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I do think that Google has a technical vision. They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage. They want to offer people focused answers t

by petra 8y ago

I do think that Google has a technical vision. They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage. They want to offer people focused answers to their questions. They want to serve as your personal assistant. They want people to really trust the first answer they get from Google. And they want to be deeply integrated with your life. The thing is: building AWS is more of an engineering project. Achieving Google's list is more of a research project - it's just far harder and less predictable. Some will even say those goals require artificial general intelligence. Assuming that's the case, the fact that Google leads the world in AI/ML , hints that they are doing a good job, right ?

tyingq 8y ago
"They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage" I'm not convinced on this one. It feels like they've ceded the SEO spam war to me. As mentioned in the article, they just crudely exclude large swaths of content now instead of trying to filter out actually bad content. And they have just generally devalued the organic results in favor of ads, widgets, curated stuff...anything that keeps you walled in to Google owned properties or ads. It's fairly common now to have zero organic results above the fold.
- petra 8y ago
  As of anything with SEO, it's all guesses. But in general, the job of SEO's is increasingly being about writing better content and satisfying the user, and less about "tricks". That's true , at least generally. But when i say better content, better is defined as more engaging, shareable, linkable, clickable. that sort of stuff. This isn't our cup of tea here at HN, but maybe that's what most people go for. Maybe. BTW, my fun pet conspiracy theory(everybody should have one!) , is that somewhere deep in the belly of alphabet, they have a secret search engine built for engineers, that nobody knows it exists, even the engineers(it uses a google theme), and it's the key behind their moonshot empire. :)
  - paulcole 8y ago
    > But when i say better content, better is defined as more engaging, shareable, linkable, clickable. that sort of stuff. This isn't our cup of tea here at HN, but maybe that's what most people go for. Maybe. Are you kidding? Look at the articles posted on HN. MANY are pure marketing or self-promotion pieces designed to be shared on social media like HN, get clicks, and start discussion. It’s funny how HN commenters only call it seo, clickbait, and marketing if they don’t like it lol.
    - petra 8y ago
      The articles here aren't that great. that's true. But would you say the same about the comments ? But also, we come here mostly for entertainment. And even in our entertainment we prefer a high-quality discussion. But Google isn't a tool for entertainment. And people here do complain about shitty Google results. And to be fair, they also complain about the declining quality of HN. But still, it's better than the alternative communities, probably.
      - paulcole 8y ago
        No, for the most part I don’t think the comments here are particularly good. Plenty of people who think because they’re paid a lot of money to be computer programmers that they can instantly have genius insights into completely unrelated fields. A good amount of “well actually” when any social issue is discussed. Surprising volume of apologizing for discrimination/racism/sexism/etc. under the guise of “free speech”.
        petra 8y ago
        Maybe you're right about discussions about social issues. But for me, that's not the reason i come here. I'm more interested in discussion about entrepreneurship and businesses, and some of the commentors are quite good.
- AJ007 8y ago
  Google wants extractable facts that they can insert directly in the search results. I speculate the users want it too, at least as long as those “facts” are actually true. The more voice makes up the percentage of searches, the fewer searches will be directly to a non-paid organic website. Anyone trying to build a scalable business and expecting SEO to play a meaningful role probably doesn’t have a firm grasp on what Google has done over the past 10 years and will continue to do. Most businesses, and their investors, should be calculating what their numbers look like if they were to receive 0 free users from Google.
  - petra 8y ago
    >> Anyone trying to build a scalable business and expecting SEO to play a meaningful role Maybe true. but it can still, sometimes be an effective tool for small businesses, both in local and organic.
taneq 8y ago
To be fair, they only lead the world in AI because they bought DeepMind.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- muro 8y ago
  Photos, voice recognition/assistant, search, smart reply etc. are not made by DeepMind. Same for their tensor processor hardware and tensorflow.
Jedi72 8y ago
Google's current vision is to try and shape/control the tech landscape to a point where you have to pay them to be found, distributed on or otherwise operate over the internet. They would like to have all search, social interaction and business services to be transacted or facilitated by them, so they can make money from it. That's at direct odds with all the missions you just stated, and is inevitble because of where the dollars ultimately come from.
- petra 8y ago
  Maybe. But once you most people blindy trust the first answer Google gives them , you know what an awesome sales tool that is ? And instead of advertisers having 4 Adwords + 4 local search(sometimes) + Google shopping + SEO to target placement for - what if everyone competed for the same, single ad placement location ? What would that do ad prices ?
iforgotpassword 8y ago
First of all, they want to make money. By selling ads, primarily. They cloned iOS not because they think they can make it better but because they saw how big mobile would get, and didn't like that apple was in control. They want to cut costs by trying to automate everything with "deep learning and AI." > They want people to really trust the first answer they get from Google. Yeah they already messed up this one by going for their ai crap here. I still remember the article about the journalist who google claimed was dead when you googled her name. Not just that but it was nearly impossible for her to contact anyone at google to correct that. Which is not surprising if you consider the arrogance of google. Nobody there even considers that their automation could make mistakes, so why have any way of contacting a real person there that could do anything? Seriously I mean it. That's the only explanation I can come up with after having read countless articles about how google locked down people's gmail for "suspicious activity" and made it impossible to reactivate, or contact anyone who could even provide any information about what exactly is wrong. All the stories about YouTube's inconsistent flagging of videos, false copyright strikes and no way of getting help. Even big channels that have a dedicated representative get a "sorry can't do anything" in many of those cases. If you ever get fucked over by google your only hope is that you can make a post on some big website that will blow up to the point where google sees it might damage their reputation.
- petra 8y ago
  We're not the target audience. When grandma googles something, and sees a "quick answer" does she trust it ? probably.
mbrodersen 8y ago
The #1 priority for Google is to sell ads. That's it. Anything else is marketing/nice to haves.

by petra 8y ago

tyingq 8y ago

"They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage" I'm not convinced on this one. It feels like they've ceded the SEO spam war to me. As mentioned in the article, they just crudely exclude large swaths of content now instead of trying to filter out actually bad content. And they have just generally devalued the organic results in favor of ads, widgets, curated stuff...anything that keeps you walled in to Google owned properties or ads. It's fairly common now to have zero organic results above the fold.

petra 8y ago
As of anything with SEO, it's all guesses. But in general, the job of SEO's is increasingly being about writing better content and satisfying the user, and less about "tricks". That's true , at least generally. But when i say better content, better is defined as more engaging, shareable, linkable, clickable. that sort of stuff. This isn't our cup of tea here at HN, but maybe that's what most people go for. Maybe. BTW, my fun pet conspiracy theory(everybody should have one!) , is that somewhere deep in the belly of alphabet, they have a secret search engine built for engineers, that nobody knows it exists, even the engineers(it uses a google theme), and it's the key behind their moonshot empire. :)
- paulcole 8y ago
  > But when i say better content, better is defined as more engaging, shareable, linkable, clickable. that sort of stuff. This isn't our cup of tea here at HN, but maybe that's what most people go for. Maybe. Are you kidding? Look at the articles posted on HN. MANY are pure marketing or self-promotion pieces designed to be shared on social media like HN, get clicks, and start discussion. It’s funny how HN commenters only call it seo, clickbait, and marketing if they don’t like it lol.
  - petra 8y ago
    The articles here aren't that great. that's true. But would you say the same about the comments ? But also, we come here mostly for entertainment. And even in our entertainment we prefer a high-quality discussion. But Google isn't a tool for entertainment. And people here do complain about shitty Google results. And to be fair, they also complain about the declining quality of HN. But still, it's better than the alternative communities, probably.
    - paulcole 8y ago
      No, for the most part I don’t think the comments here are particularly good. Plenty of people who think because they’re paid a lot of money to be computer programmers that they can instantly have genius insights into completely unrelated fields. A good amount of “well actually” when any social issue is discussed. Surprising volume of apologizing for discrimination/racism/sexism/etc. under the guise of “free speech”.
      - petra 8y ago
        Maybe you're right about discussions about social issues. But for me, that's not the reason i come here. I'm more interested in discussion about entrepreneurship and businesses, and some of the commentors are quite good.
AJ007 8y ago
Google wants extractable facts that they can insert directly in the search results. I speculate the users want it too, at least as long as those “facts” are actually true. The more voice makes up the percentage of searches, the fewer searches will be directly to a non-paid organic website. Anyone trying to build a scalable business and expecting SEO to play a meaningful role probably doesn’t have a firm grasp on what Google has done over the past 10 years and will continue to do. Most businesses, and their investors, should be calculating what their numbers look like if they were to receive 0 free users from Google.
- petra 8y ago
  >> Anyone trying to build a scalable business and expecting SEO to play a meaningful role Maybe true. but it can still, sometimes be an effective tool for small businesses, both in local and organic.

taneq 8y ago

To be fair, they only lead the world in AI because they bought DeepMind.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
muro 8y ago
Photos, voice recognition/assistant, search, smart reply etc. are not made by DeepMind. Same for their tensor processor hardware and tensorflow.

Jedi72 8y ago

Google's current vision is to try and shape/control the tech landscape to a point where you have to pay them to be found, distributed on or otherwise operate over the internet. They would like to have all search, social interaction and business services to be transacted or facilitated by them, so they can make money from it. That's at direct odds with all the missions you just stated, and is inevitble because of where the dollars ultimately come from.

petra 8y ago
Maybe. But once you most people blindy trust the first answer Google gives them , you know what an awesome sales tool that is ? And instead of advertisers having 4 Adwords + 4 local search(sometimes) + Google shopping + SEO to target placement for - what if everyone competed for the same, single ad placement location ? What would that do ad prices ?

iforgotpassword 8y ago

First of all, they want to make money. By selling ads, primarily. They cloned iOS not because they think they can make it better but because they saw how big mobile would get, and didn't like that apple was in control. They want to cut costs by trying to automate everything with "deep learning and AI." > They want people to really trust the first answer they get from Google. Yeah they already messed up this one by going for their ai crap here. I still remember the article about the journalist who google claimed was dead when you googled her name. Not just that but it was nearly impossible for her to contact anyone at google to correct that. Which is not surprising if you consider the arrogance of google. Nobody there even considers that their automation could make mistakes, so why have any way of contacting a real person there that could do anything? Seriously I mean it. That's the only explanation I can come up with after having read countless articles about how google locked down people's gmail for "suspicious activity" and made it impossible to reactivate, or contact anyone who could even provide any information about what exactly is wrong. All the stories about YouTube's inconsistent flagging of videos, false copyright strikes and no way of getting help. Even big channels that have a dedicated representative get a "sorry can't do anything" in many of those cases. If you ever get fucked over by google your only hope is that you can make a post on some big website that will blow up to the point where google sees it might damage their reputation.

petra 8y ago
We're not the target audience. When grandma googles something, and sees a "quick answer" does she trust it ? probably.

mbrodersen 8y ago

The #1 priority for Google is to sell ads. That's it. Anything else is marketing/nice to haves.