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You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool/software etc becau
by codegeek 3y ago
You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool/software etc because everyone has gamed the "Best software for xyz" etc. But what's the alternative ? None. There are these "review" websites like Capterra/Software Advice/G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT if you want to be shown on the main page for that category, you need to pay crazy PPC.
Source: I play this game since I run a software business. Would love an alternative but there are none. You either Play the game or you Die.
- moneywoes 3y agoIn contrast what is your top of funnel strategy for social proof? What would a fair review site look like?
- dgellow 3y agoHow much of your time do you spend “playing the game”?
- eyelidlessness 3y ago> But what's the alternative ? None. And gob help you if you dare search for alternative to _____.
- tough 3y agoThat page is certainly useful to find alternatives , I like I can filter by FOSS
- mschuster91 3y agoBefore the Great Reddit Strike, adding "reddit" or "inurl:reddit.com" helped in that regard pretty well.
- mvdtnz 3y agoGiven that the Reddit strike was an almost complete failure it still works well.
- notRobot 3y agoSeveral niche subreddits are still offline.
- babypuncher 3y agoI wouldn't say it was a failure per se. Old content is still there, but new content is of noticeably lower quality. Many subreddits have moved to minimal moderation or stopped it altogether. Engagement in places I used to frequent like /r/Games (which didn't even participate in the strike) is both down considerably and of lower quality. Reddit, like Twitter, is too big to fail overnight, but they are essentially zombies at this point. Their growth potential has been neutered and their most valuable users (the 1% making 60% of the quality content) are actively toying with alternatives.
- the8472 3y ago> But what's the alternative ? Since ads are a red queen's race, wasting people's attention and assuming we don't want to outright ban them then the next best alternative is to tax them heavily. How about 0.00001 cent per pixel-second-view? Then people will only put up ads when there's some real value in it, not just to keep up with the competition.
- geysersam 3y agoThat's a really good idea. We need regulation to prevent prisoners dilemma situations to the detriment of all.
- Name_Chawps 3y agoCue the blurry ads lol.
- samwillis 3y agoFrom the point of view of someone who spent 10 years running an e-commerce store, and all its advertising, until a couple of years ago. Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead. The hay day of being able to play the game and make a tidy profit is long gone. Google are playing every trick in the book to extract every possible cent from advertisers, spying on their business and sales to maximise their own profits. Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. People complain about the tracking of users/visitors, but the tracking of businesses is just as bad. They probably have better insights into the economy and market trends than most governments and banks. The penny is dropping, advertisers are noticing, my long term expectation of Google's business are not what they were.
- moneywoes 3y agoWhat’s the best alternative for those adspend $$ in your view?
- jklinger410 3y ago> Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead And then > Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. Ah, so they have all of the information and yet their ad products don't work. They don't know this?
- samwillis 3y agoThey appear to work just well enough to keep you hooked while they increasingly eat your margin.
- edmundsauto 3y agoMy 2 cents - in the past, there were bigger inefficiencies that advertisers could exploit. So they could buy a click for 10 cents, and profit 25 cents from it. Google has gotten better and closed that gap, so now you pay 15 cents (and due to increased competition, you might only profit 20 cents) The opportunities are still there in local minima, places where it's too small for Google to optimize. But the trend is clear.
- carlosjobim 3y agoThe alternative for users is Kagi, which is superior to Google for search results. For businesses, there is no good alternative to Google. Many are investing a lot of effort and money in social media, but the returns are very low compared to Google.
- Given_47 3y agoI’ve been heavily considering the 1k Kagi but the limit thing has been giving me pause. I’ve yet to try to trial tho so that should help give context how quickly I burn thru 100
- carlosjobim 3y agoI've noticed that there's a huge misunderstanding among people interested in Kagi: You're not banned from searching after passing the limit in your plan, instead subsequent searches will cost 1.5 cents each. So nothing to sweat.
- Endy 3y agoNothing to sweat, except money, of course. Not everyone has an open-ended budget.
- carlosjobim 3y agoYes, I tend to forget about the plight of the commoners when sitting at my enormous hoard of several hundred cents.
- drdaeman 3y agoYou can put a hard budget limit so you're not financially ruined if you go over those $10. And there's ultimate $25 all-you-can-eat plan, too.
- Given_47 3y agoOh I’m aware, but thanks. It’s more so the mental burden of second guessing if a search is “worth it” that would arise. Like I said tho I’ll use the trial to best figure out my process. And also yea three cents for every two searches over the 1k monthly limit is pretty trivial lol. So nvm that shouldn’t b something to give me pause
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- qingcharles 3y agoHalf the stuff I search for (old magazines) doesn't even appear in Google's SERPs any longer. I resort to Duckduckgo and Brave's searches among many others. Even things like Yandex give much deeper dives now.
- Given_47 3y agoI just recently started using DDG is there any intuitive way to block the MSN links? Probably wouldn’t be too hard to get the original article url anyway tho. And I’ve been pretty impressed with Brave search so far. Promising
- checkyoursudo 3y agoDDG should introduce anti-bangs so you could do like "!!msn weather for my town" whatever and it would pull from anywhere that is not e.g. MSN.
- nicbou 3y agoI add "-best" to my searches. It helps.
- soneca 3y agoSo crowdsourced black hat SEO indeed beat Google’s ”thousands of the most intelligent and well-paid engineers of the planet”.
- qwoz 3y ago>But what's the alternative ? https://metaphor.systems/ https://metaphor.systems/ is pretty good for exactly this kind of thing. The way the search algorithm is designed also make it extremely difficult to game.
- octacat 3y agoexcept it does not search that well...
- p3rls 3y agoThere is no alternative. People talk about alternatives but everyone I've checked is even worse. Bing, DDG etc. All give complete garbage results. Perhaps not as gamified, but usually that just means you're going to a wordpress of a less competent admin.
- kibwen 3y agoBack to webrings! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring (This is a joke (or is it?))
- noizejoy 3y agoI also think (hope), that reach/scope reduction is a possible counter-reaction as the winner-takes-all empires enshittify beyond repair. From food to manufacturing to music and other cultural endeavours: making communities small(er) might be an interesting counter (r)evolution.
- dmvdoug 3y agoWithout deciding whether your particular mention of webrings was a joke or not, the nostalgia for them that has been cropping up lately is a little bit puzzling to me as someone who remembers well those days. Because webrings themselves were often full of just pure junk, not to mention broken links, or websites that hadn’t been updated in years but we’re still “under construction” (with the de rigueur gif of a hardhat or something).
- mikecoles 3y agoWith its brokenness, those days were more enjoyable to many. The web was more interesting with the variety. Personal sites were a place for each mouth to speak. Today's sites are a place to be force fed pure junk.
- dmvdoug 3y agoOh, no, I certainly agree that the old web was a better, more interesting place than today’s. By far. If you invoked webrings simply in order to invoke the old web, I totally agree (as opposed to invoking webrings per se). I just pushed back a little bit because even back in the day I didn’t like webrings. :)
- bks 3y agoI cant speak for any site other than G2. We have multiple unpaid products that appear appropriately in their lists and quadrants. The question one has to ask themselves, just like in SEO "is my profile optimized" and try work out what their automations expect rather than paying for placement.
- derefr 3y agoIs there nothing like ConsumerReports.com for software? A service trying to just write impartial reviews for the sake of the reader?
- cowgoesmoo 3y agoI've been using reddit for this purpose
- harry8 3y ago> You either Play the game or you Die. And given the game is won by the highest bidder, all of the surplus created by technical progress goes to advertising which, as you point out, adds zero value and, in fact, detracts from rational agents making optimal decisions. This is /exactly/ the kind of market failure where those of us who prefer smaller government want to start talking about appropriate regulation.
- stanislavb 3y agoHey @codegeek, have you tried SaaSHub? It's goal is to be more "objective" compared to Capterra & G2. Yet, it's questionable to what extent that is achieved.
- taurath 3y agoThe alternative is places where people congregate. Google used to be a great place to find relatively objective information, but being ad driven it’s all gone to commercial advertising. Word of mouth (IE searching with “[…] Reddit”) gives far better information.
- liotier 3y ago> Word of mouth (IE searching with “[…] Reddit”) gives far better information Used to. Now that advertising believe their salvation lies in forums, wadding into the big ones increasingly feels like entering the water at a British beach after the privatisation of Thames Water...
- coffeebeqn 3y agoNot really. Thinking that Reddit is not gamed by marketers or bought/sponsored influencers in 2023 is just completely wrong. Any kind of aggregated rating is gamed, whether it’s Amazon or Reddit or Google or yelp At best you’ll find one very opinionated guys recommendation which may or may not match yours
- taurath 3y ago> Thinking that Reddit is not gamed by marketers or bought/sponsored influencers in 2023 is just completely wrong I didn't claim its free of gaming, but I am claiming the quality of search results for "x" vs "x reddit" is notably higher for the latter in most cases that I personally use search for.
- LelouBil 3y agosite:reddit.com is your friend, even with all the stuff that's happening over there
- seydor 3y agotheir ads are not worth it. they have become way too expensive and results are not good
- Name_Chawps 3y agoIs there no search engine that outright bans all commercial content? There are plenty of searches where I want to find what real people are thinking, not what some company's article says. This kind of thing could easily be crowd-sourced a la SponsorBlock.
- newaccount74 3y ago> Would love an alternative but there are none If you are trying to sell a product, I know one weird trick: Just make a product that people enjoy, and they will recommend it to others. No need to pay for advertising, no need to play the SEO game. The only marketing you need for a decent product is a website with docs and a download button. This works especially well if you have some sort of freemium product, because then the 90% of people who use the free version still act as multipliers. I don't know if it works for all businesses, but it's worked for me over the last decade or so.
- ivanjermakov 3y agoI use https://alternativeto.org https://alternativeto.org to find tools, might be useful.