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Ask HN: Did SEO Ruin the Web?
Every time I search for a simple question (e.g. "When is the next season of X out?"), rather than getting a simple answer (e.g. "October 20th, 2019") I'm given a bunch of articles that seem to be artificially inflated just to make the search engine happy that there is enough content/keywords. I feel like publishers don't have the best interest of readers in mind anymore and web pages are just a vehicle to deliver keywords wrapped with useless content, and worst of all, this seems to be directly caused and encouraged by search engines.
- lettergram 7y agoI mean... getting an answer of "October 20th, 2019" is nice, but also that's Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc. pulling data from some other website and not getting them the click. So I don't know if you're actually concerned so much about SEO. Regarding the general concept of SEO, I wrote some of my thoughts about it here: https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/ https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/ But essentially, Google has perverse incentives as a search provider. They don't want to give you the best answer either. They want you to click ads. SEO has actually very little to do with it in my opinion.
- tlb 7y agoIt's actually something to appreciate about Google: given the massive incentives to optimize for ad-clicks, they do an OK job at giving you the results you want. If they followed short-term incentives, they'd be like OutBrain.