true, but my use of tabs means I've opted out of the system.
I open tabs for the top results and just close them when done. Often, I have to re-search with added "verbatim" filter or quotation marks because Google seems to ignore my most important keyword 90% of the time.
I just wish search engines would let me block sites. There are maybe a dozen SEO land grabs in my domain that are trashing my search results and provide no value.
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.
I use a user script called Google Hit Hider by Domain that adds this functionality to pretty much every major search engine. Can't imagine searching without it these days.
Thanks for the feedback! I see a few interesting results on the page that seem relevant to the query (like the jsreport.io link). What did you hope to see that you didn't?
Question, and seo is not my field of expertise at all.
Doesn't it seem odd that an seo consultant says to pay for search result ads?
In my mind, the point of seo is not to pay "per click". You may pay for a great article to be written, and pay for it to be on a site, which is fair to me. But I then expect it to be noticed because of it's own merits, quality of writing and quality of "publisher". If you also have to pay for an ad for it, why bother with the publisher or even "seo quality" writing? Just write quality while ignoring seo tactics, put it on your own domain and pay for the ad yourself.
Again, I'm no expert and I have no skin in this game. Anyones two cents? Especially if you own an ecommerce site of some sort.
If you're paying an SEO consultant, you are probably wanting more traffic, SEM is going to get you more traffic, possibly at higher cost, but also in a much easier to count way.
Way back when, I worked at a travel information site that put a lot of effort into SEO and SEM. For SEO, it was mostly trying to make sure important terms showed up on the page importantly, and making sure our internal linking was using useful links, and some light link exchange with quality sites. We were never able to pinpoint any changes with results, though.
SEM was pretty much pure arbitrage -- find the pages that make the most $/pageview, find keywords that are relevant, bid so we make whatever margin the corporate overlords require. This was all easy to track and very actionable -- if keywords did well, increase the spend, if not, turn it down. We presumably got some non-trackable benefits from exposure, assuming some people who clicked through our pages would come back and use our site some more later.
I'm not an expert but have worked with some, developing seo tools.
What I've seen is that Google or FB ads are used by big clients that can afford it as a quick and easy way to get visits.
An seo 'expert' whose main recommendation is to get Google ads is no expert at all.
They can be part of a marketing campaign but are by no means the most cost effective way to getting good rankings, and users are more likely to click on organic search results than ads.
Users perceive a brand to have more authority if it ranks on page 1 at the top with an ad.
That being said that is a rare thing for an SEO to recommend and I think he might be saying that Ads help you rank -- which is a complete untruth. Ads CANNOT help you rank.
SEO can take months to move the needle, especially on a new domain. If the client needs results faster than this, the standard advice seems to be PPC & SEO for the first 6 months, then reduce / eliminate PPC as the organic traffic & conversions from the SEO campaigns increase to the desired amount.
It's in part because of the search engine's business model, just like other free apps like Facebook that suffer similar problems where the person who is consuming the product is not actually the customer.
A free product from companies that aspire to be multi-million, multi-billion dollar global companies and are celebrated by those in the tech industry for doing so, even with a 'free' product. The idea of a liberal and free internet and free products with an idolization and celebration of wealth of those same companies doesn't work. We end up with the landfill. We got what we paid for, didn't we (nothing).
There are more general terms for the author describes, it's 'advertising' and 'marketing'.
This is the cost of having a free market - people are free to compete on it.
This is the cost of freedom of speech - idiots get to talk.
You can fix this to an extent with laws - for example you can't advertise cigarettes to children. Just be aware that you can't have it all and live your life :)
Let me give another perspective on this from "the school of 'old school'"
Back in the day of yellow page advertising one of the barriers to getting business was placing an expensive advertisement in the yellow pages (for certain types of businesses). I can personally attest to the advantage of doing that. That is I was able to build a business from nothing ZERO sales to over $2m/year using a yellow page ad as the only advertising expense (also used direct mail though). Many of my competitors never wanted to spend the money for a similar ad. (You had to pay for an entire year). It just seemed to expensive to them. It was. That was good though, not bad 'psychological barrier to entry'. Back in the day it was several thousand dollars per month without knowing (the first time) what kind of results you would get.
My point is having to pay that money (and the effort of designing an ad and paying for it) showed commitment to what you were doing (at that time). It's just another way to differentiate from the competition. We were entirely self funded also and took business away from large corporations that did the exact same thing as we did. In the end having to pay for that ad was a good thing, not a bad thing.
I don't know all of google's logic with why they decide who gets SEO juice or not but I wouldn't discount what I am talking about as one of the reasons that things work this way.
this article is really something. the author is complaining about the spammy nature of the "Internet" when they are in fact complaining about the spammy nature of search results, particularly those on Google. and yet, the whole thrust of the argument is a complaint about difficult it has been to participating very aggressively in the dynamic that leads to this spammy nature.
if they have a problem with this, they have a problem not with the Internet but with search engines as the primary discovery mechanism of web sites. and if they have a problem with that, participating in the literal exact thing that results in what they are complaining about without reflecting on their own behavior is very odd.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadThis seems obvious and doable.
SEO is still a long term investment that every company needs to make for the benefit of their users, helping people find you and your information on search engines is a good thing (assuming you’re providing real value).
The only problem are the spam sites who still succeed occasionally on the fringes. Which was why we were motivated to get SEO (and SEM) help in the first place - as one of our biggest competitors is a shameless gray/black hat spammer that their poor customers keep finding on Google.
Off-topic: the author's product seems similar to my open source tool https://github.com/justcomments/newsletter-cli which allows sending emails via AWS SES
I have friends who run small businesses and just have simple sites and blogs about their customers and they have more business than they can handle. Granted it’s just a living, but it’s almost all traffic through google through organic results.
Interestingly, their competitors frequently have these bullshit, SEO sites that come in below and able their organic results. They come and go but my friend has been around for 10 years.
Customers do mention that they like a “real” site.
(Also it’s pretty harsh to say that it takes “little talent” to become an SEO expert. Like all industries, there are charlatans selling snake oil, but there are experts who have invested a lot of time in developing their skill sets, and it’s not nice to be so dismissive.)
some examples is why do sites still misuse H tags or have problems like creating a simple xml site map that handles escaping characters when required
There isn't. It is another article that will end up in the SEO landfill the author is complaining about along with other "spammy" articles that already exist in the landfill.
In essence, this is another "spammy" article to promote his product cleverly disguised as an anti-spam/anti-SEO article.
I suspect an SEO agency actually told him to write this article to generate conversation (people who resonate with the intro will share it on all social circles and cause it to go "organically" viral). As they say, all publicity is good publicity.
This is as meta as it gets!
Maybe there's space for search engines that can summarize a page if it's long and give the user what they want.
In SEO terms the "get something done" is described as "user intent".
Imagine you have written an article describing how to change the oil in a Ford Mustang.
What title better fits user intent:
"How to change the oil on a Ford Mustang"
or
"An afternoon of tomfoolery, broken wrenches and dirty hands with an American classic"
If you are at all interested in people finding you on Google you need to have a title that's more like the former than the latter.
SEO content marketing is basically a descendent of direct marketing -- the stuff you used to get in the mail, in two-page spreads in Reader's Digest and so forth.
Direct marketers have known for a very long time that long-form copy sells better. They had the numbers to prove it long before "analytics" was a common idea -- the very term A/B testing refers to the "A" and "B" sides of a newspaper print roller being able to print two versions of an advertisement.
Source: Tested Advertising Methods by Caples. A fascinating, if depressing, read.
Really? That's interesting. But how could they tell which version converted better? Maybe distributing each version in a different area?
This perfect 50/50 split pretty much controls for all the plausible variables. Location, time of day, you name it, the odds of a reader seeing either A or B was exactly 50%.
Plenty of ecommerce sites ranks with very little text on their pages. What you are saying is just wrong.
But the problem with your product isn't SEO, it's that anyone who knows what SES is, also knows how to use it for the thing you're selling, without paying an additional fee.
To me, it sadly seems like a losing war between the SEO-spammers and the search engine developers. There's no law of nature making it possible to separate fake content from true content. If The spam is good enough, I'm not even sure a human can do it.
Maybe the concept of trust-less content distribution will have to come to an end at some point and we will start ranking searches based on more or less manually maintained trust graphs?
“Good spam” is just real content.
Harvested and put on somebody else's site that is covered with ads.
We've been spoiled by the internet of old, where geeky types wrote blogs and created web sites sharing their intricate knowledge of their favourite topic. Of course there's a fair share of conspiracy theorists and incorrect ideas, but it was generally in good faith and somewhat easy to filter.
Now you won't find those anymore, instead we get SEO-optimising sites with text sourced via Fiverr resembling meaningful content but without any ambitions whatsoever of correctness nor meaningfulness. Best case, it just ends up in frustration as you realise that it's just filler, worse case, it actually misleads you with some made-up fact that you couldn't see any reason to lie about.
Organic search is the highest or second-highest source of traffic for every startup I know. Yes there are too many SEO charlatans, but to ignore such a large traffic source is not smart.
I much prefer that model instead of leaving your business’s future in the hands of Facebook/Google.
The author opens with exactly that gripe:
> I have a product that can be explained in one or two sentences. It is fairly well documented. Yet i’m being asked to write 4,000 word articles describing and comparing my product with the competition. Why? Because SEO.
We're bombarding ourselves with walls of human-unreadable English that we're supposed to ignore. It's like something from a stupid old sci-fi story.
It used to show its best guess, then branch off from it with less specificity and more variety and, in general, a result reflecting what I meant within a few pages. Now Google is so desperate to get it right on result #1 that it never admits failure no matter how many pages you go.
The infrastructure of web navigation and search is foundationally built on textual, first party published content that enjoys some presumptions of good faith authorship: that it was written to be read, by a reader, and meant to be informative, persuasive/argumentative, or recreational/entertaining.
Think: journal articles, Usenet debates, faq compilations, RFCs, product spec sheets, forum postings, IRC logs, ur-blogs, even the original social media content types (tweets, wall posts, comments).
The cycles and epicycles of architecting atop this “real” content gives us mechanisms that reward and incentivize content produced neither for the ends of the writer writing nor any reader reading, but rather in service of manipulating search and driving ux patterns of various darkness.
All the good stuff on the internet is reborn in a spasm of returning to people creating content they care about for other people who care. Then eventually with success it gets polluted into shit with bots, seo, mass media and agencies, influencers, etc.
One silly rubric I use is: could this page / app / venue have been there in 1999? If so it’s probably worth reading. If not, who knows.
(Of course there are cesspools that qualify too, like the chan world and certain subreddits, but there were cesspools in the early days of the web as well.)
but they are not doing that anymore, it is really hard to find a not spammy (what you described) result on Google these days.
and other search engines are only copying the Google algorithm we need to get back to judging a web page by its content, AI should be able to help now or soon.
Nobody would start using Google Search in its current format.
Ads are Google's bread and butter, and has been for the entirety of its existence as a public company.
Exactly why I stick to cookbooks in the past year or so. More and more, "fuck the internet", long live murdering trees.
The internet is full of garbage recipes that either just don't work, inauthentic, and uncreative, all at the same time.
As far as murdering trees go -- let's not forget that libraries and e-books exist.
Yeah library, to check if you want to buy it or just write down a handful of recipes.
The best cooking tutorials are barely translated Youtube videos. Or even better, recipes going through Google Translate.
(Or get a multi-lingual friend... :) )
Cook's Illustrated also does some 100% legit international recipes, they are smart enough to A/B test against the country of origin and try to match up the flavor profile with ingredients that are available in America, which can be more work than just directly translating to "closest cultivar of a plant".
I've also enjoyed the organic explosion of low carb cooking that has happened online. I have been witness to the community growing from its very beginnings less than a decade ago when it was just some people trying to make weight loss taste good, to professional level chefs jumping in with their recipes. It is now possible to source low-carb recipes online that can go toe to toe with any other genre of food (e.g. https://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/chocolate-hazelnut-sandwic...).
Of course there is also an explosion of low-carb blog spam. Ugh. I do sometimes miss when everyone in the community was there because they loved just trying new things out and sharing their experiences. The same SEO problems exist...
Yeah I love those. The "random grandma with a gopro" tutorials always work, modulo language barrier. The video editing is crap and you sometimes have to keep fast forwarding while stuff is cooking but the recipes are good.
I have been to what I thought was deep in the Internet recipe mines and never saw this.
It's good to slow down and enjoy those fairly simple things.
Honestly, I miss absolutely nothing from the internet when it comes to cooking. But I also wanted to be a chef. So I studied how to properly cook long ago and I cook almost every day... so I'll admit in already an outlier. Still, the way the internet treats cooking is retarded. It doesn't surprise me that people don't like to cook if they grew up with the internet as a learning resource. All these people overcomplicate easy recipes and substitute anything because it makes them feel like pretty snowflakes.
Does that still work? Most people's grandmas today where very much alive and cooking in both the 70s, 80s and even 90s and thus as steeped as anybody in all the international influences and 'foreign' ingredients that those decades brought.
the way the internet treats cooking is retarded.
And here you and I disagree. I like the way that 'modern' cooking is willing to revisit well established and 'sacred' truths about food and put them to the test. Perhaps a housewife in the 1920s isn't the authoritative source on the best way to prepare a dish, and even if she is there is no way to know without someone actually testing that hypothesis. Sites like Serious Eats and all the sites they begat bring both rigor and the joy of experimentation back into cooking. I mean why not substitute one thing for another just to see what happens or apply the 'wrong' technique to a standard dish? Many a dish that is considered a 'classic' today no doubt got their start that way.
This is way older than a decade. I knew people getting into it and sharing recipes on Usenet. The current boom is new, but online low carb communities are ancient in internet terms.
It wasn't very palatable back then, but people sure did try.
There was already an active Usenet community for lowcarb diets in the late 1990s (alt.support.diet.low-carb).
There seems to be two distinct 'genres' of cookbooks. One written by people who have studied cooking, and one written by people that have studied marketing.
In my experience, these sites tend to be less spammy too, but there's certainly variation there too.
I switched over to duck duck go several months ago. it's just as good as google for almost everything.
Although, I will admit, my youngest daughter and I get a kick out of the stories. We even try to predict which theme the writer will go with. Some are like Christmas Hallmark movies. lol.
And here I just thought people were basically self-absorbed wankers.
My most recent impression:
"I first learned about this recipe from my dog's aunt who was a lenape indian during the pre-cambrian era and she something something memories of childhood blah blah dinosaur steaks yap yap tedious digression on gritty herbs fluff fluff and so I was talking to my local grocer who put me onto an organic vegan gluten free biomagnetic interspordidial hyperflorpic gmo-free meg-free bpa-free taste-free free-free that reminded me of the time that..."
JUST FUCKING TELL ME HOW TO COOK THE BEANS JANET
It takes a very unique kind of person to write those things. And those are the ones Google is giving all the voice, while taking it away from normal people.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...
> 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 the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
So it's been a tradition in the recipe space for decades to include lots of descriptive "filler" text when you're writing your recipe book/blog. That filler text is copyrightable, which gives you legal recourse against people who might try to wholesale copy your work.
Of course, in the modern world, it's definitely true that they can also help with SEO. And honestly I wouldn't completely discount the idea of people actually reading them -- I know my wife has gone through phases where she has a couple different blogs bookmarked and will read through them to get ideas, but also because she liked the writing of the author.
Look, I have the very sad allergy to hazelnuts... I love hazelnuts... but they don't love me. Also soy. Soy is borderline deadly to me even in small amounts. So, I can't have asian food without cooking it myself. Fish sauce sans soy fermentation is my substitute. I do get the allergy issue and being left out in many foods. But I find it so damn hard to believe that all these people are allergic to everything but these "healthy alternatives" that end up being nutritionally empty. Then they wonder why they're suddenly anemic. Then they don't get enough sun because their skin "suddenly" became sensitive. Then they have depression issues. Then they can't shit straight. Then they start cutting back on other foods. Then they have to live on horse pills.
Sorry, rant. Got angry.
Fun argument to have with the next anti-vaxxer you meet. If they argue about mercury or lead being in vaccines, agree with them. Just flat out agree with how terrible it is. Then ask if they like Himalayan sea salt. There's like a 99.9% chance they love it, along with essential oils. "You do know there are more trace amounts of mercury and lead in Himalayan sea salt than in vaccines?" You will then agree with me that mental gymnastics needs to be in the next Olympics. It's amazing how they'll talk around it. Make some popcorn, open a beer and watch the show.
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.
Because Google doesn't have a financial incentive to show you quick, quality answers to you questions.
Google makes more money from you flailing around and fruitlessly searching over and over than giving you the right answer the first time.
That will work right up until the time somebody comes along and build a search engine (or other app) that will just "give you the right answer the first time."
For all their size and power, there's really nothing - in principle - stopping somebody from coming along and doing to Google, what Google did to Altavista. Yes it would be hard to execute, which may be why it hasn't happened... yet.
You have to crawl through piles of garbage like a racoon to find the one-liner you were looking for.
On the other hand, if you Google "How to do X" you will often find a youtube video in the top results. But it will skip the intro and jump right to the important part.
Sure there is a lot of garbage out there (e.g. everyone uploading 10 minute videos to hit the YouTube optimzation algorithm) but it does seem like Google does try to cut through some of the SEO garbage to get you the useful info faster.
When people find out the metrics to getting more views, they become meaningless.
I just Googled Peking duck to try something at random. Of the links on the front page, one was to wikipedia, one was to an article about Peking duck, and the rest where recipe sites (BBC Food, Allrecipes, Serious Eats etc.) or serious looking/sounding food blogs that had the recipe front and center. I don't know if it's a geographic thing (I'm in Europe) or if Google has learnt my preferences, but finding 5 reasonable sounding recipes for Peking duck with Google was trivial.
Edit: Played around some more and spotted an interesting pattern. If a look up typical US dishes, like Key lime pie or BBQ brisket, then I got results more like the ones you describe. But looking up more 'international' dishes like Peking duck or coq au vin then the results where almost all good quality recipes.
I know it's fashionable to hate Google nowadays but come on.
On top of that, without the web becoming popular, there wouldn’t have been the investment in fast home internet or fast cellular data.
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 internet much more interesting back then.
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 think I first had high speed internet around 2002 via FreeDSL and when that went kaput, DirecTV owned a company called Telestream that offered DSL service.
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.
https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-panda
It's happened over and over and over.
A pretty good web directory at the time was cheap, about $12 million a year for editors, but Google had 10+ years where it did better with unsupervised algorithms, so nobody spent any time on integrating human curators.
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 all the fluff articles trying to sell me shit. The internet, as free as it is, has been overflowed with commercial activity. Which pretty closely reflects the real world, but damn that's a shame.
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.
And if you think the answer is to create and host a new, independent engine, you will be hard pressed to develop a good one, and to find the money to keep it running.
Rate limits.[0]
One can't really build a robust and comprehensive (server-side) search engine on top of Google's search API. In other words, Google Inc isn't going to provide an API so powerful that one can build an "alternative to Google" with it.
On the other hand, if you're talking about a "client-side" filter instead of a new search engine, (e.g. a client-side webscraper that flips through the Google results pages), you'd run into multiple problems. E.g. random CAPTCHAS screwing up the automation script, and the difficulty of creating a "rules engine" (e.g. machine learning) on your local computer that recognizes blog articles with a commercial slant.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=google+search+api+rate+limit
>Wikipedia is basically an information search engine without commerce or social media. The problem is that your results page is the article itself, and you need to scroll to the bottom to get to an external site.
>It's theoretically possible to change the UI or analyze Wikipedia to make a pretty solid search engine powered by millions of person-years of curation.
Using wikipedia as a data source for a "search engine" does not fulfill gp's (jacquesm) request of "One nice solution would be a search engine that throws out anything related to commerce or linking to commerce."
For example, go to the wikipedia page for the film "Groundhog Day" and look at the external links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day#External_links
- one of the external links points to IMDB.com -- a commercial website owned by Amazon.
- another link points to Punxsatawney Groundhog Club website that's advertising a $30 beer tasting event (Hogtoberfest).
- another link points to a souvenir shop
To continue the example of commercial links, a lot of math articles on wikipedia point to MathWorld which has advertising for the commercial Wolfram Mathematica software package.
IMO, I don't believe a search engine based on wikipedia's list of external sites (even with ignoring the commercial links) is going to be useful for the mainstream audience. I probably do 50+ searches on google every single day and maybe 1% might be answerable from a "wikipedia search". For example, I needed a DIY answer to disassemble a Moen faucet and Wikipedia has zero articles with those instructions. In contrast, the Google (and Youtube) search results has the information I was looking for even though it has the unwanted ads and "content marketing" blogs from plumbing brands.
Of course paid search introduces class issues. I think we should view search like a public utility because it’s absolutely necessary for surviving the world.
We missed out on like 90% of what the information revolution was supposed to bring to users, and instead the data giants have captured all the value.
Why do people prefer free over paid? I think people underestimate the influence of advertisers and underestimate the value of their own time spent researching and dealing with crappy products. It’s almost like a psychological bias.
I like the idea of a better user agent but would I pay for one? Judging by my refusal to pay for quality journalism I’m guessing it’d be a hard sell. That’s another thing I should be willing to pay for but don’t for some weird reason.
Plus the knowledge you can, and non-trivial technical expertise like: registering a domain, DNS configuration, setting up web software (even if "one click"), and maintaining it over time.
Do you have a link to this? I've tried googling "splicing a 500kW cable" (and variants) and haven't found much relevant.
I don't think this was an accident. Back in the 90's I paid for Netscape Navigator and for email. People used to even pay money to indexed by search engines (like paying to be in the Yellow Pages). Companies started "giving these things away" in a calculated move that I guess the nascent web population was just not cynical enough to reject.
Yeah but what does that even mean. How do you define commercial? Who is going to go through all of the pages and categorizing them into commercial and non-commercial? And how do you keep shills and “influencers” from littering your results with seemingly innocent but actually commercial content?
Keep in mind there is incentive to have a commercial meta tag so that when I’m actually looking for a good or service I’d be able to easily find it (or see the lack of it). The other 99% of the time ads and products are just an annoying distraction and a waste of money to serve.
TBH google kind of sucks for looking for stuff, amazon + reddit recommendations are my main source of surfacing things I want to buy.
The frog can still sorta function. Wiggle in little circles. It ain't pretty or healthy or free. No hopping.
I wonder what it would be like to not have that nail through us.
No commerce -> no jobs -> unrest -> violence and wars (citation: centuries of human history).
Maybe, commerce is the nail which constrains humanity both in a good and a bad sense - by providing a peaceful alternative to violent lifestyles and by creating a consumerist culture?
When marketing convinces someone to buy something that ends up being a bad trade (i.e. the person that buys it is not made better off) then there is no such improvement and the world is not made better off.
Have you considered that maybe the majority of successful companies in the world are fulfilling customer wants and needs and thus making what you call Pareto improvements? And maybe it's just that the other "dumb people" derive joy from different stuff?
The market sorts these things out. It is mostly efficient. Not perfectly. But mostly. A company that is providing net-negative value to the world is a short-lived company.
Given that hucksters have existed for as long as markets have, I don't have your touching faith in the power of markets to eliminate them.
That’s not a citation. And given your thesis is a sprawling abstract claim, it really needs some real citations.
The likelihood for an individual to die by violence has been much greater for most of human history and prosperity and peace typically go hand in hand. I could provide references for these claims, but I think they are well known and references for the counter claim haven't been provided.
And evidence aside, your analysis is so coarse it’s basically impossible it could be true. Nothing that coarse is true.
And one last point: I have no doubt your head is filled with examples from history that back up your claim. What you almost certainly don’t have is evidence that there isn’t an equal raft of examples that contradict it.
It's ironic that, in trying to make search "human friendly", Google has also succeeded in giving it all the negative traits of a human --- the "human" that is more like a commissioned salesperson.
I know the argument is that humans frequently make mistakes so "we should just show them what we think they wanted", but that's just opening the door for manipulation.
Search was much better when it was closer to a "grep the Internet". IMHO machines should remain "dumb" (for lack of a better adjective) and leave the important decisions to the users, keeping the latter in control.
Curation-as-a-service could even become a viable market. It's arguably already happening to a certain extent through various platforms, creators, and aggregators; but it's not really split off as its own service yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
If you really believe that, maybe it is a nice startup opportunity for you :)
The dumber search is, the easier it is for the bad actors to game it and drown out the legit sources.
Maybe page rank (mentioned in a sibling response) helped address this, but then it’s really no longer just a dumb grep.
A simple "-site:somesite.com" removes those, or just scroll past them. Keyword spam is easy to ignore because the title of the page, the domain, or the path often has nothing to do with what you're searching for, and the preview text is nonsensical.
The dumber search is, the easier it is for the bad actors to game it and drown out the legit sources.
The dumber search is, the easier it is for users to ignore the crap and find what they're looking for, even if it's not the first result. The "smart" omission of results has the effect of removing a lot of useful ones too. Google's claims that they have X number of results for a search is essentially meaningless if you can't actually see them all.
This sums it up nicely haha
Something like 'Save Money on Food', I am positive I am best-in-class, but I am only front page google, on occasion. Without a doubt, I should be the number 1 result, and instead, well SEO'd mom-science wins.
Btw, does this mean google should be looking for crappy code/design=genuine website?
Come to think of it, that might be kind of funny for a day or two.
And not just the "shopping" tab but a fundamentally different set of algorithms for page ranking.
Edit: I'm often surprised how search engines fail to exclude obvious SEO farms. Especially looking at articles about stock, you frequently just find a ocean of what send to be clearly autogenerated articles.
Same tactic to find genuine content, but I find Google’s results to be better than Reddit’s own search.
Google has created a disavow tool for this but for someone who runs a blog and not super tech savvy may not know about it and regardless it is still a burden for anyone to keep up with all this.
Again, I'm not an expert at this and I'm doubtful that a billion dollar search engine can be tricked by such shenanigans but it may be something worth looking into. if your site traffic drops
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 find anything remotely relevant either on the product page or in the PDF owner's manual.
It's a shame what these tools have become when they could be so much more.
The other infuriating thing that's related is if you're trying to find a schematic or service manual, Google thinks you're just looking for the (often useless) user manual. Searching for the user manual does not make it think you're looking for the service manual... it's absolutely idiotic, because who would search for "service manual" but actually want a user manual? Beyond some weird conspiracy theory involving anti-right-to-repair, I can't explain why.
I think one of the reasons is that I do not get a bunch of the ‘smart’ stuff that Google tries to do for me. In a way it’s like using a search engine from 10 years ago ... and it’s better.
There are things that I do miss — quick cards for things like currency conversion, flight details, that sort of thing - but the mighty Duck is getting better at those, and if I need to reach in to Google I can always just !g it.
Both were very precious and both are gone. There was no money in them I guess.
This needs to be fixed.
Anything else seems to be served by the other providers just as well/poorly, and occasionally better.
So to share some of the challenges with that (if anyone out there wants to try again) they are as follows:
* 'Search' means different things to different people, and we've been trained that a 'search engine' finds anything on the web (for the most part). The product Blekko built could more accurately be called a 'reference' engine which was used successfully by people trying to find facts or data and were not generally trying to find things to buy.
* Have your own advertising system, all in house, where you don't have to "revenue share" with anyone if you don't want to. At its peak Blekko was serving over 10M queries per day which, if we had owned all the advertising revenue on those searches would have kept us going and growing. That said, building an advertising system is both difficult and fraught with patent risk / bad-actor risk.
* Don't let anonymous users use the service. This is perhaps the hardest thing, most people won't give up an email address for even the most useful of services, however since you're spending money serving up search queries you don't want to waste that money serving up queries to bots and other bad actors. At any given time when I went through the logs there were between 5% up to nearly 18% of the queries were 'suspicious' or likely bots. That is 18% of your capacity you can't give to "real" humans if you can't control that traffic.
* Build a relevancy ranking system rather than a popularity ranking system. Search results have two metrics of interest, precision and recall. For a reference engine you want to focus on precision over recall. And while existing search engines use the "virtuous cycle" of search & click to track popularity (which can be an indicator of precision but is better at indicating click-baityness) build your ranking engine using NLP based evaluations.
* Your document index size should target 5 billion documents with a goal of 10 billion documents. Scale your cluster and algorithms to process a query to that index in 100mS or less.
Do that and win :-) Or find the next barrier to creating a useful way to search the web for information.
Why shouldn’t the internet imitate actual life?
"Simultaneously they have a team ... basically seeding a link of my site on as many other sites as they can get hold of. "
Getting to the top of many SERPs can mean millions of dollars in monthly revenue.
If it's so easy, and the author is so smart about it, why doesn't he just take it?
It's like people who say 'well of course CRO is easy, you just make it easy for people to check out and check the stats and iterate'.
Overly arrogant engineers many times think everyone else is stupid for not being an engineer, but forget that more than just engineers are needed. I'm guessing that is how you end up with Google +.
We would say 'being a football player is so easy you just run and grunt, not like us who love math... math is for those who are REALLY smart'.
It took me a long time before I could look back at that attitude and cringe at the arrogance and lack of understanding of the complexities of the world.
The fact that this article is getting upvoted while my comment is getting downvoted is telling.
The title suggests one possible answer to that question - the author has moral qualms about turning the Internet into a landfill. (Then again, given that this article is itself almost certainly supposed to double as shitty SEO marketing / clickbait, I have my doubts.)
So the issue shouldn't be in the methods, but in the end game. Like, what value are you bringing. He could bring value and get a ton of money.
For example mortgage calculators. There are a million. Pick one, and rank it. You'll be making millions while providing value.
Strange he isn't doing it, since it is so easy and all. I mean, whatever his goals in life, a few million a year will probably help push that.
Are incentives misaligned? Sure. But saying it is easy, while not succeeding at it, just feels a bit... arrogant. No other word for it.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I dislike how sausage is made. You can talk all you like about how bad the mafia is. Doesn't mean being a top mobster is easy. Are they intellectually smart like a brain surgeon? No. But they are smart in ways that brain surgeons aren't. Considering them stupid would be a grave mistake. It also would be arrogant, it takes a certain type of person to see someone else's job and say 'that's easy' when they never practice that job ever, let alone succeeded at it.
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." Sun Tzu.
1. Would a significant amount of real humans who actually cared about the content cast a vote (up or down)?
2. Would it be even remotely possible to protect against fraudulent voting at Google scale? (remember they can't even prevent fake business listings on Google Maps, which is at least theoretically closer to verifiable from, for example, business records)
2. I think Google could do it. They're pretty damn good at detecting bots on Google.com just by analyzing whether your behavior looks human or not, and they also have logic in place to detect fraudulent ad clicks. I think they could do a much better job with fake business listing detection but it's probably just not their focus. Search, on the other hand, is their lifeblood.
I initially believed the "O" in SEO was misleading, as this kind of promotion is not optimisation (at least not for everybody), It turns out it's another letter that's misleading: "S" should be for Sales, not Search.
And once you open the floodgates of allowing user feedback to influence search results, the arms race begins, with every major news site checking the referrer for Google and begging you via popover to upvote their search result, and armadas of malware-controlled botnets being launched to generate authentic-looking feedback, and so on.
* Make your upvotes only influence your own search results, and other users like you (similar search history, similar geography, similar past upvote pattern). The fraudster upvoters would just improve SEO for their own fraudster circle. They would see their fraud-upvoted site as #1 within their own circle but it wouldn't change the ranking for me. The programmer circle gets programmer-vetted results on technical help. You know they are a programmer from their search history.
* Sites begging to upvote get a massive SEO hit of -10000 downvotes. Google's NLP should be good enough for this already.
An downvote should not mean "I disagree with this author" but rather "this site was useless spam" or "I derived no information from this site because it threw 5 popups in my face". Or if I downvote a bunch of paywall sites it should stop showing me paywall sites.
We're looking for a spam filter, basically.
How would you tell them apart? If you could identify abusive site formats mechanically anyway why even solicit votes?
This would be good if you could filter using only votes from people you know. Then you could mix in maintained lists like “all active HN users” from various communities.
http://justinhileman.info/article/googles-edit-search-result...
Bounce rate is a key ranking factor. Going back to the search results too quickly is a negative signal.
I open tabs for the top results and just close them when done. Often, I have to re-search with added "verbatim" filter or quotation marks because Google seems to ignore my most important keyword 90% of the time.
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.
Too bad search engines aren't using this to improve search results.
Here's what a Google search returns:
* Vue and Svelte — A Lot Alike, But Some Important Differences
* Why SvelteJS may be the best framework for new web devs - Dev.to
* Svelte vs Vue.js | What are the differences? - StackShare
* Svelte.js — First impressions? (vs. React and Vue) – Milosh N. – Medium
* Top 5 Reasons You Should Use Svelte on Your Current Project Right
* Vue and Svelte · Issue #4491 · vuejs/vue · GitHub
Doesn't it seem odd that an seo consultant says to pay for search result ads? In my mind, the point of seo is not to pay "per click". You may pay for a great article to be written, and pay for it to be on a site, which is fair to me. But I then expect it to be noticed because of it's own merits, quality of writing and quality of "publisher". If you also have to pay for an ad for it, why bother with the publisher or even "seo quality" writing? Just write quality while ignoring seo tactics, put it on your own domain and pay for the ad yourself.
Again, I'm no expert and I have no skin in this game. Anyones two cents? Especially if you own an ecommerce site of some sort.
Way back when, I worked at a travel information site that put a lot of effort into SEO and SEM. For SEO, it was mostly trying to make sure important terms showed up on the page importantly, and making sure our internal linking was using useful links, and some light link exchange with quality sites. We were never able to pinpoint any changes with results, though.
SEM was pretty much pure arbitrage -- find the pages that make the most $/pageview, find keywords that are relevant, bid so we make whatever margin the corporate overlords require. This was all easy to track and very actionable -- if keywords did well, increase the spend, if not, turn it down. We presumably got some non-trackable benefits from exposure, assuming some people who clicked through our pages would come back and use our site some more later.
What I've seen is that Google or FB ads are used by big clients that can afford it as a quick and easy way to get visits.
An seo 'expert' whose main recommendation is to get Google ads is no expert at all.
They can be part of a marketing campaign but are by no means the most cost effective way to getting good rankings, and users are more likely to click on organic search results than ads.
That being said that is a rare thing for an SEO to recommend and I think he might be saying that Ads help you rank -- which is a complete untruth. Ads CANNOT help you rank.
A free product from companies that aspire to be multi-million, multi-billion dollar global companies and are celebrated by those in the tech industry for doing so, even with a 'free' product. The idea of a liberal and free internet and free products with an idolization and celebration of wealth of those same companies doesn't work. We end up with the landfill. We got what we paid for, didn't we (nothing).
This is the cost of having a free market - people are free to compete on it.
This is the cost of freedom of speech - idiots get to talk.
You can fix this to an extent with laws - for example you can't advertise cigarettes to children. Just be aware that you can't have it all and live your life :)
Back in the day of yellow page advertising one of the barriers to getting business was placing an expensive advertisement in the yellow pages (for certain types of businesses). I can personally attest to the advantage of doing that. That is I was able to build a business from nothing ZERO sales to over $2m/year using a yellow page ad as the only advertising expense (also used direct mail though). Many of my competitors never wanted to spend the money for a similar ad. (You had to pay for an entire year). It just seemed to expensive to them. It was. That was good though, not bad 'psychological barrier to entry'. Back in the day it was several thousand dollars per month without knowing (the first time) what kind of results you would get.
My point is having to pay that money (and the effort of designing an ad and paying for it) showed commitment to what you were doing (at that time). It's just another way to differentiate from the competition. We were entirely self funded also and took business away from large corporations that did the exact same thing as we did. In the end having to pay for that ad was a good thing, not a bad thing.
I don't know all of google's logic with why they decide who gets SEO juice or not but I wouldn't discount what I am talking about as one of the reasons that things work this way.
if they have a problem with this, they have a problem not with the Internet but with search engines as the primary discovery mechanism of web sites. and if they have a problem with that, participating in the literal exact thing that results in what they are complaining about without reflecting on their own behavior is very odd.
I mean, it's peddling a way of sending marketing emails via AWS... Nothing spammy there!