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As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

334 points by DASD 3y ago

heshiebee 3y ago
This article is surprisingly(for the Verge) unbiased, really well written and balanced. The title is definitely misleading making it seem like the author will be taking the authoritarian side. 100% worth the read.
- omoikane 3y ago
  Which title? The one visible on the page is "The people who ruined the internet", but the one in the <title> tag is "Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? - The Verge". The current title on HN is "As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?"
michael1999 3y ago
The reverse-takeover of Google by DoubleClick is the Fall. The poison apple. All else is commentary.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
thegrim33 3y ago
This is a meta-level comment, but a technique I've been using for a while now, which I've found pretty helpful/useful, is that if an article starts off with an anecdote I immediately know not to bother reading it. It shows you that the author is more interested in pushing a feeling/emotion/story rather than relaying actual information. They're trying to manipulate how you think about the topic from the very beginning. It's really hard to describe the pattern but once you see it you can never unsee it. Just food for thought.
- j7ake 3y ago
  Also a lot of (newbie) start up pitches are like this.
- rexpop 3y ago
  This is a standard rhetorical technique for illustrating in personal terms what's difficult to imagine at a systemic or statistical level. It doesn't mean they're trying to manipulate you any more than you're trying to manipulate us, ie writing is pleading.
- dustincoates 3y ago
  A "fun" game I like to play with articles from the Verge is how many words until there's a first person pronoun. (It's almost always in the first sentence.) Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't need the journalist's backstory before I get the meat of the article.
  - wizzwizz4 3y ago
    Four! :-P
- escapedmoose 3y ago
  There’s more than one reason to read an article. Often the story is the point.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    That's true, but not great. "I'm here for you to subtly impute how I should feel about something by bypass my critical faculties" is a poor substitute for people who want to be informed.
    - escapedmoose 3y ago
      Not that I have a horse in this race, but… Your information is always going to be sourced and/or presented by humans with bias. Isn’t it better when that bias is transparent? A solo author draws their reader into a proxy conversation with them (which naturally lends itself to some level of persuasion most of the time). As a reader (I believe) your job is to pay enough attention to catch the author if they’re off-base or not playing fairly, so that you’ll walk away with more accurate understanding than you started. I suppose if you don’t want to be challenged by a proxy dialogue then a better medium for you would be statistical analysis or a scientific, structured study, but unfortunately most topics just don’t get the dedicated resources to do that properly. I’ve seen the aggregators and summary bots as well, but that seems even worse: Cherry-picking “facts” from an essay without seeing the context around them? A recipe for misunderstanding and/or getting the wool pulled over your eyes. Maybe the best solution is for every article to have a comments section where folks can point out inaccuracies and inconsistencies to help each other out? Citizen fact-checkers? Then you wind up with… this same article, as-is, posted on Hacker News alongside intelligent debate ;)
sysadm1n 3y ago
'The People' when really it's mostly bots these days, and getting smarter with LLMs too. Only a few blogs/articles are written by actual humans, and something strange has happened to my cognitive abilities lately; is discerning whether an article is written by an LLM or a human. I regularly play a game called 'bot or not' now.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
The internet was ruined when it was de anonymized by Facebook and LinkedIn etc. I remember growing up in a completely anonymous internet. You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally. Then you would go back to society as the real you and temper yourself a bit to fit in and work with others and that was ok because you could blow off steam on the internet.
- smeagull 3y ago
  Get this - you can have an anonymous facebook and linkedin account too.
  - wizzwizz4 3y ago
    Have you tried running an anonymous Facebook account in the past decade? Facebook lets you use it for a few weeks (or months), then suddenly refuses to let you in unless you provide identifying information that it never asked for before, and refuses to give you your data back until you “verify it's you” (might be quoting Google or Microsoft there, but Facebook has similar wording) even though they have no records with which to compare it to, so that can't possibly be a valid justification.
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      I deleted my account only last year and for more than one decade I was using a generated icelandic name.
      - wizzwizz4 3y ago
        If your name meets Facebook's “real name” standards, it's not like Facebook is going to hunt down your birth records and see whether it Really Is your Actual Real Name™ (not that that's even a particularly coherent concept…). Did you manage to keep your account anonymous from Facebook – that is, not linked to any of your other identifiers?
        3y ago
phendrenad2 3y ago
"The internet" doesn't really exist, now, now does it? 99% of users are living in an AOL-style world, where they live within walled gardens. Why leave twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit? There's nothing out there but a wasteland of crumbling has-been sites. Sometimes you'll find yourself on a blog or news article, but you just click/tap the back button to go back to the walled garden. Nobody is subscribing to your RSS feed. And what really did this is mobile devices. And it isn't necessarily a bad thing, although I do miss the old vbulletin discussion days.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  There's lots of good content out there, but the problem is finding it. A Google replacement wouldn't be any better, because everyone's attention would be directed into optimizing new replacement site. It frustrates me when people say "Google should search reddit by default." The reason reddit is still halfway decent is there isn't as much money in gaming it, but there would be if the entire world was sent to it.
  - bdw5204 3y ago
    I think the best path to a "Google replacement" is probably to reinvent Yahoo or dmoz. You'd still have to human curate the worthwhile sites through a ton of SEO spam and, if you go the dmoz route of volunteer curators, that's an attack vector for spammers but I think it'd be much more manageable than trying to build an index of the entire web and search it. A new general purpose web directory would also help mitigate probably the biggest harm that Google's algorithm has caused to the web: the death of the "links" page as a standard part of a web site due to sites trying to increase their pagerank by reducing outbound links.
    - asdfman123 3y ago
      That kind of web directory would work if it were just used by a small group of adherents. But it would encounter the same problems typical to big tech once any "real" money started flowing in.
  - 3y ago
dang 3y ago
Related ongoing thread: Some thoughts about The Verge article on SEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38104407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38104407
xwdv 3y ago
SEO has always been a moving target. So now it’s all about social media optimization. Think channels, not search results.
- richforrester 3y ago
  Plus a lot of it has been about semantically correct formatting of your content and code. It's a moving target in that a lot of orgs try to "game the system", or at least exploit it as best they can :) Good content will mostly rise to the top because that's what search engines strive to optimise. Nothing really changes that much probably. Just semantics.
zeruch 3y ago
I cant foresee a scenario where an endlessly growing mass of AI-generated noise, stacked upon itself, will be useful to anyone. Humans will invariably find a less contentious path (maybe its seeking out more localized options, maybe its balkanizing into various specialized domains, maybe its $NEWTHINGYETTOBESEEN, or all of the above. But the current trajectory cannot hold. Someone else mentioned the "reverse-takeover of Google by DoubleClick is the Fall" and I find that spot on. The Dionysian appetites of adtech will be its own downfall.
- w0m 3y ago
  Eventually; someone will create an index to sort through the AI output and determine what's true/relevant and return it to the consumer. Call it 'airank' maybe?
  - cyanydeez 3y ago
    yeah definitely not truth value. probably a "exploit" trigger. hard to think how reality and predictive power are going to be mediated through some kind of source index.
  - lobochrome 3y ago
    Yahoo!
  - kridsdale3 3y ago
    It's basically Wikipedia. Take as axiom that there exists infinite content of apparently human-readable stuff in the universe at random IP addresses. It is grey static, that maybe at one point in the past used to be ordered information. Now, all entropy. A human managed and manually curated safe zone of information is the refuge. Real people had real discussions and votes and decisions to result in what you see. This is true with Reddit to a lesser but still useful extent. Democracy can be gamed, but it's 1000x better than Engagement Signal Ranking that drives Google or Meta's products. The same principles apply to education, science, and political organization of human enterprise. Basically, institutionalize your info-world.
- pradn 3y ago
viburnum 3y ago
This is maybe the worst-written article I’ve ever read. So much random detail about dresses and Canadian hometowns and almost nothing to say about the actual topic.
- kridsdale3 3y ago
  It's written for human beings with full and complete emotional centers. I found it lovely.
haltist 3y ago
An art project making it obvious why the economic engine (advertising) that pays for Google's electricity bills is not sustainable: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Google+will+eat+itself https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Google+will+eat+itself
zenincognito 3y ago
SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents. Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bring ton of revenue every day. Ofcourse, Google is trying hard to monetize every little real estate but still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the past 3 years. The other aspect of this the "paid ads" also immensely valuable to advertisers. We have people spending 3 million dollars a month on paid ads returning 8X ROAS. Google & FB are still the most lucrative channels for ecommerce.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rgrieselhuber 3y ago
  As a SaaS / data vendor in the space, I can confirm.
- preommr 3y ago
  > because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve Do you actually think this or is this just a polite way of saying lots of HNers are out of touch?
  - zenincognito 3y ago
    Politely, and with due respect, I consider myself "out of touch" for most things that I don't do on a day to day basis or those that are NOT my livelihood.
  - gretch 3y ago
    I'm not the OP you replied to, but there's a scene from the movie the big short that really punched the understanding into my head: Michael Burry: I may have been early but I'm not wrong some exec: It's the same thing! I believe that a lot of HN posts are probably "right", but they are so far in the future and so non-applicable to day-to-day life, that it's indistinguishable from wrong. For example, everyone predicting Google is going to end - yeah all great companies eventually come to an end - if you want to be insightful, you actually have to be on time with it.
ge96 3y ago
I don't get the argument about gpt replacing a search engine. If gpt trains from search engine data how does it get new data? I guess the usage of gpt over time.
- postalrat 3y ago
  Why would gpt train from search engine data instead of the actual documents being indexed?
  - ge96 3y ago
    Not just documents, everything, every website that becomes searchable information. How would that work in the future if people don't use search engines, how does the gpt/llm bring that info in. Not saying it's not possible, would there be an API people submit their content into... Edit: actually I wonder if wikipedia will make one (model) they have so much info
    - wfvr 3y ago
      The whole text of wikipedia has been included in training data for basically all LLMs since the start.
      - ge96 3y ago
        That's cool real Hitch Hiker's Guide book
- ranting-moth 3y ago
  Google's search results have been poisoned by SEO. A lot of the time when looking for information about X the search results are dominated either by someone trying to sell me X or they have very superficial information about X just so they can a bit further down try to sell me X. (I'm talking about the unknown X, not Elon's failing project).
  - ge96 3y ago
adhesive_wombat 3y ago
It's always surprised me that confirmed SEO shenaniganery doesn't bring an instant ion-cannon strike from Google. I know they are apparently allergic to having a human ever decide anything ever. It's just that if I were them, with an infinite data lake to find the vendors' traces, trillion-dollar C-suite morals and the SEO was messing with the bottom line, there would be no quarter when a nest is uncovered. Delist everything to do with them, delete all their accounts and salt their persistent data profiles. Most of them are abroad and will struggle to do anything about it. After all, occasional Gmail or Android developer bans are meted out with various levels of capriciousness. I guess it's good that they're not obviously going Judge Dredd left, right and centre, but it's still surprising to me that you can run up to them, slap them in the virtual face and stay online to do it again. Or perhaps it is not messing with the short-term bottom line because the SEO sites are crawling with ads? And until ChatGPT what were you going to do? Use Bing?
- qvrjuec 3y ago
  Isn't this what happened with rap genius around a decade ago[0]? Maybe this was long before their policy of zero human intervention. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/25/5243716/rap-genius-plummets-in-google-results-apologizes-for-spammy-seo https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/25/5243716/rap-genius-plumm...
  - spookie 3y ago
    Their lengthy apology is.... I don't know how to describe it. It reminds me of relationship I had, in a bad way. The part where they go on to say "We messed up" cracked me up. You don't "mess up" when you are fully aware of your actions, and perform them as planned.
    - arp242 3y ago
      I kind of understand their "yeah, but other sites are doing the same shady shit". You can say that doesn't excuse it, and it kind of doesn't, but you're at a real competitive disadvantage if you don't participate in the arms race. It's bringing a knife to a gunfight.
fsckboy 3y ago
I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had said the house looked like it was melting, so she typed in "melting house", I think. Not that that's genius or quirky or anything, but I would never dream of typing in something I was thinking "informally", and her approach is more like "whatever whackadoo thing I'm thinking, probably other people think just like me" and she finds anything I ask her about. (I've pretested that query, and turns out that there are melting houses all over the world, just gotta look in your neighborhood) so to the point here, I lament that Google doesn't work any more, but she doesn't, she thinks it works great. Now if I can just get her to stop finding restaurant recommendations on TikTok...
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  How would you have phrased that query?
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    unlike some of the houses that show up in that query, this house was not designed to appear melting, and I wasn't sure if it was even designed to look uneven, or had the foundation settled and they did nothing about it? So I was trying to explain the uneven wavy lines, rounded corners, and I was saying "it's almost as if it had melted", thinking "this is my personal interpretation, I'm just being descriptive" so that's what I mean by "informal thinking" vs "explicit query" it's also easy to explain this one case, but it is true in general, she just finds things much more quickly than I do, and when I ask her what was her query I'm always "why tf did you type that in?" If we used a formal language for search, I'd beat her, but she throws in a lot of extraneous terms that make me think either or both "you are overspecifying" or "you are ambiguating" with those extra terms, but she gets answers I don't get, I think because many other people are typing things in the way she does. I had been trying to find it before I saw her, and since I knew the general neighborhood I was actually trying to "walk" around with streetview to find it, then I was wracking my brain for architectural terms I could use.
mushufasa 3y ago
I can see AI decrease some of the traffic for content writers who relied on SEO taking a hit; like political blogs or various sites that paid for ads to drive traffic and then essentially sell more ads to those users on their own site. But the writers/platforms that have great content can also use AI to improve their own content, so I don't think this is going to be a 'fall off a cliff' style event. I don't think that SEO is going to be decreasing anytime soon for e-commerce, which is probably the best use of SEO. AI generation images and content are no substitute for physical goods, like shoes.
legitster 3y ago
My first job out of college was writing SEO articles for [unnamed failed startup]. It was exactly the sort of daft, fluffy, "let me Google that for you" content you would think a 20 something SEO writer would come up with. And it's these kinds of fluffy, non-clickbait content that people are complaining about when they talk about Google's search results these days. I don't think the real problem are two-bit hustlers sneaking in bait-and-switch content here and there - it's that Google's own rules encourage mediocre and non-authoritative content. So one of the reasons people gravitate towards ChatGPT (or, to a similar degree TikTok) is that both will give you strong and authoritative advice (even if it's wrong!) I don't necessarily believe the internet is worse today (if you have any false nostalgia, try searching a forum for an answer to a technical problem). But experts who were actually putting out good content and information were consistently getting ripped off by knockoffs for decades and we shouldn't be surprised that nobody is contributing anymore.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  People are still contributing at a higher rate but google isn't including them. That's the difference not that suddenly professionals are fleeing because of something that has been happened since the beginning.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    I dunno. In the few areas I think I know something, I contribute on GitHub and... Thats about it? Most of what I am interested in has moved to Discord or Telegram, or rotted away in deteriorating subreddits. A few others niches moved to YouTube, a spammy one way window. Any contribution I make just feels like shouting into the void (and not even the satisfying kind like here on HN). Is this not a common sentiment?
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      If you have your own site you can bring interesting people to you. Invite your discord communities.
Havoc 3y ago
Until the LLM stuff scales sufficiently to replace free Google searches at scale SEO will stay. And judging by everyone and their dog in ai space running at a loss even when charging id say that’s not imminent
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Until the LLM stuff scales sufficiently to replace free Google searches at scale SEO will stay. I mean, it might be renamed something other than "SEO" then, but the same people will still be optimizing for a content selection and presentation algorithm. An LLM trained (or using in context learning on, or some mix) a dataset isn't immune to manipulation by the people supplying the data.
Sindisil 3y ago
Hopefully, it'll die in a fire? Not that I really think that. There's too much incentive to fine new and exciting ways to game the system, instead if actually just being relevant. Google and, to a lesser extent, other search engines, deserve some of the blame for having easily gameable ranking algorithms. Still, it's mostly on the bad actors doing the gaming, and the people hiring them to do it.
MarkusQ 3y ago
> I began to think that the reason I found them > endearing and not evil was that while many had > made quite a bit of money, almost none had amassed > significant power. Unlike the Elon Musks and Jeff > Bezoses of the world, who went from geeky teenagers > to masters of the universe, the dorks who grew up > to do SEO have stayed the butt of the joke, > beholden to the fluctuations of the algorithm, > frantically pulling levers behind the scenes > but ultimately somewhat hapless. Translation: they were "endearing" because, instead of actually trying to build something, they just made piles of money ruining things for everyone else. Sure, they're parasites, but at least they aren't (god forbid) _productive_.
phkahler 3y ago
>> Why does it always seem to surprise me, even after all these years, that the way we behave on the internet is often quite different from how we act in real life? Because you don't actually know the people you interact with on the internet. Anonymity invites deception, which builds a sort of distrust over time whether people realize it or not. Authenticity is rare on the net.
karaterobot 3y ago
I appreciate the author trying to humanize these people who have profited off of ruining the web. I freely admit, with moderate shame, that I hoped the story ended with the floor of the party collapsing.
tambourine_man 3y ago
I feel like there’s a place for smaller, more niche products and that the pendulum is swinging back to it. A few million users only. No expectation of ever becoming a hundred billion business. Something like Kagi, the old Dropbox, old Twitter. It’s never going to appeal to most people by design.
collaborative 3y ago
Traffic to our anti-SEO search engine has quadrupled in the past month but we're still losing money Hard to beat ad-supported search
- throwaway447 3y ago
  Do you have a link?
  - collaborative 3y ago
    I try not to link because it bothers me when people accuse me of self promoting. It's in the profile :)
amf12 3y ago
"The alligator got my attention. Which, of course, was the point." ... "you can’t quite stop yourself from being curious". The first three sentences of the post basically counter the author's narrative. Clickbait is ruining the internet. It doesn't matter whether it is Google, or Tiktok or Facebook or whatever, what gets popular surfaces to the top. If people like clicking on clickbait content, why blame platforms?
- remram 3y ago
  What makes content clickbait is not that you don't want to click on it. It's that once you get there, it doesn't deliver.
mikewarot 3y ago
Long ago there was a slashdot story about someone who returned to their office to find a co-worker looking at a long printout with a number of peaks circled on it. This printout turned out to be a frequency spectra derived from a covert recording device monitoring the 3 phase feed into the facility. This turned out to be useful for estimating Uranium enrichment yield. I thought it was a damned cool story, but now I can't find it any more. 8( Google won't help me find this story... but it did at least once in the past. And now I can't even find that reference to the earlier reference. Also... try finding something about marking up hypertext documents... you can't... you have to know that "annotation" works instead... at least it used to. Who knows what Google will spit out these days. Google-fu isn't what it used to be, because Google goobered it up.
- ravetcofx 3y ago
  I tried a bunch of keyword combinations with site:slashdot.org with no luck. I wonder if the story was removed
- knallfrosch 3y ago
  Happens to me a lot, but restraining Google to the site usually does more harm than good. Most often, I misremembered the site and even if not, there might be posts leading to the story on other sites.
- throwaway447 3y ago
  I have a 10TB hdd and if a website is interesting, I am likely to save it. This site you would find under /data/u/uranium/uranium_enrichment_yielt.html And I use recoll to find stuff https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/index-recoll.html https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/index-recoll.htm...
schaefer 3y ago
The ship has sailed on “isn’t useful”. Today’s Google is user-hostile.
jppope 3y ago
yes, LLMs will have a massive impact on SEO but the dirty secret here... GPT is trained pretty heavily on reddit data. theres a reason why there hasn't been an IPO and their api got crazy expensive. OpenAi is trying to build a moat with Reddit and with regulation. I really don't think its going to be that long till people figure it out, but who knows
randomdev3 3y ago
Yeah it has been pretty bad for a decade. I wish it just searched exactly for what I type in without assuming anything.
wood_spirit 3y ago
A pet theory of mine is that google pushes SO clones because they contain ads and google gets revenue from sending users to sites with ads. Talk about perverse incentives. The pre double click acquisition search results were much better. So can DuckDuckGo let me easily search for sites without ads?
3seashells 3y ago
The parasite kills the host and then withers, dies and mutated to poison llms?
aszantu 3y ago
now that you mention it... I went away from google a while ago, duckduckgo was okay for a while, but nowadays, I find myself using hackernews or just youtube(disapointing me a lot xD) before I google
WalterBright 3y ago
I simply gave up on SEO and don't think about it anymore. We just tell interested people to go to dlang.org.
DanielHB 3y ago
LLMEO obviously, people are already doing that on reddit
coldtea 3y ago
SEO was always snake oil, equivalent to "hi fi cables".
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
My preferred narrative for enshitification is death by 1000 bean-counters. A manager who needs to hit performance targets to get their 6-7 figure bonus is heavily incentivised to juice the stats this quarter. If they already show you 2 ads before a video, why not 3 or 4? Who cares if the platform as a whole slowly becomes less usable, my numbers are up! What is required is strong vision at the top, telling the bean-counters to dial it all the way back, to be able to see when the golden goose is becoming a boiled frog. Google used to know that what's good for the internet is good for Google. Sundar Pichai, you're not that guy pal.
est 3y ago
This made me think, people use machine parsable formats to accommodate crawlers. If the "crawler" turns out to be a LLM, should websites serve vector files instead? If so, we need a standardized tokenizer at w3c.
eloisant 3y ago
People trying to game search engine to rise to the top have always existed. Before Google it was easy, and search engine results were crap. Then Google managed to return relevant search results despite all the people trying to game it... And at some point Google stopped trying. The problem isn't SEO experts successfully gaming the organic results, but Google mixing ads in a misleading way and giving up on fighting SEO. So don't blame SEO experts for trying to get their pages to the top, that's their job. Blame Google for stopping doing the one thing that made them popular: return relevant search results despite everyone trying to game it.
JR1427 3y ago
I hate the way Google answers the question it wishes you had asked, but didn't. E.g. you search for something obscure or specific, but all the results are relating to a similar search, that has loads of results. It's as if Google just want to give you lots or results, and not care if they answer the question.
dusted 3y ago
*begins to realize
john-radio 3y ago
> Maybe an SEO professional would get attacked by a gigantic, prehistoric-looking reptile right there in front of me. Props to the author for having the ability to bang out her damn essay without getting bogged down in every little rabbit hole. If she were prone to compulsively editing-instead-of-writing she probably would have found out that alligators are not just prehistoric-looking; they're prehistoric itself. They appeared "94 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous" (wiki) and in fact their clade, Crocodilia, is only surviving sibling clade of Dinosauria, and so crocodiles & alligators are the closest living relatives of birds.

334 points by DASD 3y ago

This article is surprisingly(for the Verge) unbiased, really well written and balanced. The title is definitely misleading making it seem like the author will be taking the authoritarian side. 100% worth the read.

omoikane 3y ago
Which title? The one visible on the page is "The people who ruined the internet", but the one in the <title> tag is "Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? - The Verge". The current title on HN is "As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?"

michael1999 3y ago

The reverse-takeover of Google by DoubleClick is the Fall. The poison apple. All else is commentary.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

thegrim33 3y ago

This is a meta-level comment, but a technique I've been using for a while now, which I've found pretty helpful/useful, is that if an article starts off with an anecdote I immediately know not to bother reading it. It shows you that the author is more interested in pushing a feeling/emotion/story rather than relaying actual information. They're trying to manipulate how you think about the topic from the very beginning. It's really hard to describe the pattern but once you see it you can never unsee it. Just food for thought.

j7ake 3y ago
Also a lot of (newbie) start up pitches are like this.
rexpop 3y ago
This is a standard rhetorical technique for illustrating in personal terms what's difficult to imagine at a systemic or statistical level. It doesn't mean they're trying to manipulate you any more than you're trying to manipulate us, ie writing is pleading.
dustincoates 3y ago
A "fun" game I like to play with articles from the Verge is how many words until there's a first person pronoun. (It's almost always in the first sentence.) Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't need the journalist's backstory before I get the meat of the article.
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  Four! :-P
escapedmoose 3y ago
There’s more than one reason to read an article. Often the story is the point.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  That's true, but not great. "I'm here for you to subtly impute how I should feel about something by bypass my critical faculties" is a poor substitute for people who want to be informed.
  - escapedmoose 3y ago
    Not that I have a horse in this race, but… Your information is always going to be sourced and/or presented by humans with bias. Isn’t it better when that bias is transparent? A solo author draws their reader into a proxy conversation with them (which naturally lends itself to some level of persuasion most of the time). As a reader (I believe) your job is to pay enough attention to catch the author if they’re off-base or not playing fairly, so that you’ll walk away with more accurate understanding than you started. I suppose if you don’t want to be challenged by a proxy dialogue then a better medium for you would be statistical analysis or a scientific, structured study, but unfortunately most topics just don’t get the dedicated resources to do that properly. I’ve seen the aggregators and summary bots as well, but that seems even worse: Cherry-picking “facts” from an essay without seeing the context around them? A recipe for misunderstanding and/or getting the wool pulled over your eyes. Maybe the best solution is for every article to have a comments section where folks can point out inaccuracies and inconsistencies to help each other out? Citizen fact-checkers? Then you wind up with… this same article, as-is, posted on Hacker News alongside intelligent debate ;)

sysadm1n 3y ago

'The People' when really it's mostly bots these days, and getting smarter with LLMs too. Only a few blogs/articles are written by actual humans, and something strange has happened to my cognitive abilities lately; is discerning whether an article is written by an LLM or a human. I regularly play a game called 'bot or not' now.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

The internet was ruined when it was de anonymized by Facebook and LinkedIn etc. I remember growing up in a completely anonymous internet. You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally. Then you would go back to society as the real you and temper yourself a bit to fit in and work with others and that was ok because you could blow off steam on the internet.

smeagull 3y ago
Get this - you can have an anonymous facebook and linkedin account too.
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  Have you tried running an anonymous Facebook account in the past decade? Facebook lets you use it for a few weeks (or months), then suddenly refuses to let you in unless you provide identifying information that it never asked for before, and refuses to give you your data back until you “verify it's you” (might be quoting Google or Microsoft there, but Facebook has similar wording) even though they have no records with which to compare it to, so that can't possibly be a valid justification.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    I deleted my account only last year and for more than one decade I was using a generated icelandic name.
    - wizzwizz4 3y ago
      If your name meets Facebook's “real name” standards, it's not like Facebook is going to hunt down your birth records and see whether it Really Is your Actual Real Name™ (not that that's even a particularly coherent concept…). Did you manage to keep your account anonymous from Facebook – that is, not linked to any of your other identifiers?
      - 3y ago

phendrenad2 3y ago

"The internet" doesn't really exist, now, now does it? 99% of users are living in an AOL-style world, where they live within walled gardens. Why leave twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit? There's nothing out there but a wasteland of crumbling has-been sites. Sometimes you'll find yourself on a blog or news article, but you just click/tap the back button to go back to the walled garden. Nobody is subscribing to your RSS feed. And what really did this is mobile devices. And it isn't necessarily a bad thing, although I do miss the old vbulletin discussion days.

asdfman123 3y ago
There's lots of good content out there, but the problem is finding it. A Google replacement wouldn't be any better, because everyone's attention would be directed into optimizing new replacement site. It frustrates me when people say "Google should search reddit by default." The reason reddit is still halfway decent is there isn't as much money in gaming it, but there would be if the entire world was sent to it.
- bdw5204 3y ago
  I think the best path to a "Google replacement" is probably to reinvent Yahoo or dmoz. You'd still have to human curate the worthwhile sites through a ton of SEO spam and, if you go the dmoz route of volunteer curators, that's an attack vector for spammers but I think it'd be much more manageable than trying to build an index of the entire web and search it. A new general purpose web directory would also help mitigate probably the biggest harm that Google's algorithm has caused to the web: the death of the "links" page as a standard part of a web site due to sites trying to increase their pagerank by reducing outbound links.
  - asdfman123 3y ago
    That kind of web directory would work if it were just used by a small group of adherents. But it would encounter the same problems typical to big tech once any "real" money started flowing in.
- 3y ago

dang 3y ago

Related ongoing thread: Some thoughts about The Verge article on SEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38104407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38104407

xwdv 3y ago

SEO has always been a moving target. So now it’s all about social media optimization. Think channels, not search results.

richforrester 3y ago
Plus a lot of it has been about semantically correct formatting of your content and code. It's a moving target in that a lot of orgs try to "game the system", or at least exploit it as best they can :) Good content will mostly rise to the top because that's what search engines strive to optimise. Nothing really changes that much probably. Just semantics.

zeruch 3y ago

I cant foresee a scenario where an endlessly growing mass of AI-generated noise, stacked upon itself, will be useful to anyone. Humans will invariably find a less contentious path (maybe its seeking out more localized options, maybe its balkanizing into various specialized domains, maybe its $NEWTHINGYETTOBESEEN, or all of the above. But the current trajectory cannot hold. Someone else mentioned the "reverse-takeover of Google by DoubleClick is the Fall" and I find that spot on. The Dionysian appetites of adtech will be its own downfall.

w0m 3y ago
Eventually; someone will create an index to sort through the AI output and determine what's true/relevant and return it to the consumer. Call it 'airank' maybe?
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  yeah definitely not truth value. probably a "exploit" trigger. hard to think how reality and predictive power are going to be mediated through some kind of source index.
- lobochrome 3y ago
  Yahoo!
- kridsdale3 3y ago
  It's basically Wikipedia. Take as axiom that there exists infinite content of apparently human-readable stuff in the universe at random IP addresses. It is grey static, that maybe at one point in the past used to be ordered information. Now, all entropy. A human managed and manually curated safe zone of information is the refuge. Real people had real discussions and votes and decisions to result in what you see. This is true with Reddit to a lesser but still useful extent. Democracy can be gamed, but it's 1000x better than Engagement Signal Ranking that drives Google or Meta's products. The same principles apply to education, science, and political organization of human enterprise. Basically, institutionalize your info-world.
pradn 3y ago

viburnum 3y ago

This is maybe the worst-written article I’ve ever read. So much random detail about dresses and Canadian hometowns and almost nothing to say about the actual topic.

kridsdale3 3y ago
It's written for human beings with full and complete emotional centers. I found it lovely.

haltist 3y ago

An art project making it obvious why the economic engine (advertising) that pays for Google's electricity bills is not sustainable: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Google+will+eat+itself https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Google+will+eat+itself

zenincognito 3y ago

SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents. Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bring ton of revenue every day. Ofcourse, Google is trying hard to monetize every little real estate but still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the past 3 years. The other aspect of this the "paid ads" also immensely valuable to advertisers. We have people spending 3 million dollars a month on paid ads returning 8X ROAS. Google & FB are still the most lucrative channels for ecommerce.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rgrieselhuber 3y ago
As a SaaS / data vendor in the space, I can confirm.
preommr 3y ago
> because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve Do you actually think this or is this just a polite way of saying lots of HNers are out of touch?
- zenincognito 3y ago
  Politely, and with due respect, I consider myself "out of touch" for most things that I don't do on a day to day basis or those that are NOT my livelihood.
- gretch 3y ago
  I'm not the OP you replied to, but there's a scene from the movie the big short that really punched the understanding into my head: Michael Burry: I may have been early but I'm not wrong some exec: It's the same thing! I believe that a lot of HN posts are probably "right", but they are so far in the future and so non-applicable to day-to-day life, that it's indistinguishable from wrong. For example, everyone predicting Google is going to end - yeah all great companies eventually come to an end - if you want to be insightful, you actually have to be on time with it.

ge96 3y ago

I don't get the argument about gpt replacing a search engine. If gpt trains from search engine data how does it get new data? I guess the usage of gpt over time.

postalrat 3y ago
Why would gpt train from search engine data instead of the actual documents being indexed?
- ge96 3y ago
  Not just documents, everything, every website that becomes searchable information. How would that work in the future if people don't use search engines, how does the gpt/llm bring that info in. Not saying it's not possible, would there be an API people submit their content into... Edit: actually I wonder if wikipedia will make one (model) they have so much info
  - wfvr 3y ago
    The whole text of wikipedia has been included in training data for basically all LLMs since the start.
    - ge96 3y ago
      That's cool real Hitch Hiker's Guide book
ranting-moth 3y ago
Google's search results have been poisoned by SEO. A lot of the time when looking for information about X the search results are dominated either by someone trying to sell me X or they have very superficial information about X just so they can a bit further down try to sell me X. (I'm talking about the unknown X, not Elon's failing project).
- ge96 3y ago

adhesive_wombat 3y ago

It's always surprised me that confirmed SEO shenaniganery doesn't bring an instant ion-cannon strike from Google. I know they are apparently allergic to having a human ever decide anything ever. It's just that if I were them, with an infinite data lake to find the vendors' traces, trillion-dollar C-suite morals and the SEO was messing with the bottom line, there would be no quarter when a nest is uncovered. Delist everything to do with them, delete all their accounts and salt their persistent data profiles. Most of them are abroad and will struggle to do anything about it. After all, occasional Gmail or Android developer bans are meted out with various levels of capriciousness. I guess it's good that they're not obviously going Judge Dredd left, right and centre, but it's still surprising to me that you can run up to them, slap them in the virtual face and stay online to do it again. Or perhaps it is not messing with the short-term bottom line because the SEO sites are crawling with ads? And until ChatGPT what were you going to do? Use Bing?

qvrjuec 3y ago
Isn't this what happened with rap genius around a decade ago[0]? Maybe this was long before their policy of zero human intervention. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/25/5243716/rap-genius-plummets-in-google-results-apologizes-for-spammy-seo https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/25/5243716/rap-genius-plumm...
- spookie 3y ago
  Their lengthy apology is.... I don't know how to describe it. It reminds me of relationship I had, in a bad way. The part where they go on to say "We messed up" cracked me up. You don't "mess up" when you are fully aware of your actions, and perform them as planned.
  - arp242 3y ago
    I kind of understand their "yeah, but other sites are doing the same shady shit". You can say that doesn't excuse it, and it kind of doesn't, but you're at a real competitive disadvantage if you don't participate in the arms race. It's bringing a knife to a gunfight.

fsckboy 3y ago

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had said the house looked like it was melting, so she typed in "melting house", I think. Not that that's genius or quirky or anything, but I would never dream of typing in something I was thinking "informally", and her approach is more like "whatever whackadoo thing I'm thinking, probably other people think just like me" and she finds anything I ask her about. (I've pretested that query, and turns out that there are melting houses all over the world, just gotta look in your neighborhood) so to the point here, I lament that Google doesn't work any more, but she doesn't, she thinks it works great. Now if I can just get her to stop finding restaurant recommendations on TikTok...

wildrhythms 3y ago
How would you have phrased that query?
- fsckboy 3y ago
  unlike some of the houses that show up in that query, this house was not designed to appear melting, and I wasn't sure if it was even designed to look uneven, or had the foundation settled and they did nothing about it? So I was trying to explain the uneven wavy lines, rounded corners, and I was saying "it's almost as if it had melted", thinking "this is my personal interpretation, I'm just being descriptive" so that's what I mean by "informal thinking" vs "explicit query" it's also easy to explain this one case, but it is true in general, she just finds things much more quickly than I do, and when I ask her what was her query I'm always "why tf did you type that in?" If we used a formal language for search, I'd beat her, but she throws in a lot of extraneous terms that make me think either or both "you are overspecifying" or "you are ambiguating" with those extra terms, but she gets answers I don't get, I think because many other people are typing things in the way she does. I had been trying to find it before I saw her, and since I knew the general neighborhood I was actually trying to "walk" around with streetview to find it, then I was wracking my brain for architectural terms I could use.

mushufasa 3y ago

I can see AI decrease some of the traffic for content writers who relied on SEO taking a hit; like political blogs or various sites that paid for ads to drive traffic and then essentially sell more ads to those users on their own site. But the writers/platforms that have great content can also use AI to improve their own content, so I don't think this is going to be a 'fall off a cliff' style event. I don't think that SEO is going to be decreasing anytime soon for e-commerce, which is probably the best use of SEO. AI generation images and content are no substitute for physical goods, like shoes.

legitster 3y ago

My first job out of college was writing SEO articles for [unnamed failed startup]. It was exactly the sort of daft, fluffy, "let me Google that for you" content you would think a 20 something SEO writer would come up with. And it's these kinds of fluffy, non-clickbait content that people are complaining about when they talk about Google's search results these days. I don't think the real problem are two-bit hustlers sneaking in bait-and-switch content here and there - it's that Google's own rules encourage mediocre and non-authoritative content. So one of the reasons people gravitate towards ChatGPT (or, to a similar degree TikTok) is that both will give you strong and authoritative advice (even if it's wrong!) I don't necessarily believe the internet is worse today (if you have any false nostalgia, try searching a forum for an answer to a technical problem). But experts who were actually putting out good content and information were consistently getting ripped off by knockoffs for decades and we shouldn't be surprised that nobody is contributing anymore.

ipaddr 3y ago
People are still contributing at a higher rate but google isn't including them. That's the difference not that suddenly professionals are fleeing because of something that has been happened since the beginning.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  I dunno. In the few areas I think I know something, I contribute on GitHub and... Thats about it? Most of what I am interested in has moved to Discord or Telegram, or rotted away in deteriorating subreddits. A few others niches moved to YouTube, a spammy one way window. Any contribution I make just feels like shouting into the void (and not even the satisfying kind like here on HN). Is this not a common sentiment?
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    If you have your own site you can bring interesting people to you. Invite your discord communities.

Havoc 3y ago

Until the LLM stuff scales sufficiently to replace free Google searches at scale SEO will stay. And judging by everyone and their dog in ai space running at a loss even when charging id say that’s not imminent

dragonwriter 3y ago
> Until the LLM stuff scales sufficiently to replace free Google searches at scale SEO will stay. I mean, it might be renamed something other than "SEO" then, but the same people will still be optimizing for a content selection and presentation algorithm. An LLM trained (or using in context learning on, or some mix) a dataset isn't immune to manipulation by the people supplying the data.

Sindisil 3y ago

Hopefully, it'll die in a fire? Not that I really think that. There's too much incentive to fine new and exciting ways to game the system, instead if actually just being relevant. Google and, to a lesser extent, other search engines, deserve some of the blame for having easily gameable ranking algorithms. Still, it's mostly on the bad actors doing the gaming, and the people hiring them to do it.

MarkusQ 3y ago

> I began to think that the reason I found them > endearing and not evil was that while many had > made quite a bit of money, almost none had amassed > significant power. Unlike the Elon Musks and Jeff > Bezoses of the world, who went from geeky teenagers > to masters of the universe, the dorks who grew up > to do SEO have stayed the butt of the joke, > beholden to the fluctuations of the algorithm, > frantically pulling levers behind the scenes > but ultimately somewhat hapless. Translation: they were "endearing" because, instead of actually trying to build something, they just made piles of money ruining things for everyone else. Sure, they're parasites, but at least they aren't (god forbid) _productive_.

phkahler 3y ago

>> Why does it always seem to surprise me, even after all these years, that the way we behave on the internet is often quite different from how we act in real life? Because you don't actually know the people you interact with on the internet. Anonymity invites deception, which builds a sort of distrust over time whether people realize it or not. Authenticity is rare on the net.

karaterobot 3y ago

I appreciate the author trying to humanize these people who have profited off of ruining the web. I freely admit, with moderate shame, that I hoped the story ended with the floor of the party collapsing.

tambourine_man 3y ago

I feel like there’s a place for smaller, more niche products and that the pendulum is swinging back to it. A few million users only. No expectation of ever becoming a hundred billion business. Something like Kagi, the old Dropbox, old Twitter. It’s never going to appeal to most people by design.

collaborative 3y ago

Traffic to our anti-SEO search engine has quadrupled in the past month but we're still losing money Hard to beat ad-supported search

throwaway447 3y ago
Do you have a link?
- collaborative 3y ago
  I try not to link because it bothers me when people accuse me of self promoting. It's in the profile :)

amf12 3y ago

"The alligator got my attention. Which, of course, was the point." ... "you can’t quite stop yourself from being curious". The first three sentences of the post basically counter the author's narrative. Clickbait is ruining the internet. It doesn't matter whether it is Google, or Tiktok or Facebook or whatever, what gets popular surfaces to the top. If people like clicking on clickbait content, why blame platforms?

remram 3y ago
What makes content clickbait is not that you don't want to click on it. It's that once you get there, it doesn't deliver.

mikewarot 3y ago

Long ago there was a slashdot story about someone who returned to their office to find a co-worker looking at a long printout with a number of peaks circled on it. This printout turned out to be a frequency spectra derived from a covert recording device monitoring the 3 phase feed into the facility. This turned out to be useful for estimating Uranium enrichment yield. I thought it was a damned cool story, but now I can't find it any more. 8( Google won't help me find this story... but it did at least once in the past. And now I can't even find that reference to the earlier reference. Also... try finding something about marking up hypertext documents... you can't... you have to know that "annotation" works instead... at least it used to. Who knows what Google will spit out these days. Google-fu isn't what it used to be, because Google goobered it up.

ravetcofx 3y ago
I tried a bunch of keyword combinations with site:slashdot.org with no luck. I wonder if the story was removed
knallfrosch 3y ago
Happens to me a lot, but restraining Google to the site usually does more harm than good. Most often, I misremembered the site and even if not, there might be posts leading to the story on other sites.
throwaway447 3y ago
I have a 10TB hdd and if a website is interesting, I am likely to save it. This site you would find under /data/u/uranium/uranium_enrichment_yielt.html And I use recoll to find stuff https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/index-recoll.html https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/index-recoll.htm...

schaefer 3y ago

The ship has sailed on “isn’t useful”. Today’s Google is user-hostile.

jppope 3y ago

yes, LLMs will have a massive impact on SEO but the dirty secret here... GPT is trained pretty heavily on reddit data. theres a reason why there hasn't been an IPO and their api got crazy expensive. OpenAi is trying to build a moat with Reddit and with regulation. I really don't think its going to be that long till people figure it out, but who knows

randomdev3 3y ago

Yeah it has been pretty bad for a decade. I wish it just searched exactly for what I type in without assuming anything.

wood_spirit 3y ago

A pet theory of mine is that google pushes SO clones because they contain ads and google gets revenue from sending users to sites with ads. Talk about perverse incentives. The pre double click acquisition search results were much better. So can DuckDuckGo let me easily search for sites without ads?

3seashells 3y ago

The parasite kills the host and then withers, dies and mutated to poison llms?

aszantu 3y ago

now that you mention it... I went away from google a while ago, duckduckgo was okay for a while, but nowadays, I find myself using hackernews or just youtube(disapointing me a lot xD) before I google

WalterBright 3y ago

I simply gave up on SEO and don't think about it anymore. We just tell interested people to go to dlang.org.

DanielHB 3y ago

LLMEO obviously, people are already doing that on reddit

coldtea 3y ago

SEO was always snake oil, equivalent to "hi fi cables".

HlessClaudesman 3y ago

My preferred narrative for enshitification is death by 1000 bean-counters. A manager who needs to hit performance targets to get their 6-7 figure bonus is heavily incentivised to juice the stats this quarter. If they already show you 2 ads before a video, why not 3 or 4? Who cares if the platform as a whole slowly becomes less usable, my numbers are up! What is required is strong vision at the top, telling the bean-counters to dial it all the way back, to be able to see when the golden goose is becoming a boiled frog. Google used to know that what's good for the internet is good for Google. Sundar Pichai, you're not that guy pal.

est 3y ago

This made me think, people use machine parsable formats to accommodate crawlers. If the "crawler" turns out to be a LLM, should websites serve vector files instead? If so, we need a standardized tokenizer at w3c.

eloisant 3y ago

People trying to game search engine to rise to the top have always existed. Before Google it was easy, and search engine results were crap. Then Google managed to return relevant search results despite all the people trying to game it... And at some point Google stopped trying. The problem isn't SEO experts successfully gaming the organic results, but Google mixing ads in a misleading way and giving up on fighting SEO. So don't blame SEO experts for trying to get their pages to the top, that's their job. Blame Google for stopping doing the one thing that made them popular: return relevant search results despite everyone trying to game it.

JR1427 3y ago

I hate the way Google answers the question it wishes you had asked, but didn't. E.g. you search for something obscure or specific, but all the results are relating to a similar search, that has loads of results. It's as if Google just want to give you lots or results, and not care if they answer the question.

dusted 3y ago

*begins to realize

john-radio 3y ago

> Maybe an SEO professional would get attacked by a gigantic, prehistoric-looking reptile right there in front of me. Props to the author for having the ability to bang out her damn essay without getting bogged down in every little rabbit hole. If she were prone to compulsively editing-instead-of-writing she probably would have found out that alligators are not just prehistoric-looking; they're prehistoric itself. They appeared "94 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous" (wiki) and in fact their clade, Crocodilia, is only surviving sibling clade of Dinosauria, and so crocodiles & alligators are the closest living relatives of birds.