5 ms·
It's not really the ads that killed Google search for me. it's more the over agressive minmaxed SEO that makes most of results garbage.
by Galanwe 3y ago
It's not really the ads that killed Google search for me. it's more the over agressive minmaxed SEO that makes most of results garbage.
- gjvc 3y agoCan you explain "minimaxed" in this context, please?
- ok123456 3y agoNot bad enough to be outright spam with just enough relevance to be shown in the top ten search results. Try finding product reviews, or product comparison articles. It will likely be LLM garbage that doesn't say anything, but uses the right keywords and enough coherency to be indexed.
- HeckFeck 3y agoIt's obvious LLM tripe when you click into the article and it begins with several worthless paragraphs describing why someone would be interested in the topic and how things can sometimes go wrong... Yes, I already knew that. That's why I'm here. It might be an attempt to copy customer service 'empathy' but it has the opposite effect: angering me because my time is wasted with this crap, and I have to scroll several screens to find what I need.
- chrisweekly 3y agoTangent: your use of the word "tripe" here is spot-on. The secondary definition (nonsense) works, but I'm talking about the apt metaphor of its primary definition: offal that's technically edible but comes from low-quality parts of the digestive system which are literally filled with feces. LLM-generated SEO spam should always be called "tripe".
- moomin 3y agoHonestly, a lot of this isn't LLM stuff. It's "people being paid pittance".
- chrisweekly 3y agoGood point; maybe all clickbait and SEO spam, regardless of human provenance, counts as "tripe".
- swader999 3y agoAnd the content itself is just a reflection of the search. Whole web is turning to rot such that the only few remaining great sites don't even need indexing because well there's so few left.
- mschuster91 3y ago> It will likely be LLM garbage that doesn't say anything, but uses the right keywords and enough coherency to be indexed. Or some site that "aggregates" Stackoverflow, Quora and whatnot. Pure hell and I wish everything bad possible on this planet to the people who have implemented this kind of scam.
- saaspirant 3y agoI block them using uBlacklist in Firefox. My blacklist is growing.
- thesuperbigfrog 3y agoNot OP. I believe "minimaxed" in this context refers to optimizing profits while trying to keep search results useful to users. The term comes from game theory where a player tries to maximize their gains while minimizing their losses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax
- brianshaler 3y agoFor me it's when they stopped showing results that include your keywords and instead a random smattering of anything broadly related to the topic being searched for.
- jvolkman 3y agoYou can use quotes around keywords. https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-search-results-when-you-use-quotes/ https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-searc...
- geraldcombs 3y agoThis shifted from "can" to "absolutely have to" a long time ago for my use cases.
- jdgoesmarching 3y agoI’ve had google searches disregard my quoted query.
- dekhn 3y agoeven quotes don't work 100% of the time- if there is strong signal to show another result, it will be shown even if it isn't a quote-match. Previous user clicks are the top ranking signal. IIUC "verbatim mode" is supposed to do something like this. https://search.googleblog.com/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html https://search.googleblog.com/2011/11/search-using-your-term...
- zbrozek 3y agoWhen I use Google search-which is rare these days-I exclusively use verbatim mode.
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoOften it's not even related at all. For example, Google often prioritizes obscure music bands or albums even for generic or well-known terms.