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The article starts with intimating that SEO is the problem. Perhaps to an extent it is, though I'd say with G's massive market share that optimising for one swe
by ricardo81 2y ago
The article starts with intimating that SEO is the problem. Perhaps to an extent it is, though I'd say with G's massive market share that optimising for one sweet spot with one search engine is really the problem. It makes SEO easier, one search engine and criteria. 20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines you'd be ranking well in some but not others. A good argument for alternative algorithms (and search engines).
Generative AI is no doubt useful for simple questions, and perhaps for people who aren't even interested in being sceptical about the answer given, but it seems at too high a cost for the visibility of the actual web and the effort put in by content creators.
Obviously with the huge and unrivalled ROI G gets from ads vs any rivals, the fact they're the default on most mobiles etc means any alternatives have a huge uphill battle to get seen.
At least there is Bing (and its meta variants), Mojeek (independent, a smaller index but truly independent) and Brave (claims independence but has a historical tie to scraping results)
- hollerith 2y ago>20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines That's not how I remember it. My recollection is that for a year or 2 (roughly 1998 and 1999) Altavista was the dominant engine, which rapidly gave way to Google essentially as soon as Google became available, and since 2000 Google has been the dominant engine. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was getting my info on what engines people were using mostly from Usenet, Slashdot and a non-web-based forum called river.org.
- ricardo81 2y agoAlltheweb was fairly prominent then. The likes of Ask Jeeves and Lycos had a few % market share. Gigablast also had its day back then.
- hollerith 2y agoBefore I switched to Altavista, I used Lycos for most of my searches though I did occasionally use Ask Jeeves and Alltheweb just to explore the space of offerings. During those years, I also used DMOZ regularly, which is not a search engine, but rather an index of links organized much like a card catalog in a library is.
- ricardo81 2y agoYahoo bought a lot of the alternatives out, going from memory, then eventually switched to Google results.
- whstl 2y agoAltavista was very popular in tech circles. But I remember "normies" mostly using and talking about Yahoo, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and even lots of local, country-specific, search engines. And after that moving to Google.
- hollerith 2y agoI noticed at the time that Yahoo's engine was very popular with the less-technical users, yes.
- MagnumOpus 2y agoIn those years from 97 to 99, Altavista might have been your first stop, but you had to ask Excite, Yahoo, Jeeves and Lycos for a full picture or even to get a single good answer. As you say, once Google Beta appeared it was the first and last stop for any of its users.