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There was a very good thread on HN about this not long ago(1). Google search is getting worse because it is letting companies like Pinterest game it. Instead o
by superasn 5y ago
There was a very good thread on HN about this not long ago(1). Google search is getting worse because it is letting companies like Pinterest game it.
Instead of fixing the spam they are instead encouraging companies to spend more and more time on SEO and coming up with their own shenanigans like better ranking for using AMP (defunct now).
People who generally make great content (think a researcher or a great software maker) can't compete with billion dollar companies like Canva, Shutterstock and Pinterest who spend millions of dollars on SEO and have dedicated SEO employees who spend all day sending outreach emails and doing experiments. Henceforth the good content never even sees the light of the day; drowned by all this "SEO" optimized content.
FWIW i still believe it's the job of the search engine to find great relevant content and show it to the user instead of the other way round. Though I know it's much easier said than done.
(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25538586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25538586
- joe_the_user 5y agoIt's not even just gaming or priority. As others mention, it just straight up ignores substantial search terms or interprets them only to sell mainstream crap. It will return nothing rather than obscure terms that are present on the web.
- seoaeu 5y agoI don't understand this narrative that Google is making the search results get worse or "letting" companies game it. Search result ranking is adversarial! If the results are worse than they once were, that just means that Google is less far ahead in the arms race than they used to be
- mleonhard 5y agoAn alternative explanation is that Google stopped caring about UX.
- AwaAwa 5y agoA doodle a day, is the UX way.
- hedora 5y agoI think this summarizes the argument that Google search is imploding: - Many of the problems are self-inflicted (dropping search terms, pages of other stuff before first link). - They’re getting worse faster than their competition. - Google apparently helped at least one external SEO team game image search into relevance-oblivion. (Also, “narrative” usually implies “fiction” or “concerted disinformation campaign”, and is either used as a weasel word by liars referring to their own writing/reporting, or it’s used as a pejorative. I don’t think you meant to imply either.)
- systemBuilder 5y agoThe rest of you guys are too young to remember but I remember something called yellow pages and white pages. Google has certainly forgotten. White pages Were a search index that could never be monetized in the phone book! Google offers only yellow pages!
- rileymat2 5y agohttps://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec00003/?sp=28&r=0.484,0.136,0.263,0.392,0 https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec00003/?s... I do not think this is true, some businesses got special stuff in the white pages.
- hedora 5y agoIn the pages you linked, they’ve mixed businesses and personal lines, and bolded the business lines. In some states, there was a separate section in the back (On blue pages? Wasn’t there a red section too?) with just the business listings. Still, not a big deal either way. Even with the yellow pages, listings were alphabetical, and grouped by business type, and businesses could pay for bigger listings. I’d forgotten how information dense listings used to be (probably due to lack of filtering, but it still makes me want yelp to do better) https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec04924x/?sp=411&r=0.046,0.096,0.47,0.673,0 https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec04924x/?...
- OrderlyTiamat 5y ago> AMP (defunct now) What did I miss?