A storefront for robots: The SEO arms race has left Google and the web drowning in garbage text, with customers and businesses flailing to find each other.
A storefront for robots: The SEO arms race has left Google and the web drowning in garbage text, with customers and businesses flailing to find each other.
Selling real things to real people means writing a steady stream of nonsense text that only web crawlers will ever read.
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I pretty much only use google to search other web sites, like “thing im searching for” site:beehaw.org or whatever. It’s completely useless otherwise.
Truly. Most web search engines, including google, are mostly useless these days if you don't already have a good idea where to look or it is a very common search.
You use to be able to click down a bunch of pages till what you were looking for turns up. But now after you go down a few pages it just starts repeating and it is all mostly big tech sites.
You search for anything slightly niche, everything past page one is just rubbish. It's especially jarring when searching for something programming related and 80% of the results are auto-generated stuff scraped from Stack overflow. It reminds me of Amazon where you search for a product and almost all results are chinese-made clones of what you are looking with randomly generated names.
It reminds me of Amazon where you search for a product and almost all results are chinese-made clones of what you are looking with randomly generated names
This is a big factor as to why I shop at Amazon much, much less nowadays. Can't find anything reputable outside of major brands, just feels like a market for dropshipped items
Things weren't anywhere near this bad a decade ago 😒
The most baffling thing modern search engines do, especially DuckDuckGo, is a page of search results in they inevitably throw in some unrelated results involving my location as looked up by my IP.
I'm not sure why when looking for old Sega console stuff it wants me to know about plumbers in what it thinks my city is, but it's sure dedicated to me finding out! :facepalm:
It makes me smile a little when I get ads for restaurants in the suburb in a completely different city where my ISP has its registered business address.