Google search is losing the fight with SEO spam, study says
Google search is losing the fight with SEO spam, study says
Study finds "search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam."
I guess we all kinda knew that, but it's always nice to have a study backing your opinions.
IMHO, the problem with Google isn't SEO. It's Google. When Google was great, it would find exactly what you were searching for. The whole point was to get you off of Google and on to whatever site you were looking for as quickly as possible. Over the last several years, their search has increasingly been drinking the 'engagement algorithm' Kool-Aid. Now Google doesn't search for what you ask, it searches for what it thinks you are trying to find. Which is fucking useless because I know exactly what I'm trying to find and that's exactly what I typed in. Selecting verbatim search and putting things in quotes helps. But it's still displays tons of irrelevant stuff that doesn't include what I searched for.
It's actually easy to point to exactly when the downfall started. Years ago Google was trying to make a social network called Google+ that would compete with Facebook. Before this, a + operator in the search field meant only show results that contain that particular term. But they wanted people to search for Google+, so they changed it so the plus sign became a searchable term and quotes were necessary to include a term or phrase. That was the moment Google decided that search wasn't their most important product. And it's been slow downhill ever since.
My problem is replacing search terms with synonyms (which are often wrong for the context) and ignoring things like quotation marks or other search tools. It’s hard to exclude irrelevant results. Sometimes I’ll know an article’s exact title, search with and without quotes, and never find it.
Google’s relevance of search has gone extremely downhill in the last few years even before the surge of AI articles, so it’s no surprise the keyword-injected articles are all that’s winning now.
But holy shit does it piss me off how many of these first page results have literally incorrect information now too. Want to learn how to do something in software? See a release date? Find accurate information? Good fucking luck.
Yeah it's pretty wild how bad search results have been lately. The unfettered proliferation of AI bullshit on the internet is gonna have some really goddamn irritating impacts on just about everything I think.
I remember back in the day when the same shit was happening because websites would just put, like, an entire dictionary in tiny, hidden text somewhere at the bottom of the main page so it would have a greater chance of showing up no matter what you typed into the search engine.
It's pretty wild that they didn't think about people doing exactly the same thing with all the new methods they came up with to make searches "relevant" since that was one thing that made Google so much better than the competition back then.
Any system you make to push certain things over other things are going to be figured out and gamed.
Bing with ChatGPT has been my go-to search on my Android phone for a couple of months now. The ease in which I can just ask a question in a normal American English sentence and ALWAYS find what I'm looking for has sold me.
However, finding specific coding examples (Assembler) has been a little lackluster. In those cases I still have to form a search query like I would on Google.
Given that, Bing is still my SE of choice now. I can get the information I'm looking for without the 1st dozen or so results that say Fuck You Buy Something like I get on Google.
I'm really enjoying perplexity.ai most of the time you just get the answer you're looking for.
First I tried duckduckgo, now I’m checking out kagi.
I would expect its only going to get worse as they try to suppress wages across the board in tech
Yea