I remember the days when internet as a whole were simpler in terms of contents and users, and search engines reflected that simpicity. I am not sure if it's possible to go back to those days.
Or a search engine with zetabytes of data and the world's largest collection of AI PhDs. It could be possible that they have the advantage over some scam artist smoking cigs in front of a screen at 3am, considering it's their system.
I wonder if google could even return to its heyday if it wanted. Even if they stopped playing dumb games with search there a alot more malicious actors whose entire career is to fuck up search results now.
I feel like low-quality advertising results, low-quality-match results, and scammy results are at least 3 different bad search result types to get, and folks here are talking about the former
of course, google gets paid to show them, and I don't think anyone here realistically expects google to voluntarily stop intentionally fucking up search results unless it somehow means a larger paycheck to them
Reducing yearly revenue from 250 billion to 200 billion seems like a reasonable tradeoff for not hobbling and annoying more than half the population of the earth and also maintaining brand longevity. Right now they are further and further ripening for disruption by an upstart.
Ah yes, the good ol' days of content farms copying from stack overflow, or did you mean the good ol' days of buying back links? Or the good ol' days of web rings?
Let's face it, the heyday of honest results are just as mythical as the political "good ol' days".
I honestly don't get your snark. Those were the good old days of the Internet, when SEO spam and PageRank wasn't a thing. Then Google came and made the Internet even better, then it turned to shit, and here we are. And web rings were great, you take that back.
So yes, there was a period of time when the Internet was in some ways better than nowadays. Now I'm not saying that everything that happened since is bad, but Internet search and signal-to-noise ratio has definitely fallen off a cliff.
Let's enjoy the good days of siloes and SEO optimization. I doubt it'll get better.
Notably, around `08 or `09, these cycles stopped. From the outside, it looks like Google stopped trying to fight spam and just gave a bunch of huge sites a permanent boost in rankings instead, so at least some of your results might not be spammy garbage.
Also honest content moved into video and podcasting formats (that are harder to index) or inside walled gardens like Twitter or Facebook. It's like if the internet was a sea and Google was the ship used to navigate it, the water has dried up and now it's just craggy shoals we have to navigate around to get anywhere.
I honestly switched to google from alltheweb and altavista initially because of the easier name and muscle memory taking hold. To this day I believe Altavista was better when google first took off.
