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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?""
> 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Indeed most of the content on the web is SEO fluff or veiled attempts to push an affiliate link.
Worse, almost every site has a cookie “preference” popup (when everyone knows the preference is just the minimum necessary cookies), a newsletter signup popup, and a browser notification request popup.
Add to that the autoplaying videos that will pop out into their own overlay if you scroll away plus the rotating ads of different sizes which cause the page content to shift up and down... oh and the fancy morphing page headers that hang down over the content you’re trying to read if you don’t scroll enough at first.
The web is currently a shitshow of comic proportions, the likes of which not even the most cynical comedians accurately predicted.
The desktop app situation isn’t as bad, but it follows a similar trend of demanding more from the hardware and user (and network) while providing less.
It might actually be better overall if mobile and desktop performance had not increased in the last decade. I swear the end user experience hasn’t on average improved even a fraction as much as the hardware capability has.
I still remember to this day the experience I had with the Miranda IM messenger -- I was signed it to at least 6 services (ICQ, AIM, Yahoo and a few others). 40MB of RAM during the time when 1GB RAM on an average PC became the affordable norm, no lag ever, instant rendering, everything works instantly, plus a lot of possible customisation -- themes, emoticon packs, you name it.
Same with web. Search for something, get 7 useful results on the first page, get your work done in minutes. No banners, no ads, no consent popups, no constant nagging for signups. Just content and some personal expression -- which, while comical at places, is still vastly preferable to the crap show we are enduring today.
Fast forward 12-15 years forward and I am absolutely amazed how awful the state of the desktop and the web is. Things are only getting worse with time.
I also vividly remember banner ads at that time, there were a few popular sizes. Some of the first ad-filtering proxies based their blocking algorithms on the sizes.
When AdWords came it felt almost beneficial, because connections were slow and often metered.
SEO tricks proliferated at the time (say, 2000), too, of more stupid sorts because search engines were not that sophisticated yet, including Google.
I append "reddit" to any query not meant for a productive task. Except now the internet is mostly reddit for me, which kinda bums me out. Especially given the new js-heavy design. In 2019, if I want reliable search about something I know nothing about I must first search on google, then try again with "reddit" appended, then change www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com, then parse through what are often questionable answers from anon users, possibly still influenced by marketers, and then maybe, I get the answer or next lead that I was looking for.
Most of the times I Google something I get content farm rubbish.
Know also that low paid "freelance writers" are often writing a lot of this information that so many people rely on.
I use reddit queries for things that aren't really critical, say a video game recommendation (try Googling that and see how many "top 17 adventure games" you get)
For more serious things like "do I have lactose intolerance?", I google something like [wiki lactose intolerance]
I do wonder why one of the world's most advanced intelligent systems built by thousands of the world's most intelligent people employed by a company which pretty much explodes in a burst of millions of dollar bills when you tap it lightly can't seem to show us results that aren't full of rubbish.
It's like Google's "discover" feed - it shows me trash news from a tabloid.
Google knows _A LOT_ about me, don't they know I despise tabloid news? Gossip about Kylie's breast cancer? No.
You can opt-out of the redesign in your settings so www.reddit.com and old.reddit.com both show the old reddit, and you can use new.reddit.com to view new-only pages.
I'm logged out by default and only log in to comment, which is rare. I don't like leaving my username up for display if a friend/family member has to borrow my laptop for something. I've engaged in a couple of communities that are a little more counter-cultural than my peers.
Done this. Eventually one account always becomes my main account and I'm back to square one. I don't care enough about reddit to keep up with 2 separate accounts.
Google used to have a filter to only show discussions which I used constantly until they removed it. It's the only way to find actual reviews of some products without a million pages of blogspam
I use ddg, and I use site:reddit.com. Reddit's internal search engine isn't as good for general web searches like this (which is what the ! redirects to).
The front page of Youtube is going to be like the front page of Youtube...full of lowest-denominator stuff like awful memes, Youtuber drama, superhero movies and video games.
But it is maybe the only major site online where you can at least get a real person's opinion on common questions, like recipes and cooking methods, without the fluff of the productized, Adsense-driven sites that exist only to make money.
Case in point: r/gifrecipes. Recipes shown in gif form, so 60 seconds or less. Discussion can happen in the comments, but there won't be any inane babble about how the recipe has been passed down their family for generations. The lengthy pre-ambles on recipe blogs exist only to circumvent Google's penalties for "thin content", i.e. pages with less than 500 words.
Content is being written to serve Google's requirements, not the users.
I was really late to the reddit party and only made an account a few years ago. Thought it would be a great technical resource... Every time I had a more advanced question the place seemed to fall flat. You'd go to a very specific sub thinking there should be some informative people but you come to find it's full of people in the same boat as you. They wind up guessing or throwing out whatever to get karma simply being unhelpful. One answer to a question I had about data recovery was replied to with "your approach is very amateurish" I reply with "please explain to me how it is amateurish" and get no response. It's just a big fuck you waste of time.
I tried helping in some subs but was met with hostility. Tried directing someone to the proper channels (mailing lists) to search for help with a openbsd hardware issue and I get insulted in return because they didn't like my answer. And it wasn't a rude "RTFM" reply but an honest helpful post explaining the mailing lists and how to search and ask. Fuck that noise. I got better shit to do.
The real purpose of reddit is to aggregate people around faux community to sell ads. You have nothing but circle jerks and fanboyism but no actual meat and potatoes. Even after deleting every single worthless default main sub the subs I try to watch are all "look what I did!". Actual questions are never answered. It's all about showcasing to get circle jerks going so people can live vicariously through the achievements of others. That keeps the eyeballs on the ads.
I find myself going back to IRC where the barrier of entry is much higher so you wind up with people who know a thing or two.
As always: It depends. There are great communities and in-depth discussions on niche topics to be found on reddit, but of course there's a lot of low quality content. Particularly when it comes to product recommendations, many reddit communities seem to have become an echo chamber and settled on the same few products they have been suggesting for a while. Often those aren't necessarily bad recommendations, but they are far from in-depth and rarely backed by any actual experience with or tests of the product in question - instead it's become a popularity contest.
I do visit some niche Discord channels which are well guarded and the help is certainly there. Though, as another poster mentioned and I have said before is Discord allows too much distracting visual fluff. IRC keeps the conversation focused thanks to the lack of said visual fluff. It's also extremely cross platform and isn't hostile to community made clients.
Reddit has a lot good communities sharing good info for niche subjects. The top 100 or so subreddits are as you say, but there are some good ones further down. And the reason to not use reddits search engine is that it still is very bad.
> It's a cesspool of kiddie memes, shock, ill informed opinion and political posturing.
You could make the same generalization about the internet as a whole. Reddit has so many communities and there is a lot of variety. r/fountainpens for example has none of the ills you describe.
The people here aren't talking about finding a meme that contains words in their search.
Reddit is simply the largest site that disincentivises content-for-contents sake. When you find someone asking a complex question, the person answering it does it because they have a real answer- not because they can make some money by googling the answer and rewording it. That's what the rest of Google's content often devolves to. For certain topics.
Browsing reddit is as described, I never go to r/all for that reason, not do I feel obliged to login, comment or vote in most cases but if you limit your consumption of reddit to a few subs, the difference is huge.
Most of reddit does suck. There are still really useful communities—my go-to example is /r/askhistorians, which has some of the highest quality analysis and research on the internet.
Protagonist shames people who work in marketing, calls them bottom feeders, low skill workers and spammers. Protagonist’s product offers ‘marketing emails’ service
Protagonist is trying to make money selling email marketing services. It isn't working. He wants to make money (it's not a charity)
There are millions of dollars per month to be made in ranking #1 for Mortgages. Protagonist says it is easy. Protagonist isn't making the money that would bring in. But it's easy. That it takes no skill. But he can't make the monies.
Why this article is upvoted is very odd. The article does bring up an interesting topic, there are issues with the incentives SEO places. Just like the incentives that directories placed, anyone remember AAAA Plumbing Services? Or before that, with paying writers per word/line (I'm looking at you books from the 1800s)
Aligning incentives is hard. And it's interesting. But the arrogance of the person who wrote the article is amazing, not to mention the cognitive dissonance he must experience. I personally couldn't get over that to really appreciate the larger topic being covered.
I noticed that too and am shocked this comment isn't at the top.
Related, I'd find an attempt to measure the amount of waste in SEO blogspam and email spam/ham very interesting. I.e. who gets the real landfill designation.
A truck driver's indignation would at least be understandable, but you have to assume that an email blast service has some knowledge about how the sausage of online marketing is made.
There's a bit of a difference between talking to people who have asked to hear from you and obfuscating the way people find information by creating noise.
This is 100% how search engine optimization works, the consultants are correct.
As a marketer, when I search for marketing information on Google 70%-90% of the time all of the stuff on the 1st page generally isn't teaching me anything I didn't already know.
But as someone who does this exact thing, I know how expensive good content is - hiring an author to write 3,000 words of valuable information for a reader can cost $500 - $1000 per page. Add another $400 - $1,000 for the consultants time on that page.
Or you can hire writers that produce lower value information for $30 - $120 per 3,000 words that ranks just as well as high quality content.
The first thing I thought when I saw Elon Musk's writing AI was how powerful of a search marketing tool this is.
Reducing your content cost to effectively zero gives you a HUGE competitive advantage.
I know a publisher programmatically generating content and generating millions of organic search visits a month for marginal costs reaching 0 - they pivoted to a tech company after identifying their #1 problem was content costs were too high and ad revenue was too low. Now they're selling this technology to other publishers.
>I'd gladly donate some local lectures on the stuff I know if I had the time.
It sounds like your time is a limited resource and you choose to allocate it to other areas of your life instead of for the good of spreading knowledge. Why then, do you think others should give their time away for free?
No offense taken, yours is a valid criticism -- until you meet 20+ internet marketers in real life.
There are a lot of very greedy people with a lot of time on their hands but they choose to try and strangle the internet instead of bettering it. And I am left saddened that I have a family to support, health to improve, and work on having my own retirement fund. Maybe start a business or two as well.
Trust me I get it. But currently I have to think of the future and there are only 14-15 active hours a day.
Yours remains a valid remark. If we want to have useful internet then maybe a lot of personal lives have to be sacrificed.
I get where you're coming from. But I'm going to offer another perspective. There is a shitload of content being made on the internet, and I believe you too would agree the vast majority of content on the web could be hardly called "knowledge" and are more likely to have a negative effect than good on society. And it's literally all free, they don't get paid for that, it's just what people naturally do, and technological advancements have made it really easy to do.
In such a landscape, how do we incentivize the proliferation of actually useful content and knowledge? It's not so easy as to just putting words out there most of the time is it? The content we consider valuable have significant amounts of time, research, and thought behind them I would assume. Time is a limited resource, and it is often that the people who have the most valuable knowledge to offer have less of it while those who post meaningless crap have the most.
>> "Knowledge should be free at our point in time and supposed evolutional stage. But it's not."
We only evolved technologically. Our economic systems are still stuck in the 19th century. The planet's cultures are still recovering from a string of empires that valued domination and assimilation over cooperation.
For now, I have to charge for my skills to live. Some day I hope to be able to have hobbies and share their output without having to monetize them to fund the efforts.
Knowledge can be free, with the caveat that you'll usually get what you pay for. We think back fondly of the early Internet when there were all types of truly informative sites.
But we forget that few people even had the Internet back then, and it wasn't commerce-oriented in the way it is now. And back then, those with the capability to put websites online, without things like Blogspot, Wordpress, and the like, were a pretty select minority who had the technical chops and a desire to spread information without expecting any compensation.
I do. My main barrier to being more useful and community active is my limited time. As I said above, I wouldn't charge a penny if I had the time to share more knowledge.
But then the people writing high quality content end up drowned in the deluge, and the market drives itself towards the local minima of quality. That is very, very fucked up.
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.
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.
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?
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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'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?
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'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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The Internet needs a good non-profit search engine that has no conflicts of interest. It could be funded by a foundation like Wikipedia or by the government like PBS, but the world sorely needs this resource.
Most people forget (or never realized) that the main benefit page rank had over previous search engines was that it briefly bypassed pay for placement.
At this point, if search results are dominated by SEO paid placement, then Google search should be as ripe for disruption as the search engines it replaced.
I think a non-profit, curated index is a good first step to disintermediating this whole shady (and spammy) industry.
Wouldn't that be "optimized" for as much as any other? Seems like google wants non-SEO results as much as us, if only so that advertisers are forced to spend their money directly with Google.
> Wouldn't that be "optimized" for as much as any other?
Not with good algorithms and curation. Sure, it will be an arms race. But another benefit is that it would be completely open, so people could build better algorithms on top of it without having to write their own crawlers, which nobody can do now with Google (at least not for free.)
I don't think it's a conflict of interest; we're just seeing sites tuning themselves to rank highly in google. I also think google doesn't actually like the extreme SEM optimization, but rather can't figure out how to discourage it.
It is a well known fact that Wikipedia has bias in how articles are moderated[1]. It is a really bad example to emulate. The last thing you want is search to be controlled by a non-profit organization with bias towards the content. I rather the bias be towards money rather than towards content. The former allows for competing views while the latter doesn't. The former is also highly regulated. The latter isn't.
I don't think the problem is lack of conflicts of interest. The issue is that content creators have far different needs than content consumers. I'm not convinced that Google isn't incentivized to address this, or that a non-profit would have better results (at least not without heavy, expensive curation)
Probably nobody has no conflicts of interest ever. But right now Google is heavily biased toward advertising and data collection which is not good for -- pretty much everybody.
Then how do you propose companies market their products/services? You want us all to go back to pre-90s era where advertising was controlled by few media conglomerates who favoured only the giant corporations? Today, a mom-and-pop store has as much an equal footing as a big-box store when it comes to advertising their products/services online.
Spammy articles should be dealt with the way spam is dealt with in email. Pruning is the way forward in my opinion. Consistent cleaning of the search results of spam and ensuring high quality results should be the priority. I don't understand why the tech crowd is so anti-advertising. I rather the tech crowd focuses on coming up with solutions to remove bad advertising methods rather than do away with advertising all together. The latter will just cause big job losses and the ones affected won't be the large corporations but small business that rely on these cost-effective advertising solutions.
I don’t think it’s searching for things that’s the problem, it’s creating things of value. There’s no reason to create a great piece of content if no one sees it. To get people to see it you need to fill it with fluff for google.
The very existence of 'things of value' is what motivated people to build crawlers and search engines in the first place. There are many reasons to create 'a great piece of content', even if nobody else is likely to see it (e.g. for my personal reference, consolidating my understanding, just for fun, etc.). Filling it with fluff simply reduces its 'greatness'.
I think the problem is figuring out how we systematically identify things of value.
My personal feeling is that the solution lies in having good 'seed' URLs with which to build indexes. This might be done using curated lists, as a number of people here suggest, or perhaps through crawling and scoring the content.
Is this merely a continuation of the inevitable "Eternal September" effect?
The internet is a reflection of its users. That's why HN'ers tend to look back on 'what it once was' very romantically, because back then it only catered to the technically-minded, the critical thinkers, and so the content matched the demographic.
In hindsight (because I'm not smart enough to have seen it before it happened, and only just smart enough to join the already-joined dots) this was inevitable. Catering to world + dog means anything goes in the pursuit of eyeballs (= sales). Whatever search system is put in place will be manipulated towards this goal.
If a large proportion of the users don't care / don't notice / accept this is normal, then it IS normal.
Television, Radio, newspapers, and magazines are all (predominantly) advertising landfills.
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.
This is just the flip side of what was at the time a revolutionary search strategy: prior to Google search results were even worse than they are now. Altavista and the rest were just indexing content and providing naive text search over their cache of the Internet and spammers had ensured that only very specific searches having nothing to do with commerce were discoverable.
Then Google came along with PageRank, which rated pages based on which and how many other sites linked to them. Suddenly the Internet was usable again. For a few years. But spammers caught on and the algorithm has had to become more complex. But companies are so desperate for attention and there’s so much money floating around that the huge swaths of entirely fake content have sprung up and become more and more sophisticated.
Unfortunately Google still rules and it takes some unsavory activity to get a new product or service to surface effectively. That’s not actually a new phenomenon, it’s just different mechanisms. But I feel sorry for anyone in the situation described here. I would not be able to bring myself to do effective PR in this or any other age.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 guess if google was willing to do no evil for a moment and actually think what would make both their search better for the user and www better place overall, they would put a big button next to each search result saying roughly "Hey, dear google. Every thing I have ever seen in this domain is full of crap. Please do not ever again show any page from this domain in my search results" And then use the information from this button to lower the search score for any domain with high level of users willing to ignore a domain completely.
Won't work: SEOs already send user signals by literally paying normal, average persons to once in a while do a search for something and click on each result until they arrive at example.tld.
The thinking is that Google tracks keywords + clicks, and if people search for "keyword" and aren't satisfied with the info on domain1, domain2 and domain3 (demonstrated by clicking on the next result) but are satisfied after visiting example.tld (demonstrated by not clicking on any other results), Google will rank example.tld higher.
It's not cheap, and I consider it to be more Voodoo than proven fact, and most SEO people are generally more the religious type than the scientist, so they won't run tests. They do it, see that they rank well and continue to do it. I've suggested sacrificing chickens, but nobody listens to me (or they won't admit that they do).
This functionality can be misused by your competitor(s)! There already is the issue of companies fraudulently clicking on search and display ads just to damage the advertising budget of competitors. This would only open up another dimension for abuse.
Hiding a domain for just you is fine but this isnt a good idea.
>And then use the information from this button to lower the search score for any domain with high level of users willing to ignore a domain completely.
Its trivial to game and becomes just another service for SEO consultants to sell ie having some mix of botfarms and humans in low cost of living countries flag your competitors sites.
While I would personally love such a feature; there's the issue of computer illeterate people who accidentally click on it for a domain they care about, forget about it, and then have no idea why the google is broken
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I reckon that arms-race only exists because the web is fundamentally broken due to having/allowing some level of anonymity.
If you could perma-ban a spammer's real world identity or that of his company (or any company they're a part of), then there would be no need for the arms race. Just a continual "negotiation" whereby bad behavior is informed and requested to stop. And if that entity decided to ignore such a request they'd get the nuclear option of being permanently banned from the platform. You could argue that such a system would not be that different to real-world licensing requirements/restrictions as applied to lawyers and doctors.
Just follow the identity like you would the money, and you could solve a good chunk of this issue.
It does seem to have worsened lately. Especially the crappy Consent to cookies things that block half the screen with an advert covering the other half. Even with a adblocker and pi hole it's becoming unbearable
99% of these cookie warnings are not GDPR compliant, they offer no option to opt-out and continue reading the site (cookies are not required for a blog post to function and even if they were these don't need the warning) and they opt-in by default, all the tracking cookies are still there no matter whether you accept or not.
Anyone that thinks this is GDPR compliance shouldn't be allowed to touch a computer.
There are bad actors in every industry. Good job generalizing here. I’m one of those “bottom feeders” you wrote about to promote your service.
I’m sorry you got conned by a snake oil salesman. It sounds like your BS detector is broken. It’s a shame you didn’t do a bit more research to find a credible SEO service (or learn to do it the right way yourself).
"Good SEO” isn’t about “tricking search engines”. It’s about empathy for the user, and has a strong UX component.
If you're creating hollow content, or a poor experience otherwise, why would you expect users to convert, let alone come back to the site or tell a friend about it?
My SEO philosophy/approach is to gain a solid understanding of the intent behind a query/problem, and then create the best experience possible to address/answer that query. When you do a better job at answering the user question than the other sites out there, and your "UX metrics", (i.e. bounce rate, time on site) validate this experience, you're on the right path.
It's obviously more complicated than this, but that's where I start.
“Good SEO” is a long-term bet. “Tricks” that get you ranking on the first page are useless if search visitors bounce from your site once they realize your content is rubbish. Will AI-generated content create a best-in-class experience for a user? I have a hard time believing that it would.
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.
I don't know why this ranked here. This is an overly-simolistic cynical take on SEO and search engines. Get into detail, state examples supporting your assertions. Sure search engines make money on junk SEO, but it's not their primary motivator and at least Google works to diminish junk SEO. Their product just does better and makes more money on quality content; Google knows this and it's why they're still the top player in the game.
> And that’s what the internet has become. Full of gossip, junk content, paid posts, con articles, click bait links, sock-puppetry, spam, regurgitated spam, free e-books, self aggrandizement, fake followers, fake news, - all designed to achieve one thing - con the Search Engine - and you.
Most of this is junk, but TBH the free e-books don't bother me one bit. I even like a few of the peddlers who deploy this tactc, if the content is any good.
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.
I honestly think the only way back from this is to curated lists like in the old days.
Or specialized search engines. as a user I'm often using byzantine strings of words to get the result I want because of all the SEO if I had access to an engine that only had programming related stuff, or only had recipe related websites, or only political stuff I think I would have an easier time searching it would also give the creators of the specific content an easy place to post their wares.
Kinda like specialized torrent sites. Ever since I got access to content specific torrent sites I haven't used public sites, and I have only had to use private general sites once or twice.
Because the search-engine is content specific it'll be better at organizing the information and surfacing what I'm interested in finding, I think there will still be a place for google but it'll be less useful than it is today.
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).
Could it be anything otherwise? For any given search term there may be millions of results but only 50 or so will make the first page. No matter what you do, you can't expect to be one of those 50.
We've reached an era when you can't simply rely on the search engine to do your marketing for you. You'll have to do the traditional route of marketing where you take the responsibility of getting the word out on your product.
This is similar to YouTubers complaining when their traffic takes a nose-dive because YouTube tweaked some recommendation algorithm.
In other words, this is what the long-tail looks like.
BTW I see a lot of -- Google does not give me back what I ask for when I type is X -- and that is true.
That is NOT because of SEO however. That is their use of AI in language interpretation and how it is being used in algorithms, which really, well sucks.
If you want them to get better go to Twitter and tell them how irrelevant they have become or how much you hate the ads or all the featured spaces - because you know what SEOS have been telling them for a long time, but they ignore us.
If regular users started telling them? They might listen.
_________
But this post? It is bovine feces.
> Why? Because there’s so much competition in my line of business and i need the initial paid traffic.
So this in itself is a problem. Why would your business be more relevant if there's much meaningful competition?
It really depends on what you're searching for. Taking the bike example. No search engine could ever give a meaningful result when just searching for "bike". You need to get more deep into the material and search with specialized terms. "bike internal hub" looks pretty fair in Google.
I checked out his product and I can see his predicament... a lot of other services do the same things. He's just doing it in a simple way (with what appears to be a very sane pricing model).
Would suggest that SEO is just one of many tactics to acquire users. I bet that from this article - you'll get waaaay more customers for your early stage product than ranking on google would have gotten you at this early stage.
I used to be obsessed with SEO - now I realize that many companies, search just isn't the best way to acquire customers. I saw this - currently investing in SEO and moving up the rankings steadily because long term - it feels like a great source of brand awareness.
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 :)
I blame Google. They could easily derank sites with paywalls, interstitials, and 4mb of trackers but this goes against their core business. When paywalls stopped being considered "cloaking" I knew the free web was done for Google search.
I'm not sure if there's much research on the subject, but in my experience a huge majority of "slow" sites are directly caused by tons of tracking and ad code.
How many of us are actually okay with any of that? I've never paid for an "article" subscription and don't know anyone that has.
Google should provide at least the dumbest notation of "this site is paywalled". What you click is no longer what site you end up on.
I would much rather just see the 99% of internet pages that are free, remove that other shit from my search results. But it's Google's bread and butter so they never will
Oh, poor content farms can't make money that way? Good. I'm fine with my internet feed looking like 1999. The internet was far more useful before it was a medium for a bunch of assholes to make money off "content"
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 think what frustrates me most about the current state of SEO is that it is a race to the bottom for both businesses and consumers. Below a certain threshhold of notability, traffic essentially becomes correlated with SEO spend. Even the business that wins the SEO war in its local community can end up with issues, as for certain industries the disproportionate number of eyes on the first few links can easily balloon into an unmanageable amount of service calls and customer support infrastructure needs, when all the while perfectly adequate businesses languish away on the second and third SERPs ends up fighting over the remaining 5% traffic scraps.
In an ideal world, traffic numbers would be correlated with some combination of product quality mixed with a sort of load-balancing effect so that each quality company could match their available supply to the demand. I still believe, perhaps naively, that search engines could have profitably built infrastructure to serve the needs of consumers in this way -- focus group-like services for commercial search that would require companies to pay for the privilege of submitting to objective evaluations of their products in exchange for more traffic. In a structure like this, the incentives of search engines and end users could be aligned.
Instead, Eric Schmidt and the rest of the market share MBAs came into the picture and we got precisely the opposite -- instead of holding businesses beholden to the needs of end users, now we have this insidious and dystopian perpetual advertising machine where not only are businesses now beholden to the needs of a faceless SEO algorithm, funneling money away from R&D and into this annoying waterfall of trite crap noted by this article, but IMO even worse is that end users are essentially beholden to the needs of the corporations -- either by getting creepily data-mined and harvested for the benefit of the highest AdWords bidder, or by getting inundated by constant ads, as anyone who has tried watching YouTube without AdBlocker on can attest to. I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I say that nobody wins except the search engine stockholders.
I was totally heartbroken when Google sold out and created AdWords. I naively had thought it would never happen -- Brin and Page were literally on record saying, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers” (Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998)[0].
So I've had embarrassingly heated discussions with Googler family members where I raise this issue, and their defense has been essentially that AdWords is a necessary evil that funds all their infrastructure expenses, as well as their cool R&D and "20% time" and all their ML advancements that they get to do, like AlphaGo, Waymo etc.
But I really think that when your company depends on perverse incentives in this way, the end result will ultimately drift away from their original job of serving consumers, and eventually exist only to inflate their own share price and run what amounts to a protectionist racket. The only difference is that the threat of withholding SEO traffic is much cheaper and efficient option than mafia shakedowns.
Off the top of my head on a Sunday, a few laws that might help remedy the SEO situation:
* Make all posted internet content public domain (no limits on scraping).
* Make any scraped public data used for profit be available to the public via a license similar to the GPL (similarly to how medical research of public data should be shared with the public rather than hidden behind a paywall).
* Legally separate search from industries such as advertising and shipping (apply some antitrust legislation for once).
* Require some sort of tech support for redress of grievances (if a human can't be reached within say 10 business days, allow escalation to a government agency that can apply injunctions or other red tape to encourage monopolistic companies to play nicely).
* Implement steep fines for market manipulation, similar to insider trading laws. If a search engine pulls the listing that another business's livelihood depends upon, and it can be proven that (for example) a competitor or business partner initiated the pull, then it should open the search engine up to collusion charges. Frivolous pulls not remedied after say 10 business days would be treated as malicious and open the search engine to an audit of its relationships with its clients in that space.
Please if anyone has more ideas, let's hear them. I'd vote to look at the merits of any new laws rather than their likelihood of being implemented, which I realize is likely quite low!
SEO is essentially voodoo bullshit right? The people I’ve met who hawk it are the same people who in the same breath refer to themselves as UX professionals, interaction designers, or some other nebulous term. It’s yet another thing that requires little to no training but gives these people clout in their organization and a role to play.
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.
Kind of the opposite. Amazon and other big retailers dominate, sometimes you want to know what other people are selling and to buy from them. Right now there isn't a lot of point in ecommerce as the land grab has already gone.
My idea of a better filter is to rate pages on the quality of the HTML. SEO is never about that and the search engines essentially ignore all the element tags.
If there was an incentive for people to write non-bloated HTML that used all the elements and had proper document outlines rather than just look pretty then I think we could eliminate people who can't do decent web pages, including Amazon.
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.
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.
We are not using tricks when we tell you to create content. We are telling you what Google considers quality.
Tricks are for blackhats and they can work and there is nothing wrong with that, but what you are talking bout is actual white hat SEO that Google demands from sites to be considered quality enough to rank.
And the "it's easy" garbage.
Go ahead. Let us know how easy it is when you are done doing it by yourself.
It sounds like you know a lot on this topic and have good information to contribute, but could you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? For example, the rule that asks you to edit out the name-calling ("garbage", "bovine feces") is an important one.
> We are not using tricks when we tell you to create content. We are telling you what Google considers quality.
That may very well be true but taken to its logical conclusion all you're really admitting is that Google does a very poor job of accurately assessing the quality of any given piece of content. And that pretty much nails the point of the post.
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 +.
>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.)
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.
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.
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.