3 ms·

Problem is, I expect 2010 google search would be considerably worse now than it was in 2010, because "SEO" has had another decade to evolve.

bigger_cheese 5y ago
There was already SEO stuff going on back then people were less aware of it. I can remember during height of the Iraq war people manipulated google to display George Bush as the top result for "Miserable Failure" and there were other exercises like that happening. It's hard for me to pick a sweet spot for the internet in many ways I feel like I've grown up with it. I can remember the web of circa 1995 to 1997 with Gif's that wouldn't render properly in internet explorer, HTML marquee scrolling text and the dreaded blink tag being used everywhere. You needed to play search engine bingo with Altavista, Metacrawler, Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos etc etc. And it was a crap shoot if search engines would give you useful results. I can remember the web of 1998 to 2000 where every web developer seemed to discover html frames at the same time. We had good search with Google but pop up ads were so rife that the internet was borderline unusable. I can remember all the free webmail sites like hotmail, yahoo etc. ICQ chat was massive (whatever happened to that - it was a staple of my teen internet). In Early 2000's Firefox came along and saved the internet by virtue of its built in popup blocking. But there was a mishmap of "Applets" and "Plugins" everywhere Flash Player, Java Applets, Real Player etc. Video (and audio) on the web was terrible half the time it would complain about missing codecs, it would buffer forever and if something did load it would be the size of a postage stamp and look pixelated as all hell. I remember Gmail came out and everyone went gaga over it's interface. Last period that real stands out is the mid to late 00's with development of big Social Media sites, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc. The web got more and more javascript heavy. Web video streaming finally became useable. Google Chrome came out and flash player finally died despite Microsoft trying to revive it with Silverlight. I kind of feel like this last 10 years are a continuation with increased surveillance and tracking.
eitland 5y ago
I think matt_cutts or someone who was active at the same time used to say that. But it still doesn't defend not blocking sites that doesn't contain anything except autogenerated content. And it still doesn't defend ignoring my keywords.
- tempestn 5y ago
  No, the keyword ignoring stems more from catering to the majority of people who don't know how to logically formulate a search for a search engine that expects every word to match. Most people will intuitively just try to ask the search engine a question (even if not literally phrased as such), and so Google has adapted to fill that need. Which even for those of us who would prefer something a bit more clear cut, is honestly handy a lot of the time. I think using +plus +before +keywords still works for situations when you don't want any words ignored? Certainly agree it seems like they could do a better job of burying auto-generated sites though. (Although I'm sure it's a difficult problem!)

bigger_cheese 5y ago

There was already SEO stuff going on back then people were less aware of it. I can remember during height of the Iraq war people manipulated google to display George Bush as the top result for "Miserable Failure" and there were other exercises like that happening. It's hard for me to pick a sweet spot for the internet in many ways I feel like I've grown up with it. I can remember the web of circa 1995 to 1997 with Gif's that wouldn't render properly in internet explorer, HTML marquee scrolling text and the dreaded blink tag being used everywhere. You needed to play search engine bingo with Altavista, Metacrawler, Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos etc etc. And it was a crap shoot if search engines would give you useful results. I can remember the web of 1998 to 2000 where every web developer seemed to discover html frames at the same time. We had good search with Google but pop up ads were so rife that the internet was borderline unusable. I can remember all the free webmail sites like hotmail, yahoo etc. ICQ chat was massive (whatever happened to that - it was a staple of my teen internet). In Early 2000's Firefox came along and saved the internet by virtue of its built in popup blocking. But there was a mishmap of "Applets" and "Plugins" everywhere Flash Player, Java Applets, Real Player etc. Video (and audio) on the web was terrible half the time it would complain about missing codecs, it would buffer forever and if something did load it would be the size of a postage stamp and look pixelated as all hell. I remember Gmail came out and everyone went gaga over it's interface. Last period that real stands out is the mid to late 00's with development of big Social Media sites, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc. The web got more and more javascript heavy. Web video streaming finally became useable. Google Chrome came out and flash player finally died despite Microsoft trying to revive it with Silverlight. I kind of feel like this last 10 years are a continuation with increased surveillance and tracking.

eitland 5y ago

I think matt_cutts or someone who was active at the same time used to say that. But it still doesn't defend not blocking sites that doesn't contain anything except autogenerated content. And it still doesn't defend ignoring my keywords.

tempestn 5y ago
No, the keyword ignoring stems more from catering to the majority of people who don't know how to logically formulate a search for a search engine that expects every word to match. Most people will intuitively just try to ask the search engine a question (even if not literally phrased as such), and so Google has adapted to fill that need. Which even for those of us who would prefer something a bit more clear cut, is honestly handy a lot of the time. I think using +plus +before +keywords still works for situations when you don't want any words ignored? Certainly agree it seems like they could do a better job of burying auto-generated sites though. (Although I'm sure it's a difficult problem!)