4 ms·

What a completely disconnected-from-reality article. There are so many ways to use Google to obtain the information you're looking for, and so many people do i

What a completely disconnected-from-reality article. There are so many ways to use Google to obtain the information you're looking for, and so many people do it literally on a minute-to-minute basis that it's flat absurd to call that ineffective. It's trivially easy to learn something by typing a question into Google; maybe when writing an article try gut checking it against obvious observed reality first. I simply cannot fathom a noble reason why the author would decide to publish this. Edit: Oh wait I found it; the author is Vladimir Prelovac, CEO, Kagi Inc. What does Kagi Inc. do? I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader, but I bet you guess it in one try...

jaimex2 4y ago
Which part is disconnected from reality? Google is a horrible search engine, you routinely have to hack it to get searches not linking to the centralised web. The first 5 results are ads, followed by Youtube links or a Quora/Reddit on the topic. If you used the web 20 years ago you know what a good search engine was like.
einpoklum 4y ago
> There are so many ways to use Google to obtain the information you're looking for Especially if you're looking for Google users' private information, and you're a business partner of Google's.
dr-detroit 4y ago
artificial 4y ago
Search peaked 10 years ago. There's lots of regression in Google Search. For example, you used to be able to search images by specific dimensions. You can do this today on Yandex. The quality of results and promotion of sponsored results, the scraping and displaying of site contents so users visit less (how is this legal btw?) Not respecting verbatim searches.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  About '08. Spam took over right after that. Used to go in waves of better/worse as they played cat-n-mouse with spammers, but they seemed to kinda give up right around then.
- matai_kolila 4y ago
  That's not really what this article is about though, it's about how PageRank doesn't work anymore because advertising is at odds with returning valuable results, which is complete nonsense for a gigantic subset of the value that Google offers. Also it's written by a CEO of a competing search company. It's literally the very SEO he's railing against...
barbazoo 4y ago
For me, almost everything that's not coding related, and that's after all the SO clones etc have been removed from the results, is SEO "optimized" at best and SEO spam at worst. Most websites that show up on Google follow the same recipe of headlines, quotes, stock images and repetitive content and annoying introduction paragraphs that place them at the top of the list.
pdabbadabba 4y ago
> Edit: Oh wait I found it; the author is Vladimir Prelovac, CEO, Kagi Inc. What does Kagi Inc. do? I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader, but I bet you guess it in one try... Point taken. But it's not as though this was concealed. The top line of the page is "Tales from Kagi." The piece is hosted on blog.kagi.com. The author's signature at the end of the piece reads "CEO, Kagi Inc." The final line of the post is "I hope you join us [i.e., Kagi] on this journey."
- matai_kolila 4y ago
  It just bothers me that this blatant SEO attempt is an article about how SEO ruined PageRank. Maybe it doesn't bother you, just thought it was worth calling out explicitly.
  - SahAssar 4y ago
    > blatant SEO attempt It is marketing and trying to influence the discourse, but I don't see how you can call it SEO.
    - matai_kolila 4y ago
      Writing blog articles like this and posting them to social media to create crosslinks is a very common SEO strategy to "trick" PageRank into promoting your site higher in search results. It's the whole purpose behind all of those random blog articles on corporate sites; to improve PageRank ranking.
      - SahAssar 4y ago
        I have seen a lot of SEO content spam, and this article does not come across as that to me.

jaimex2 4y ago

Which part is disconnected from reality? Google is a horrible search engine, you routinely have to hack it to get searches not linking to the centralised web. The first 5 results are ads, followed by Youtube links or a Quora/Reddit on the topic. If you used the web 20 years ago you know what a good search engine was like.

einpoklum 4y ago

> There are so many ways to use Google to obtain the information you're looking for Especially if you're looking for Google users' private information, and you're a business partner of Google's.

dr-detroit 4y ago

artificial 4y ago

Search peaked 10 years ago. There's lots of regression in Google Search. For example, you used to be able to search images by specific dimensions. You can do this today on Yandex. The quality of results and promotion of sponsored results, the scraping and displaying of site contents so users visit less (how is this legal btw?) Not respecting verbatim searches.

yamtaddle 4y ago
About '08. Spam took over right after that. Used to go in waves of better/worse as they played cat-n-mouse with spammers, but they seemed to kinda give up right around then.
matai_kolila 4y ago
That's not really what this article is about though, it's about how PageRank doesn't work anymore because advertising is at odds with returning valuable results, which is complete nonsense for a gigantic subset of the value that Google offers. Also it's written by a CEO of a competing search company. It's literally the very SEO he's railing against...

barbazoo 4y ago

For me, almost everything that's not coding related, and that's after all the SO clones etc have been removed from the results, is SEO "optimized" at best and SEO spam at worst. Most websites that show up on Google follow the same recipe of headlines, quotes, stock images and repetitive content and annoying introduction paragraphs that place them at the top of the list.

pdabbadabba 4y ago

> Edit: Oh wait I found it; the author is Vladimir Prelovac, CEO, Kagi Inc. What does Kagi Inc. do? I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader, but I bet you guess it in one try... Point taken. But it's not as though this was concealed. The top line of the page is "Tales from Kagi." The piece is hosted on blog.kagi.com. The author's signature at the end of the piece reads "CEO, Kagi Inc." The final line of the post is "I hope you join us [i.e., Kagi] on this journey."

matai_kolila 4y ago
It just bothers me that this blatant SEO attempt is an article about how SEO ruined PageRank. Maybe it doesn't bother you, just thought it was worth calling out explicitly.
- SahAssar 4y ago
  > blatant SEO attempt It is marketing and trying to influence the discourse, but I don't see how you can call it SEO.
  - matai_kolila 4y ago
    Writing blog articles like this and posting them to social media to create crosslinks is a very common SEO strategy to "trick" PageRank into promoting your site higher in search results. It's the whole purpose behind all of those random blog articles on corporate sites; to improve PageRank ranking.
    - SahAssar 4y ago
      I have seen a lot of SEO content spam, and this article does not come across as that to me.