The worst is the SEO pages, especially for popular how-to topics. Every single first page result will be a page that has expanded what used to be said in bullet point form, into a 1500 word essay that you must now slog through in order to get the information you need. And this is by necessity, because Google values prose over bullet points.
The majority of things that come up on search nowadays consist of computer-generated essays. The only way around this is to limit your search to Reddit. And I fear that soon Reddit will be flooded with AI generated fluff to take advantage of the residual "real-user" SEO.
Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!
I really loved the first paragraph of the article about Reddit: "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit". I want to add this that just happened at my company, that shows really bad execution on the Reddit side. Bad as if the current Reddit management is surfing tiny waves in some paradise.
Our company tried to use Reddit Ads for years. We are not US based and there was problems using every credit or debit card. The ones that work everywhere and. obviously, in Google Adwords.
We retried a few months ago and it worked but our Reddit ads were not approved because they were in the crypto space where indeed we are in the security auditing and research side and also work for Web3 projects.
Then, they assigned a higher level Reddit contact, they gave us several forms to fill to show that we were not in the wrong Web3 side. We completed every form over several weeks, until they say they don't have an account manager for our account. At this point I don't know if the right thing is to talk to the CXO level directly. Yes, Reddit management doesn't understand their own business and most probably loosing a lot of money.
BTW: I specifically ranted about ways of challenging Google back in 2013 in the same vein [1].
Maybe this is giving reddit too much credit, but I do see people say "append reddit to searches" literally every time the topic of search is brought up, so what if reddit is aware people do that but doesn't want to be a search engine?
Imagine you're one of the few remaining sources of human content on the Internet, and you look at the terrible cat and mouse game google plays forever with spam, you don't really envy it. So imagine telling the world hey, reddit is the new google, everyone come do your searches (and spam) here, gl mods.
This doesn't ring true to me. Reddit has clearly demonstrated a desire/mandate to monetize, even at the expense of its users. If they thought they had a viable Google competitor they wouldn't look that gift horse in the mouth.
The fact that unpaid volunteers (mods) are handling the spam problem is an upside.
I disagree with that. It doesn't matter if Reddit doesn't want to be a search engine. People are already using it a search engine and they simply will never stop no matter what those ppl in Reddit are thinking. Better to embrace the search use case and make it search friendly.
> "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit"
It's more that it's the current blogsphere. All those things that were there at the organic distributed web didn't completely go away, they just became walled, and Reddit is the only one with walls low enough to be discoverable.
It's not a search engine, it's only the place with a full link quality enumeration.
To me all signs point to Reddit never having been a commercial venture, but rather an influence and propaganda machine for United States government agencies. So they already have their budget paid.
I don't see Chinese communist party buying Reddit stocks as proof against US government agencies using Reddit to influence the population, that's what I mean.
>>Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!
Yup, Google and it's main result set has for quite a while been dead to me (ya, I use DDG, and pretty much threat the main result set that way too). Finding valid detailed comments on Reddit, HN, or SE is what I use for primary clues.
Sadly, this has a predictably limited shelf-life.
When using Amazon for product search, for a short while, it worked really well to sort results by avg review grade. Very short while, as the reviews rapidly filled with fakes. Now, I need to go manually into each review set and compare the quantities and qualities of 1_Star + 2_Star reviews as a primary filter for scam products (& ignoring the idiot posts giving 1_Star for a shipping problem). Now, even using Fakespot and those tactics, the well of Amazon Reviews is quite fully poisoned, to the extent that I now specifically avoid shopping there for entire categories.
Now that this is being discovered about Reddit, HN, & SE, we can expect the inevitable "flooding of the zone with shit".
People have been astroturfing on reddit for a long time, the only reason it's not a cesspool is that reddit has a hardcore anti-marketing bent in a lot of subs and they'll aggressively out shills. I expect that GPT powered reddit bots will make the shills a lot harder to identify though.
It has always been a cesspool for a long time though. Only fit for consuming memes, cat pics, and financially motivated stunts like when Keanu Reeves was there the other day, using the social media account of the company for his upcoming film in a few weeks.
Each subreddit is controlled by a few essentially random people that likely have personal gain as one of their motivations.
If you think you aren't being advertised to on reddit just because the spam isn't as obvious as elsewhere, think again. The advertising there is more sophisticated than bots dropping links in comments.
There was a leak a while ago showed one of the moderators of wallstreetbets that was posting fake options gains, and it still gave him a massive following which he used to sell them a newsletter or something.
There are many subreddits where there will be a link in the sidebar to a monetized website affiliated with one of the mods.
And even 10 years ago, I remember at least 1 moderator of the programming subreddit somehow always had his blog posts highly voted and ending up on the front page, while any other submissions, especially ones that might counter his claims, would end up being stuck in the "spam filter". And if you messaged to have it unblocked, they'd only respond 1 day later, which means it would never show up on the front page due to the age factor of the ranking algorithm.
So, assuming that this "mismanagement" is not just happening in the crypto space, but across the board in other spaces too, they are missing out on short-term money, but are more valuable for the searches that users are now doing (including me). So.. is it actually bad execution?
The mismanagement is not between quotes since all compliance was filled and acknowledged.
Could you please elaborate on your question? Since our issue was supposely solved filling all the requirements there is no difference about the different spaces. This is bad execution by the book.
Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the internet. If they valued shortness then everything would be trimmed to bullet points removing useful info.
The problem is really not that google is doing a bad job, it’s that the incentives to get views on pages ruins the internet.
I disagree that whatever ranking system google uses will just be gamed to the same extent. If google downgraded the rank of pages with lots of ads and trackers it would substantially reduce the incentive to game the system, the reason it won’t is because most of those pages are running Adsense so there’s every incentive for google to keep the status quo.
The first point is best served by sources that I like and trust, often authoritative to some degree. If they already have a good search (like MDN or Wikipedia) I will often use that directly or go via DDG: !mdn keyords..., !wiki keywords... If not, I type the name of the website as a keyword in front (like reddit...)
The second is really more about finding specific types of websites. For example John Smith's blog that I don't remember etc.
What I'm saying is that to fix the web, we need more sites that can act as the first point above. Whether they are wikis or not is more of a practical consideration. The point is that they don't suck and that there's not enough of them IMO.
Those sites will demand a % of sales to let anybody into their garden, while search engines demand nothing. That can work for digital products that are of unlimited supply.
Page publishers would still have the same incentive to game the system, only putting a smaller numer of ads, perhaps then more expensive and more carefully selected.
If you want to live in that world, you can today by running an adblocker. All major browsers enable you to use one. Even on mobile, vast majority of ads are easily defeated with a simple DNS-based blocking. I only see a handful of ads on Tik Tok and mobile Twitter. They're still mostly bad.
> If you want to live in that world, you can today by running an adblocker.
That misses the entire point: Google search results will still be manipulated to push those low quality results higher because even if you don't see the ads enough people do that investing in SEO is worth for those sites.
That was my point: if Google rewarded sites with fewer ads, you would get all the same manipulation and low-quality content but with fewer (but perhaps more expensive and carefully selected) ad blocks. You can have that today.
No, the reason they won't is that trackers and ads have little to do with the value of the content.
As long as there are any ads, the incentives stay the same. You're saying an internet completely free of monetary incentives would be better. I doubt that's true but it really doesn't matter, because it won't be happening.
You misunderstand, if you penalize excessive advertising then the revenue generated per page view decreases. This will reduce but not eliminate the amount of effort spent on these projects resulting in fewer such webpages.
So ‘How to unclog a toilet’ is always going to get SEO optimized spam. However, most topics don’t get that many views making them less viable for this business model.
That assumption is worth reconsidering. It may be that fewer ads would just be more expensive to run and would work out similarly revenue-wise in the long run. The value of lots of ads may be diversification and smoothing out revenue, not increasing net.
If every single website on the planet had fewer ads then the new equilibrium might be roughly equivalent revenue, but many websites only have a single banner advertisement. So much of the redistribution of revenue would end up on those websites.
> If you provide less monetisation for content creators
But I don't want to "consume content", I want to "get information". Most "content creators" don't provide any info. Or at best there is some info there but you have to watch an hour worth of video for the 20 useful seconds.
You could reward the type of monetization that is correlated to high-quality content and penalize the type that is associated with spam.
Site offers extra paid content or services, or takes donations? Rank up. Ads? Neutral or rank down based on type of ads. Affiliate links? Rank way down.
I don't want "content", some generic attention grabbing placeholder around which they spam ads. I don't want some professionally made lowest common denominator product designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. I want creations with heart and soul. I want to read the opinions and writings of real human beings, not corporate PR articles with cleverly disguised pitches at the end.
People who don't have enough intrinsic motivation to create regardless of financial reward probably aren't producing anything of value. That basically excludes every for profit website out there that would be "killed" by less monetization. Killing them off is a good thing.
Agreed. If content creators are more interested in getting something back (money) then they are creating something of value to society and disseminating it in a simple and clean way then I'm forced to think twice about their motives.
If you put the cart (making money) before the horse (creating value) then you are not really a productive member of society. Takers are like irresponsible children, they take without any awareness of the ramifications their behavior has on society.
This kind of attitude is similar to colonialism, an attitude representative of most of commercial enterprises today. Givers give value knowing that when they give, they receive, without any need to unnaturally focus on the end result.
The real problem is that Google holds an effective monopoly in search, so any digital marketer worth a salt will optimize the crap out of their blogs and pages to get higher and higher rank within Google alone. This will, in turn, lead to what we see today: a race to the bottom in terms of quality to get the best SEO results.
I've found that a mix of search engines give me the best results, I'm trying my best to incentivize competition. If I want super local results anywhere outside the US, I'll use Google+uBlock because that's what it works, but everything else I use Kagi or DDG.
That sounds like it makes sense - but if human readers know what's a good search result and what isn't, why would Google not be able to optimize their algo accordingly? If the results for a query don't match the "nature of the query", it's a bad result. If the algo can be gamed, it isn't aiming for the actual goal, i.e. it fundamentally fails at information retrieval.
Because anything google can detect, the spammers can generate to match. We will soon enter an era of GPT generated spam which not even humans can tell if it's real info or just garbage that looks real.
Luckily on Kagi I can just block sites the moment I realize it is nonsense.
Or boost or even pin sites that I feel are extra valuable.
Back in the old days I had a txt-file on my desktop containing domains with a minus in front, llke -example.com -example.org for all the worst offenders, so that I could post them on the end of every contested search.
After a while I think Google found a way to ignore those as well as every other filter I had - at least I gave it up.
if human readers know what's a good search result and what isn't
That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a "good result" looks like. I imagine that's dependent on a lot of factors, from the context of why the user is searching, their demographic, and their biases. When I search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe" I want straight facts - ingredients and bullet point steps and nothing else. My mother would want some background about the recipe, where it's from, and what makes it different. You can't get that from the search term alone. You need a lot more context.
It's exactly what the promise of 'personalized search' based on tracking everyone around the internet told us it would give us but it doesn't seem to work very well.
> That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a "good result" looks like
Maybe we can't agree on what people want, but what I'm sure we can agree on is what people don't want. I don't recall anyone ever saying "I wish there were more ads in the content I'm consuming".
Yes, and now turn that sentiment into a metric that can be measured as input to the model.
At first it was click-through rate, but that turned SEO into sites into clickbait to get high click scores. Then they switched to time spent on the site, and as a consequence we get recipes that are filled with 2h of prose above them just so people stay longer on the site.
Recipes are a pain in general, even without google, doubly so for baking.
Baking is a science, not art... so recipes calling for a cup of flour and two teaspoons of butter are useless to me, while recipes with ingredients in grams are useless to many american grandmas.
On the other hand, a pinterest page with a photo and a large overlay asking me to register is useless to both of us.
Nowadays a cup and a tablespoon are standard unities of volume. They are not any worse than milliliters. There are a few people that insist on ignoring the standards, but those also tend to not publish their recipes.
The issue is that for a lot of ingredients -- flour notably among them -- you can't measure accurately by volume. If you're looking for reproducibility, you have to measure by weight.
And once you start measuring some things by weight, you quickly realize that most things are easier to measure out by weight than volume (particularly sticky ingredients like honey), so you start wanting to measure everything that isn't a tiny amount by weight.
I convert all of the recipes I collect to gram measurements for this reason.
> Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the internet.
That is true to the extent that the "anything" is only a proxy for quality. Keywords, reputation, etc are all proxies.
But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page. Does it provide useful information? In what area? Etc. Then invert that in order to answer queries. I really hope this is where page ranking is headed.
> But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page
That'd be nice, but I am skeptical for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that where Google has already applied AI, it has seemed to make things worse, not better.
Why do people even care about views? Because of advertising. It is the root cause of all problems on the web today. All Google has to do to fix the web is put itself out of business by delisting pages with ads including its own. Search and the web at large would be fixed in days.
Maybe I am wrong about this, and maybe the SEO junk sites would find a way to evolve, but what I really want from google is a plonk button so I can have a personal kill file for sites that I never want to see again.
Google used to support this[0], and I used it happily for blocking low-quality domains such as Experts Exchange, certain Wikia subdomains, and Pintrest. The feature was later removed[1] in favor of a browser extension, but the extension was less functional because it could only filter out results from the current page, so heavily-spammed keywords had result pages with only one or two links.
Nowadays, with the results being entirely spam for multiple pages, I think a return of the server-side filtering would be necessary if it's to be at all useful. Otherwise you'll get page after page of blank SERPs.
It would be possible to do that at browser level through extensions, for example there is one to filter out Pinterest results from search results. I wouldn't however expect that potentially great feature to be natively available in Google search anytime soon, unless they made it as a analytics filled paid service and in a way that gave their advertisers and investors the power of circumventing it, that is, both plonk and unplonk as a service.
As a bonus, Google would have access to the list of who had blacklisted what sites -- surely that would be useful to them as a signal to detect "SEO spam sites".
Because of a recent HN article on the subject, I was searching for "correlation of ACT scores and IQ", and the first 5 hits were the _same_ crappy 1500 word essay, where various section headers were programmatically changed to include exactly what I searched for.
How challenging would it be to just check common searches and generate a page that hits all relevant wordings by including those words right in the page.
I tried several different variations like "How to convert ACT score to IQ", etc. Same stupid page.
The computer generated essay and the fake stackoverflow clones are the worst thing ever. It's harder to code now than just a few years ago because of all the BS people put on the internet.
I'm finding some value in live chats with the repo maintainers, but that's not really viable for everything, plus won't be easy for juniors to do either.
And the worst of SEO pages are cooking recipes, where you have to scroll down screens of badly written meaningless text before you actually get to ingredients list. At least Google still keeps indexing recipe microformats.
Even worse, I've found myself directed to long recipe pages with a huge amount of prose about the history of the recipe, how the author developer it etc, BUT THEN THERE IS NO ACTUAL RECIPE! This has happened multiple times in the past year. And this was often the first or second result when Googling the recipe. wtf?
Hi guys! Last month I was visiting my grandma... (3 minutes of this) ...so don't forget to like and subscribe this! Now, i usually use this kind of flour, but I decided to replace it with this special kind from my local farmers market, which is great, because it's sold by this old lady who works... (5 more minutes of that) ... so if you like putting ginger into your cookies, write it down in a comment (3 more minutes of this) ... now you have to fold in the cheese... i have a separate video (15 minutes) just explaining how to fold it in, so I won't show that here, but click the link in the description to see that ...
Yeah... i prefer text. It's even wors with tech stuff.... do they expect me to retype the commands/code from the video?!
For recipes I've had good results with YouTube. Short videos, to the point, with a leaflet in the beginning showing ingredients needed. YouTube for tech stuff is the worst, I agree.
You're getting downvoted because those of us who have tried for ourselves often find videos vastly less useful, efficient or relevant than a bit of text. Especially in the world of the 'influencer'. Now you have half a video pimping their dozens of YouRedTwitTok accounts you just have to click on, the other influencers they're mutually shoveling traffic to, the products they're being paid to pimp...and if you're lucky you might get some information tacked onto the end.
We all have to sift. No matter if the content is text, video or audio. If I'm undertaking a project of some magnitude - like cooking a new dish or changing my brakes - then I don't mind spending a little time to find the highest quality information. And for many things, that will be inside a YouTube video. Even if you have 100 million low quality content creators, you have at least a million high quality content creators.
I can look at a blob of text and have an idea if it's worth looking deeper at in a glance, especially something structured like a recipe. I have to watch the video. That doesn't scale, and I frankly have better things to do than vet content creators via several or many minutes of inane video at a time, much less 'millions' of creators. In fact, the most efficient way I've found to find a new recipe that isn't a waste of time is to start with "ignore video sites" and "ignore influencer infested sites" (e.g. Instagram).
Not that everything on YouTube is crap, just most things. Sometimes seeing a video of someone doing something is the only way I can figure it out. There are many particularly useful videos of how to use complicated test and measurement gear. And tying knots. But the video isn't efficient enough for me to start there.
This is what I'm trying to say: Sometimes you don't have better things to do, because you need the knowledge that is in the video. If you're doing something important and somebody comes up to offer to show you a much better way of doing the task, does this have to be the response? "I have better things to do".
Some YouTube videos are worth the time to watch, and I would argue that for recipes you'll spend your time better starting with videos vs search engines. Unless it's something you already know how to make and just need a reminder of the measurements of the recipe.
Talking about cooking, you have the BBQ channels on YouTube, with people showing you how to best cut and prepare different cuts of meat. If you don't personally know somebody to show you these techniques you'd be lost with only text content and no video.
I think it's easier for people to rage at an annoying YouTube video when trying to find information, than to rage at worthless SEO spam. But the solution is the same: close the tab and go back. It doesn't take many seconds to notice if a YouTube presenter is an idiot.
Not at all! It depends greatly on the content and the person. For recipes it is actually useful to see with your own eyes how to do something. The same thing with many other things, such as for example carpentry and mechanics. I agree that text is better for tech content and for a lot of other things that are mostly text based, or more abstract.
We've been conditioned into thinking text is better because we've all been through schooling, which consists of text books and a person yelling in front of a blackboard. If you let kids watch high quality YouTube videos instead, they would get a much better education.
Well, I should have said "text is better for me". Especially for recipes, which are a list of instructions. I just need to see the list, not have someone tell it to me.
Videos aren't dense enough, information-wise. I can't just put them up on a screen as a reference, and they require too much interaction as I have to back up, play, back up, play, back up, etc. in order to use the information being relayed.
If I only have a video telling me something, it's better than nothing, but it's going to slow me down, reduce my understanding, and will inevitably leave out detail that is important to me.
If you're already adept or not looking into things that are challenging to you, then you might just need a list of ingredients. If somebody who has never cooked needs to dice onions for the dish and doesn't know how to do that, YouTube will help much more than any text. There are so many things and aspects that we don't have vocabulary for and is just faster showing.
I haven’t noticed, but I usually hang around King Arthur’s website for bread recipes and they use mass and bakers’ percentages, so do other baker blogs that I may find. Maybe it’s different for things other than bread, but I can’t say. Hail Eris!
Yeah this, if I want to know how many chapters are there in a game, I have to real an entire article telling me useless stuff before I can get the info I want. Witj ChatGPT I can avoid this. I would say most of my Google searches were for answering questions, not to find articles related to a topic.
The industry term for it is "made for advertising". It is a constant battle because some people in adtech want to increase impressions at all costs, and some people want to block these sites from their systems. Guess which one wins out when executives see how much money it makes?
Why do you believe that users will start using this "AI AdBlock"? Regular ad blockers are enough to cover current ads. Google also controls the main browser in the biggest mobile OS (Chrome on Android), and it doesn't support ad blockers. There are options (Firefox, Brave, Kiwi, etc.), but most users don't bother.
The bit of social media people use to talk to their IRL friends and family will be fine.
But the bit of social media where people are listening to celebrities, getting their news, sharing memes, discussing common interests? It might get flooded with bots so convincing as to be indistinguishable from normal users.
It's as soon as it learns that X celebrity is dead generates clicks.
Then folks will learn not to trust it just because it is a computer once everyone is announced dead, and everyone will have to make claims that they aren't.
I simply cannot imagine being willing to provide identity documents to any of the social media/advertising companies. They would have to somehow demonstrate they're trustworthy first.
This is a major reason I think LLMs could help with SERPs - presumably it will be a lot harder to do SEO effectively because now it involves the model training barrier.
Model training is already trivial, just expensive. As LLM optimized HW appears the expense will drop. By 2030, I’d expect decent consumer hardware to be both faster and two orders of magnitude cheaper than what’s in use today for model training.
The majority of things that come up on search nowadays consist of computer-generated essays. The only way around this is to limit your search to Reddit. And I fear that soon Reddit will be flooded with AI generated fluff to take advantage of the residual "real-user" SEO.