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>SEO is part of the reason that traffic began being moved towards blogs and Q&A sites. Exactly mirroring the decline in the quality of google results. You wan

by harry8 4y ago

>SEO is part of the reason that traffic began being moved towards blogs and Q&A sites. Exactly mirroring the decline in the quality of google results. You want something specific with say 4 words in the query string, convincing google not to drop one of those in basically every result it returns giving you nothing but SEO spam is a lot more difficult than it should be. Tried googling for something you read last week following a link and now can't find again despite it being about something really esoteric? So yeah you can work around some of the goog breakage with :allintext or putting a + in front of ever term or putting every term in "quotes" but yeah, at the stage where you're the audience for howtos are you doing that? Dunno. Who is old enough to remember when google was /liked/? Seems like a long time ago now, huh?

nl 4y ago
I'm old enough to still love Google. I think it is the wonder of our age. Hell, I'm old enough to remember when altavista.digitial.com was the most amazing thing I'd seen. But the worse Google results today are as good as the average results from that or any other pre-Google search engine.
benreesman 4y ago
I’m that old. Google was everyone’s favorite thing they’d ever seen on the Internet. Ditto GMail, Maps, etc. Want to really blow people’s minds? The same was true for Facebook. These products didn’t get big enough to have power to abuse by being unpopular. People loved these products.
- rileymat2 4y ago
  I remember the love for Google products, scoring an invite to gmail. I don’t remember a distinct love for facebook. It was much cleaner than MySpace, and kind of exclusive because I needed my university email, but not love.
  - benreesman 4y ago
    Yeah I don't think FB was ever very popular with the techie crowd: it didn't solve a problem they had as those people could like self-host their own blogs and photos and shit (and frankly took some enjoyment in the fact that the plebs couldn't). Techies had IRC and mailing lists and soon HN, etc. Contrast that to Google which was an indispensable tool for any hacker on basically day one, people will forgive a lot from a company that they can't live without. But many if not most non-techie people ranted and raved about how much they loved Facebook well into the 2010s, even if they started calling it Instagram at some point. The general public (especially lefty coastal public) didn't start taking out all their frustrations with Big Tech in general on Facebook in particular until 2016. The story that Facebook got Trump elected is absurd (I worked in the abusive behavior / content moderation group then: I was in the room and the press got this one badly wrong), but it was a riveting story and most people seem to still believe it now. Even some Facebook employees in other orgs seemed to believe that FB had failed in not putting its finger on the scales. As for why anyone would want CEOs of private-sector companies in San Francisco to unilaterally decide who the president is? That is a horrifying thought. I think Big Tech CEOs probably find that a horrifying thought. The fact that they probably could is nightmare fuel enough, and the fact that to my knowledge they don't probably means there is still some Anakin behind the Vader mask. Sorry for the novel, but this is all going to go into the history books wrong, and it bothers me to be hung for the wrong crime. FB/Google/etc. have blown it many, many times by "moving fast and breaking things" on privacy, letting mid-level product managers do user-hostile shit with inadequate oversight, "warehouse first and ask questions later"-type stuff, any number of things. But it's an emergent property of rapid-cadence metrics-driven product management, not a Bond-villain stoking a mustache.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  I don’t recall it that way. Everyone in tech was impressed by Google circa 1998 - it was the first search engine that really didn’t suck in some way. Facebook never had that level of tech cred, although it wasn’t as reviled early on as it is now.
  - benreesman 4y ago
    I mean, AFAIK basically the first thing Sheryl did when she joined Facebook (from Google) in 2008 was break ranks with the wage-fixing cartel and immediately hire like a whole infrastructure organization from Google. Many if not most of the early-ish-days hardass hackers at FB were (figuratively) still wearing Google T-shirts when they built FB's scale infrastructure. So to anyone paying attention at that time, it was pretty clear that the level of tech cred should be about the same. It was the same people.
thayne 4y ago
I'm old enough to remember when google was well loved. And I'm really not that old.

by harry8 4y ago

nl 4y ago

I'm old enough to still love Google. I think it is the wonder of our age. Hell, I'm old enough to remember when altavista.digitial.com was the most amazing thing I'd seen. But the worse Google results today are as good as the average results from that or any other pre-Google search engine.

benreesman 4y ago

I’m that old. Google was everyone’s favorite thing they’d ever seen on the Internet. Ditto GMail, Maps, etc. Want to really blow people’s minds? The same was true for Facebook. These products didn’t get big enough to have power to abuse by being unpopular. People loved these products.

rileymat2 4y ago
I remember the love for Google products, scoring an invite to gmail. I don’t remember a distinct love for facebook. It was much cleaner than MySpace, and kind of exclusive because I needed my university email, but not love.
- benreesman 4y ago
  Yeah I don't think FB was ever very popular with the techie crowd: it didn't solve a problem they had as those people could like self-host their own blogs and photos and shit (and frankly took some enjoyment in the fact that the plebs couldn't). Techies had IRC and mailing lists and soon HN, etc. Contrast that to Google which was an indispensable tool for any hacker on basically day one, people will forgive a lot from a company that they can't live without. But many if not most non-techie people ranted and raved about how much they loved Facebook well into the 2010s, even if they started calling it Instagram at some point. The general public (especially lefty coastal public) didn't start taking out all their frustrations with Big Tech in general on Facebook in particular until 2016. The story that Facebook got Trump elected is absurd (I worked in the abusive behavior / content moderation group then: I was in the room and the press got this one badly wrong), but it was a riveting story and most people seem to still believe it now. Even some Facebook employees in other orgs seemed to believe that FB had failed in not putting its finger on the scales. As for why anyone would want CEOs of private-sector companies in San Francisco to unilaterally decide who the president is? That is a horrifying thought. I think Big Tech CEOs probably find that a horrifying thought. The fact that they probably could is nightmare fuel enough, and the fact that to my knowledge they don't probably means there is still some Anakin behind the Vader mask. Sorry for the novel, but this is all going to go into the history books wrong, and it bothers me to be hung for the wrong crime. FB/Google/etc. have blown it many, many times by "moving fast and breaking things" on privacy, letting mid-level product managers do user-hostile shit with inadequate oversight, "warehouse first and ask questions later"-type stuff, any number of things. But it's an emergent property of rapid-cadence metrics-driven product management, not a Bond-villain stoking a mustache.
KerrAvon 4y ago
I don’t recall it that way. Everyone in tech was impressed by Google circa 1998 - it was the first search engine that really didn’t suck in some way. Facebook never had that level of tech cred, although it wasn’t as reviled early on as it is now.
- benreesman 4y ago
  I mean, AFAIK basically the first thing Sheryl did when she joined Facebook (from Google) in 2008 was break ranks with the wage-fixing cartel and immediately hire like a whole infrastructure organization from Google. Many if not most of the early-ish-days hardass hackers at FB were (figuratively) still wearing Google T-shirts when they built FB's scale infrastructure. So to anyone paying attention at that time, it was pretty clear that the level of tech cred should be about the same. It was the same people.

thayne 4y ago

I'm old enough to remember when google was well loved. And I'm really not that old.