[HN Gopher] How SEO Ruined the Internet
___________________________________________________________________
How SEO Ruined the Internet
Author : midef
Score : 211 points
Date : 2020-04-06 09:24 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.superhighway98.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.superhighway98.com)
| haybanusa wrote:
| I think Google is to blame for allowing this.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Not just "allowing", but directly causing. Google were the ones
| who first monetized links by treating them as a search signal.
|
| As soon as links became a signal to search engines, they
| stopped being an organic expression of page authors.
|
| What's that old saying about metrics? "You get what you
| measure."
| cousin_it wrote:
| I think most spam websites today could be filtered out with very
| simple algorithms. But that would lead to fewer people ending up
| on these websites and clicking ads. So if your search engine is
| also an ad network, filtering out spam websites is not in your
| interest.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| This is the real problem.
|
| SEO will always be a game of cat and mouse. The original
| algorithms were designed to surface useful content relevant to
| the search query with the limitations of the technology at the
| time (so they could be gamed).
|
| Nowadays technology has improved and processing power is much
| cheaper so it should be possible to use machine learning to
| recognise what's "good" and what's SEO spam and thus get ahead
| of the SEO crowd again.
|
| The problem here is that the spam sites are also the ones with
| ads (often _Google_ ads), so there is no financial incentive
| for Google to actually do anything about those.
| silexia wrote:
| The article linked here has a good point it is trying to make,
| but makes a number of false points that undercut it's goal.
|
| 1998 - 2003 was one of the most difficult times to find what you
| were looking for, even on Google. Many searches for basic
| information would return results buried in spam pages,
| pornography, and scams.
|
| Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does
| not work or help your SEO.
|
| The real problems are that Google is directing the bulk of
| traffic to certain brand name websites. Another real problem is
| that Google set a simplistic AI with a goal of increasing
| clickthrough from search results and decreasing bounce rates.
| This leads to developers building all those top 10 lists where
| you have to click through each item (harder to bounce that way),
| and some of the pages that disable the back button in various
| nefarious ways.
|
| I also agree Google should be showing smaller websites more
| frequently - perhaps optimize for a different goal than the one
| listed above. More weight on keyword matching perhaps or maybe
| following only a few "authoritative" users CTR & bounce rate
| habits.
| sumo89 wrote:
| I agree, it's easy to hate on the current system and I think
| the ads are getting way too similar to the real results now.
| But all those websites that have a massive list of names/place
| at the bottom just to come higher up the search, that was the
| real worst time. When you'd search "Handyman in Leeds" and the
| top results would be for a company that isn't even in the right
| location but was big enough to list highly and had "Handyman in
| Leeds" in hidden text at the bottom of the page.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| > Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and
| does not work or help your SEO.
|
| Typical SEO cargo cult behavior. This worked at one time, or at
| least it _seemed_ to work, so we 'll just keep doin' it.
|
| I can't really blame SEO people, though. As long as Google
| keeps its algorithms secret, I'm not sure what else they're
| supposed to do except publish good content and hope for the
| best - which, in an ideal world, would be good enough, but...
| calibas wrote:
| SEO effectively means catering to whatever metrics Google happens
| to be focusing on at the moment. It's supposed to reward "good"
| content, but there's really no way of automatically judging
| what's "good" content so Google relies on all these other methods
| that are open to abuse.
|
| Whatever way Google rates websites has a direct effect on the web
| itself. In a way they're a victim of their own success.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| Or rather _we_ are the victims of their success.
| calibas wrote:
| Partially true because of how pervasive they've become,
| they're powerful enough to influence the lawmakers in my
| country. I don't really see myself as a victim though, I just
| use different search engines.
| sub7 wrote:
| Wasn't SEO, it was a Google's "Suggest over Search" strategy,
| followed by the completely predictable bastardization of organic
| results by internal groups.
|
| Biz ops says increasing revenue for [random Google bs] by ranking
| Y over Z in the results, so it happens. M&A says Rotten Tomatoes
| won't give us all their data, their users and their firstborns so
| they won't show up, even on page 2.
|
| This is literally what antitrust was created for. Companies do
| this naturally when they get too successful, it's on us to remind
| them who pays the bills.
|
| By us I mean the US govt so we're basically fucked.
| Jaruzel wrote:
| A MAJOR problem with google is it's assumption that if you search
| in English you don't care if the top results are American.
|
| I've noticed that on google.co.uk, unless you add 'uk' at the end
| of your search query you'll always get US sites first [1]. Google
| clearly lump all English based queries into the same geo-
| graphical bucket - they never used to do this.
|
| ---
|
| [1] Yes, I am logged in, and Google knows where in the world I
| am.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _Yes, I am logged in, and Google knows where in the world I
| am._
|
| They never seem to know where you are in a way that would
| actually be useful to you, but always do for their own creepy
| tracking reasons.
| helij wrote:
| I am not logged in and I always get UK search results even if I
| search on google.com.
| koyote wrote:
| It's even worse when you are trying to search in a language
| that is not English from a region that is English speaking.
|
| I often look for recipes in French or German and it's
| impossible to find anything. I try to browse to google.de/fr, I
| try adding site:.fr but it will still try and give me the most
| English results. My Google search settings indicate I am happy
| with German and French results but it seems to have no
| affect...
| thrwwy9999534 wrote:
| Would be good to have search engine algorithm that searches on
| visible content only and places anything with ads and trackers
| last.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| That would require the search engine itself to not be funded by
| those same ads.
| pal_9000 wrote:
| The article doesn't present complete facts. Regarding zero-sum
| game, this perhaps was true in the old pagerank algorithm. But
| I'd believe Google's ranking algorithm has advanced beyond simple
| keyword density, passing links. What I've noticed is it now gives
| much more emphasis to user experience. (With metrics like bounce
| rate meaning the searcher didnt find what he looked for and went
| back to search results)
|
| We all like to shit on Google but there's no search engine even
| remotely close to the quality of results. Of course, there's a
| lot of spam associated with SEO, hacking attempts, spam comments,
| e.t.c. There are side effects of its algorithm of course, that
| are negative to web.
| inshadows wrote:
| How does Google determine bounce rate? That I click on another
| search result after I click on the first one?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Google search result links don't link to the site directly
| but go through a Google-provided redirect that presumably has
| a reference to the original search query.
|
| If you were to go back to the same search result page and
| click on another result within a short timeframe they will
| assume you "bounced".
|
| They also have Google Analytics littering the majority of the
| web, so I'm assuming that gives them a signal as well.
| websitejanitor wrote:
| It's more complicated than this.
|
| Google links directly to search results now, they stopped
| using the tracking redirect years ago. They probably track
| clicks and scrolling directly on the SERP with JS.
|
| Google Analytics is absolutely not used for ranking
| purposes. GA is far too unreliable and gameable to be used
| for anything like that. It's more likely that Chrome and
| Google Safe Browsing are used for tracking user hits.
| notJim wrote:
| This article is good, but to go a bit deeper, it seems like part
| of the problem is ultimately capitalism or the commercial nature
| of the modern internet. As long as there are these incredible
| incentives to game the system, people are going to do so. And
| those same incentives apply to Google, since they are advertising
| driven too. They used to fight more against this stuff, but I
| think as they've realized they get their cut either way, they're
| less inclined to do so. And even if they were so inclined, it's
| sort of asking them hold back the ocean in my view, because the
| incentives are so stacked against them.
| durnygbur wrote:
| Google with default settings is useless and using more
| sophisticated queries quickly walls off the user with
| increasingly annoying captcha.
|
| The "world's knowledge under you fingertips" motto is still valid
| and brilliant though. My personal solution is library of OCR-ed
| PDFs with most established books from various domains, git
| repository for each domain. Greppable in miliseconds, locally.
| Hijack this, SEO experts!
| FiatLuxDave wrote:
| Your personal solution sounds interesting. I'd be interested to
| know more details about it, and how it works for you. If it is
| how I imagine it, it could also be one of those things that
| could be built into a tool that could rival Wikipedia or search
| engines.
|
| Based on your reply to handsomechad, you may think that it's
| easiest for people to just build one themselves. But there may
| be a business opportunity in providing a pre-packaged solution
| for the masses. In the same way that Dropbox provided a tool
| that was "trivial" to experts, but was difficult for non-
| experts (see the infamous comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), if you have a tool
| that is essentially a rival to Google Books for reference
| texts, that is interesting.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| How did you acquire the books? Are they in the public domain,
| or did you have to buy them? In either case is there a place to
| acquire/buy these books massively or did you do it one by one
| manually?
| durnygbur wrote:
| Whichever most convenient way to obtain a full restriction-
| free PDF of a book. Fetched one by one through various
| channels in my case. Very few are in the public domain, if
| any. BTW one can do the same with academic publications,
| device manuals, or whatever else content available in PDF.
| handsomechad wrote:
| do you have a link to this solution
| durnygbur wrote:
| ImageMagick and Tesseract for OCR-ing each page of a PDF into
| a separate text file (through TIFF image format, disregard
| the huge TIFFs afterwards), private git repos for hosting,
| then ag/grep for searching. Not as easy to find the phrase
| back in PDF as with eg. Google Books, but then GB with
| copyright related content restrictions is useless most of the
| time.
| RobertoG wrote:
| It kind of ruined content too.
|
| Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching
| for the answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO
| ruined content.
|
| Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are
| goin to explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading
| this post, you will know why SEO ruined content.
|
| In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of
| content created, unfortunately, as we are going to explain in a
| moment, it has been ruined by SEO.
|
| ?Is it SEO really the reason content was ruined?
|
| Some people argue that SEO is not really the reason content was
| ruined, we will review all the reason why SEO could be really
| ruining content.
|
| Please, click "next" to know why SEO could be ruining content.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Yep.
|
| Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I
| search and just find _a_ recipe? Nope. Through the magic of
| SEO, I now have to scroll through 15 paragraphs of somebody 's
| life story before being able to examine the time and
| ingredients.
|
| How much time and energy was wasted on building "tag" systems?
| All those fun little term link clouds that sites used to have.
| I know I wasted time on it. I had something that would scan for
| words and their synonyms and tag articles, a rescan feature for
| tags that got added after the fact, and various other
| utilities.
| lerchmo wrote:
| I find this particular example particularly gross. Recipe's
| are no doubt a heavily searched category. Why does google
| allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites to win the top spots?
| does it have to do with the google ads from top to bottom?
| wlesieutre wrote:
| > _Why does google allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites
| to win the top spots?_
|
| Something bothered me about this question, and I think it's
| the way it frames Google's role as being a passive
| participant.
|
| Google doesn't "allow" anything. Google writes the rules
| and picks the winners.
|
| When you search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe,"
| Google's search algorithm goes "Here's a nice webpage with
| Grandma Betty's life story and a paragraph about how to
| make chocolate chip cookies at the bottom. This is what you
| were looking for."
|
| Recipe sites look like they do because Google forces them
| to look like that if they want Google to send them any
| search traffic.
|
| Is there a different algorithm that would give more useful
| results? Is there a way to rank the sites on how well they
| present the information you were searching for? Is there a
| way to factor in whether a site has good recipes or
| terrible ones? I don't know, but I don't have a giant
| advertising money fountain and teams of very well paid
| engineers.
|
| Like you hinted at, I think it's reasonable to suspect
| Google for not having an incentive to fix this. They get
| their ad money either way, and they probably get more of it
| from worse sites. As long as it's good enough to keep
| people from switching to other search engines en masse,
| they're not losing anything.
| [deleted]
| octocop wrote:
| This is sooo true, every time i look for a recipe online it's
| all i ever see.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| Thanks, I hate it
| RobertoG wrote:
| I just searched (1) "SEO ruined content" in duck duck go and
| this Hacker news page is the first entry.
|
| We are very lucky that, as far as we know, an accumulation of
| irony doesn't create black holes.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=SEO+ruined+content&t=canonical&ia=...
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Currently page 2 on Google.
|
| To be fair, "SEO ruined content" is a pretty specific search
| string and doesn't even show up in the results that out-rank
| this submission. This comment specifically talks about "SEO
| ruined content" and is, correctly, a good results candidate.
| humanbeinc wrote:
| Awesome.
| [deleted]
| meesterdude wrote:
| this x1000! By pandering to the algorithm of google, a lot of
| great content has become watered down, softened, or impacted in
| other ways. Titles have to be worded a certain way, article
| length has to be a certain length...
|
| hoping someone else chimes in with other thoughts because I
| used to know more about this, and SEO cheapening quality
| content was one of the key takeaways I had.
| owlninja wrote:
| Recipe blogs are the worst! Just get to the goods already!
| taberiand wrote:
| It's like we've flipped APIs on their heads - humans use
| tools to obtain the minimal data (just the recipe), while
| the bots make requests and receive the whole dump of
| pointless, extraneous fluff in return.
| awithrow wrote:
| Many now have an anchor directly to the recipe. I try to
| book mark those so I don't have to read about the author
| pontificating on the changing of the seasons or how an
| ingredient in the dish reminds them of childhood for the
| 800th time.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| If I had one word to characterize the modern web it would be
| "shallow". SEO and commercialization have led to a world wide web
| where I can easily find 100 shallow, keyword-optimized articles
| on "machine learning for IoT" published on high-ranking websites,
| but not a single page with actual in-depth information about the
| topic.
|
| But there still is great content on the web, it just becomes
| harder to find in all the noise. I think websites like HN and
| Reddit and - to some degree - sites like Twitter with their
| human-based curation are really important for this, so I'm glad
| they're thriving.
| monk_e_boy wrote:
| I worked in SEO for ages, and it's shady as f. You can buy links
| from anyone, the BBC the guardian, the times... It just costs
| money. You can ask/force people to take links down (copyright
| scare, sue, threaten). Fake blogs, we used to run a bunch, some
| became so popular they became actual blogs on that subject. We'd
| get money from competitor SEO companies for links on it. There
| are tons of niche subjects with no info on the internet. We'd
| often put it up for SEO purposes. Wikipedia was started by an SEO
| company. The rumour was that Wales started it as a cheap way to
| get high page rank links to sites he owned. But the rewards were
| huge. Get a struggling car insurance site from position 11 in
| Google to position 2 or 1 and their profits would be 10x. They
| would show us numbers from each advertising sector, SEO, radio,
| TV, newspapers, etc. Super interesting. Break that down by age /
| gender ... Very interesting. No wonder the internet is a shit
| show. So much money involved and zero regulation.
| theklub wrote:
| Just look up a recipe for something and this fact instantly
| becomes apparent
| jedberg wrote:
| Early SEO efforts were actually good for the web. They forced you
| to make your content easier to find and more accessible.
|
| But then that became the table stakes, and people had to start
| resorting to dirtier tactics. Or just more annoying ones.
|
| During this shelter in place period, I've been reading a lot more
| recipes online. Every one of them starts with the person's life
| story. And I get it, maybe how that recipe came to exist is
| interesting. But at least put a link right at the top that says
| "skip to recipe" or something. Sometimes I want to read the
| story, sometimes not. Make it easy for me skip!
|
| I put a recipe on my own website, it's literally a .txt file with
| just the recipe, ingredients right at the top. I posted a picture
| of the final product on the internet recently, and a friend asked
| for the recipe, so I sent him the link.
|
| He replied "the format and delivery method of this is almost more
| satisfying than the recipe itself".
|
| That's how I know we've gone too far in SEO.
| trey-jones wrote:
| SEO combined with Amazon (and other) referral revenue
| opportunities. Combined with human psychology and ignorance
| outside of the tech community of the wiles of online marketing.
| Honestly Hacker News is one of the few sources I trust nowadays,
| and that is of course not implicit. There is a lot of
| misinformation and a lot of reporting about reporting. A lot of
| hyperbolic and misleading headlines. Stay safe out there.
| tone wrote:
| I'm actually really glad to have seen this and the comments. This
| has something I've been prattling on about to anyone who will
| listen for the last couple of years now. Glad to be somewhat
| vindicated!
| Priem19 wrote:
| One might add social media to that list as well. If there's a
| Dunbar's number in real life, there definitely is one for online
| communities too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
| blunte wrote:
| The situation has gotten so dismal that I often have to look past
| page 1, and sometimes page 2 of search results.
|
| Especially when looking for technical things or reviews on
| practically anything, the top 5 results are garbage sites (with
| content written or modified by people with names suggesting an
| SEO "content" factory in a particular region of the world).
| rwmurrayVT wrote:
| The r/juststart crown strikes again.
| inshadows wrote:
| Recently, on page 2 and later, and sometimes even on page 1, I
| see lots of *.it links that just dump a wall of text that seems
| like it's been scraped from legit resources but all tags
| content got smashed into one text block. Examples pages that
| now return 404:
|
| http:// axlk.bebanni50.it/debian-i915.html
|
| http:// bpnq.circoloambientalepiemonte.it/nfsv4-uid-
| mapping.html
|
| IOW, if it's not on page 1 it's mostly crap (spam).
| krapp wrote:
| > The situation has gotten so dismal that I often have to look
| past page 1, and sometimes page 2 of search results.
|
| That's hardly _dismal._ That not even mildly inconvenient.
| tqi wrote:
| > I remember when it was easy to find logic, facts, and reason on
| the web. Then, someone optimized it.
|
| When was that, exactly? In 1998, when only 3% of the world had
| access to the web and creating content was limited to a small
| handful of privileged individuals? This author rails against
| "Directing the narrative", while building site with a thin sliver
| of links related to a handful of topics they deem worthy of
| inclusion. They offer no solutions for an internet that servers
| 3.5 billion people, choosing instead to whine about how much
| better the internet was "back in the day."
|
| I don't think Google is blameless, but I think they are more of
| an inevitable byproduct of this many people coming online than
| they are a root cause.
| bb123 wrote:
| Is there anything I can do as a user of the web about this? Is
| there a search engine out there that is better for these things
| than Google?
| Cyberdog wrote:
| To a certain extent, any search engine will be "better" for
| avoiding some SEO tricks than Google since somewhere between
| most to all SEO people are only concerned with how things rank
| in Google, thanks to its overwhelming majority usage on the
| English internet - where their pages rank in the results of
| Bing or Yandex isn't a matter of concern to them. Granted, many
| of the tricks to satisfy Google are going to satisfy other
| engines too, but not all of them, and not in exactly the same
| ways or degrees. (Getting a different result page from Google
| and from search engine X can be a feature, not a bug.)
|
| I personally have been using DuckDuckGo for several years at
| this point and am quite satisfied with their results and their
| commitment to privacy. You shouldn't use any Google product if
| you have any serious measure of concern for your privacy (he
| hypocritically types while a YouTube video plays in the
| background - hey, at least I'm not logged in).
| pacamara619 wrote:
| I find it really hard to believe that you don't know any other
| search engines than goolag and haven't tried them.
| mcv wrote:
| Well, there are other search engines of course, and sometimes
| they're slightly better. Not great, though.
|
| I'm really itching to start writing my own search engine now.
| ShorsHammer wrote:
| This is pertinent and don't think the easy answer is yes, as
| soon as any other search engine gets big enough the same gaming
| will occur.
| leejoramo wrote:
| Anybody else remember when you could search for a phone number
| and find legitimate web pages that contained the phone number?
|
| We lost that a long time ago.
| calibas wrote:
| I just tried this out, and it works fine for at least one of
| the local organizations here, both in Google and DuckDuckGo
| (530-926-4698).
|
| I just tried it with my own number, and my site comes up with
| both search engines as well.
| runxel wrote:
| If I am doing that most of the time the first few hundred
| results are pages which just list all numbers there are -
| like in a consecutive manner.
|
| Never understood why there are so many of this pages and why
| you would build one...
| thawaway1837 wrote:
| I'd argue that having the internet limited to a handful of
| gatekeepers, all of whom are sustained by ad dollars, is probably
| far more responsible for ruining the internet.
|
| I find it hard to believe that in a world where Google and
| Facebook's users were its customers and not its product, it
| wouldn't be able to find a way to combat SEO effectively,
| especially considering how they are basically hoarding the
| majority of the smartest people in the world.
| mcv wrote:
| I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my
| searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most
| popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find.
|
| I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most
| obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind
| of content you're looking for, or even switch between different
| modes: am I just looking for the definition of a common but
| complex term, am I looking for a specific article that I vaguely
| remember a phrase from, do I want something I've seen before, or
| am I in the mood to discover new, unexpected things?
|
| Also, I just don't want to see results from some sites. Let me
| tweak the importance of some sites, rather than relying on
| Google's gameable algorithms.
| midef wrote:
| I like playing around with "Million Short" -
| https://millionshort.com. It's a search engine that lets you
| logarithmically filter-out the top websites. It isn't perfect,
| of course, but its a fun way to discover things.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I love the idea and have tried to use their service a number
| of times over the years. I've never been terribly happy with
| the results.
| mcv wrote:
| That is a fantastic idea.
|
| Of course some of those top sites, especially the blogging
| and self-hosting platforms, can still contain obscure stuff
| that might be just what I'm looking for.
| netsharc wrote:
| I have another "Google is shit now" anecdote: a few months ago
| I wanted to look up some trivia for the movie "Lord of War". I
| entered this term in Google, and since there was a game that
| was just released, it responded with "Showing you results for
| 'God of War'". No results on the front page had anything
| related to the Nic Cage movie.
| mda wrote:
| Can you find the exact search term from your search history?
| netsharc wrote:
| It was "lord of war director's commentary". I thought it
| was because many more people were googling for the game,
| but I just tried and Google is still doing this!
| krapp wrote:
| I just searched "Lord of War" and the front page is
| entirely about the movie. Don't know what to tell you.
| netsharc wrote:
| So you replied to my response about the exact search term
| I used by telling me... this?
| krapp wrote:
| Yes, you said it was happening currently, so I tried it.
| The problem you're complaining about doesn't actually
| appear to exist, at least not objectively.
| eitland wrote:
| You are using a different query it seems.
|
| Also as a non native speaker you appear to be rude.
| krapp wrote:
| I'm not trying to be rude, but I honestly believe a lot
| of the complaints people make about how useless Google's
| search results seem overblown. I use Google all the time,
| sometimes for obscure results, often for technical stuff,
| and the worst I've ever had to do is look past the first
| page, but often the first page suffices.
|
| Google showing results for director's commentary of God
| of War when someone searches "Lord of War director's
| commentary" is arguably not a failure on Google's part if
| more people do search for the game than the movie,
| regardless of the incorrect title.
|
| That said, I completely agree with the theses of TFA. SEO
| is a cancer.
| scollet wrote:
| They aren't being rude, just increasing the sample size
| and reporting back. Perhaps we're witnessing SEO for
| different regions, regulations, and aggregate history of
| the two.
| graeme wrote:
| Found the point of confusion. "Lord of war" returns the
| movie. " Lord of War director's commentary" returns the
| game.
| eitland wrote:
| Again, I'm not a native speaker, here are the exact words
| that krapp used:
|
| - "Don't know what to tell you."
|
| - "The problem you're complaining about doesn't actually
| appear to exist, at least not objectively."
|
| In my limited experience I don't see any reasons to use
| these exact words in this context except to belittle..?
|
| Anyone care to explain? My seatbelt is fastened and I'm
| ready to learn (and apologize if necessary :-).
| [deleted]
| curmudgeon63 wrote:
| Intentionally? I'll assume good faith. Under that
| presumption, my best interpretation of that poster is
| "socially unaware, likely prone to nitpicky
| argumentation."
|
| The poster who said he was having difficulty getting good
| results from Google, was obviously venting about his own
| personal experience.
|
| Next comes along another poster who says "I tried it. I
| don't have your problem." Another post down, "... The
| problem you're complaining about doesn't actually appear
| to exist, at least not objectively."
|
| Excuse my outburst, but who the fuck says that?
|
| The original poster was venting about a problem he
| experienced. What good can someone do when he comes in
| and says that he doesn't experience the same problem, and
| states that it likely doesn't exist? There is no upside
| here. There's an only a downside: being rude.
| fingerlocks wrote:
| If you click the "search instead for..." then the non-
| video result was exactly what I believe you wanted.
| mattmanser wrote:
| The point is, why is it doing this?
|
| It's not even suggesting both God of War and Lord of War,
| for me all the results on the first page are about God of
| War.
| krapp wrote:
| Google usually shows a link to "search for x instead" when
| that happens. And let's be fair, most people searching for
| "Lord of War" are probably really searching for "God of War."
|
| Having to click an extra link or maybe scroll beyond the
| front page doesn't make Google a shit show.
| blunte wrote:
| Perhaps Google believed that nobody would intentionally look
| for a Nicolas Cage movie...?
| greggman3 wrote:
| Why? He's an academy award winning actor who is hugely
| popular or else he'd be out of a job.
| [deleted]
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| https://millionshort.com/about is an implementation of the idea
| of finding obscure content, but it seems not successful to me.
| mda wrote:
| Half your searches? Isn't it a bit dramatic? You can always
| check your search history, but I seriously doubt 50% of your
| searches Google can not find anything - assuming data is
| somewhere accessible-. Tell us a few of the obscure things that
| you know exist openly and google could not find for you.
|
| I see these claims all the time, but usually with zero
| examples.
| fasicle wrote:
| Agreed, I almost always find what I am looking for on my
| first search. It might be a few search results down the page,
| but usually what I'm looking for is found on the first
| search.
|
| Maybe I've just adapted to typing in words and phrases into
| Google in a way that brings up the results I'm looking for.
| mcv wrote:
| It's a very rough estimate. I'm not going to check every
| search in my history. But it feels like the chances I'll find
| what I need are comparable to the chances I won't.
|
| One example: this weekend I was looking for lyrics from the
| British folk band _Why?_. I know they exist; my brother has a
| bunch of their albums. I have quoted lyrics at Google, I 've
| searched for it on Youtube, I've searched for the band name
| combined with song titles or names of band members, and I
| found tons other bands and other random crap, but not the
| band I was looking for. Eventually I searched for a very
| specific phrase that was also the title of one of their live
| albums: "Jig at a Why? Gig", and that finally turned up
| results.
|
| It's an obscure band, and their name being a common word
| certainly doesn't help, but certainly combined with song
| titles, lyrics and band members, it should be pretty clear
| what I'm looking for? But with Google giving strong
| preference to the most popular results, Google becomes
| primarily good at finding things you don't need a search
| engine for to find them. I want a search engine that's good
| at finding things that are lost, rather than in plain sight.
| BostonFern wrote:
| Lyrics are notoriously hard to find on Google. I assume
| it's in part due to copyright issues, but it's also not how
| Google works. Searches are based on key words, not exact
| matches of several words in order.
| fiblye wrote:
| There was once I time where I could type maybe 5 random
| words from a song and get it as the top hit.
|
| Now there are times where I can't remember the song
| title, but I can type a few lines of lyrics verbatim plus
| include the musician's name and get only random,
| unrelated links.
| mda wrote:
| I think this particular query has a problem with the with
| the unfortunate name "why" which is probably causing the
| confusion. I don't think search engines did a better job
| before, nor this has anything to do with Seo. Change the
| "Why" with another obscure band with a distinct name, you
| would get results, could Gogle do better, sure, is it worse
| than before, I reaaly don't think so.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| This is how most complaints about "Google these days"
| play out.
|
| Once pressed to give actual examples, we realize it
| wasn't a trivial search anyways and certainly not
| something better Google did long ago on a technical
| basis. And Bing certainly isn't doing much better.
|
| Of course, there are some things that Google does filter
| out these days like things that seem like pirated
| content.
| trendscout wrote:
| DDG doesn't work for me either when it comes to more general,
| not tech-ish stuff. One thing for news I found was
| https://yetigogo.com
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| Yeah DDG is hit or miss. Most (70% or more) DDG searches work
| but a lot of times Google or Bing does a better job.
| eitland wrote:
| To me it seems the problem with Google goes far deeper than
| struggling with bad SEO.
|
| - For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that
| is faithful to the search you actually typed in. This is not
| dependent on SEO spammers at all, only on Googles unwillingness
| to accept that not every user is equal and some of us mean
| exactly what we write, especially when we take the time to
| enclose our queries in double quotes and set the "verbatim"
| option.
|
| - Ad targeting has been so bad it has been ridiculous. Yes, on
| average it works but around the edges it is somewhere between
| tragic and hilarious. For ten years after I met my wife the
| most relevant ads Google could think of was dating sites. Not
| toys, not family holidays, not tech conferences, not magazine
| subscriptions, not offers from local shops, but scammy dating
| sites that was so ridiculous that I cannot imagine how most
| people would fall for them. (For a while I wondered if this was
| all a fluke but now I have confirmed it happens to others in my
| situation as well.)
|
| - Also in other areas it is becoming ridiculous. For example:
| what is the idea behind aggressively showing me captcas while
| I'm logged in with two different google controlled accounts,
| one gmail and one gsuite, both paid?
| BostonFern wrote:
| You're not their customer, advertisers are, so it's only
| natural that the ads you see aren't personalized. That's
| never been the goal.
|
| It is, however, technically a potential benefit that the more
| exactly advertisers can target you, the more relevant ads you
| could be seeing, which is a wonderful sales pitch for users
| who are agnostic anyway, but that's not how advertising works
| in practice.
| eitland wrote:
| > You're not their customer, advertisers are,
|
| 1. I'm well aware of this
|
| 2. It doesn't contradict anything I wrote
|
| 3. I've read it so many times and seen it misapplied so
| many times it is getting annoying.
|
| > so it's only natural that the ads you see aren't
| personalized. That's never been the goal.
|
| I doubt it was the intent of the advertisers to waste
| expensive impressions on people who weren't in the target
| audience _at all_ , so I'm pretty sure they expected _some_
| personalization WRT which customers gets what ads.
|
| I also very much doubt that it was Googles intention to
| annoy me to the point where I trash them in public foras, I
| just don't think they're capable of fixing it anymore as
| they are way to busy "being Google", e.g. doing cool stuff
| while not listening to customers (I was planning to add
| more here, but this single example seems to summarize it
| well.)
|
| I recognize I might be a bit more direct than usual here
| and you aren't responsible for the first 97 times I've seen
| this meme here but as an answer to my question it is not
| applicable as far as I can see an also generally that meme
| is just noise here at HN now.
|
| (Anyone who is actually in todays 10000 lucky WRT the
| "you're not the customer" meme, feel free to prove me
| wrong.)
| BostonFern wrote:
| Meme? If hearing this uttered bothers you this much, then
| maybe complaining about poor relevance in Google ads
| isn't such a good idea.
|
| I'm sorry that I seem to have offended you.
| eitland wrote:
| I'll try to explain:
|
| My post may contain a meme but it was directly relevant
| to the post above.
|
| Mentioning that I'm not Googles customer is significantly
| less relevant (I think irrelevant) when it is obvious
| that it should have been in the actual customers best
| interest to avoid spamming me with expensive and utterly
| irrelevant ads.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Yes, on average it works
|
| Maybe we frequent vastly different websites, but this has
| absolutely not been true for me, even for companies who are
| supposed to be experts at using their data. I don't think
| I've ever seen an ad that has actually been relevant, and I'm
| not even trying to hide my habits or behaviors.
|
| For example, take Amazon. Their ads all over the web
| frequently recommends me stuff I've already bought just a
| month ago, the very same product. Or the products they
| recommend are way out of my zone, like woman clothing while I
| never purchased woman clothing or anything close to it.
|
| So, I'm not sure how the ad market even goes around and my
| friends are describing the same behavior from the ads, even
| from companies that have my entire shopping history already
| (like Amazon)
| eitland wrote:
| > > Yes, on average it works
|
| > Maybe we frequent vastly different websites...
|
| I think we agree. What I mean is on average it works _for
| Google_ , not that it works for us. They still makes
| boatloads of cash.
|
| For what I know the targeting is equally bad for you and me
| and everyone and they are just convincing advertisers that
| is worth paying for despite this.
| capableweb wrote:
| Right, that's a good point, that it's working on their
| side with convincing the advertisers. Thanks for
| clarifying so I could understand!
| DoubleGlazing wrote:
| That's why I miss pre-Google search engines such as AltaVista
| and alltheweb. "If you searched for "some obscure string of
| words" you would only get results that matches that exact
| string. I really don't like how Google just chooses to vary
| the spelling of your query when a match isn't found. I often
| search for electronics components using their part number.
| I'll type in something like "P204PPX" (a random code I just
| made up) and despite there being no match Google still gives
| me pages of results that are nowhere near what I was looking
| for.
|
| And the worst thing is that this is all done to keep those ad
| dollars flowing. Look at how many companies always have a
| paid advert associated with their name when a search is made.
| They are paranoid about losing rank due to Google fiddling
| their algorithm or someone else doing a better SEO job using
| their brand.
| KMag wrote:
| Google used to respect search operators, and dramatically
| tone down query optimization for queries that contained
| operators. As I've written elsewhere, I suspect learn-to-
| rank is to blame[0], by optimizing ranking for generic
| sloppy queries despite your query being very focused.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22747889
| mcv wrote:
| > _" For years it has been next to impossible to get a result
| that is faithful to the search you actually typed in."_
|
| Good lord, yes. If I type two words, I want preference for
| sites that contain both of them, yet the first results all
| have either one or the other, because surely I must be more
| interested in a popular site that uses only one of these,
| right? Google is sometimes too smart, trying to interpret
| exact words I type as vaguely related words. Sometimes that's
| relevant, but often it's not.
|
| > _" For ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads
| Google could think of was dating sites. Not toys, not family
| holidays,"_
|
| They have a tendency to show you ads for exactly the thing
| you don't need anymore because you already found it. I don't
| think AI is in any danger of taking over the world just yet.
| Except with bad advertising, apparently.
| masswerk wrote:
| > _" They have a tendency to show you ads for exactly the
| thing you don't need anymore because you already found it.
| I don't think AI is in any danger of taking over the world
| just yet."_
|
| There's an eschatological trait to targeted advertising, as
| it seems to be all about past sins. So I'm not too sure
| about your evaluation and AI's own claims...
| Tomte wrote:
| > They have a tendency to show you ads for exactly the
| thing you don't need anymore because you already found it
|
| Say you searched for a TV a month ago. Now you're seeing
| lots of ads about TVs. Stupid Google.
|
| But is it? A substantial fraction of those people are
| returning their TV because something is wrong with it. Now
| they are looking for another TV set.
|
| Sure, the majority keeps their TV. But it is still
| profitable to target all those TV buyers, because they have
| self-selected into the set of people who really want a TV
| now, and they are willing to pay.
|
| Reaching the fraction of those who need another one is
| probably[1] very lucrative.
|
| [1] I'm sure Google has run the numbers
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Agreeing: This thread of thought comes up semi-regularly
| here, I've argued similarly to you.
|
| People will rebuy good products, or be stimulated to
| replace other similar products (bought a new TV for the
| kitchen, now the lounge TV seems dated, new boots feel
| awesome get another pair for when they wear out, new
| $thing is fun buy one for friends birthday.).
|
| There's also a big place for brand enforcement. Show Sony
| stuff, to remind someone ['s subconscious!] they bought
| Sony.
|
| A tertiary effect is what I call the "Starbucks
| Purposeful Bad Naming effect" - you get ads for the exact
| TV you bought -- beyond the brand reinforcement, etc.,
| you also get to tell everyone you meet a weird story
| about how "internet advertising is broken ..." and "yes,
| my new Sony TV is great thanks, you should get one".
|
| Those ad agencies aren't stupid; they have metrics for
| their metrics and have tracking that can tell you to the
| second when your gut bacteria burps ...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _I don 't think AI is in any danger of taking over the
| world just yet._
|
| The scary thing about AI is that, even as the algorithms
| have greater and greater intelligence, we're still not much
| closer to teaching them to do what we want them to do. They
| can game the system better than ever, and then the universe
| is tiled with surgical masks.
| Kye wrote:
| Maybe this is how AC finally reversed entropy.
|
| https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
| spiritplumber wrote:
| Insufficient data for an answer.
| mcv wrote:
| So if AI ever takes over the world and kills us all, it
| will probably be because it failed to understand what we
| actually wanted.
| WalterSear wrote:
| https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
|
| https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
| basch wrote:
| I wish I would have seen this coming years ago. I would have
| built a Google Custom Search Engine, and every time I ran into
| a good website, added it to the whitelist. By now, it would
| probably be alright.
| gsich wrote:
| I see mainly two problems:
|
| - Affiliate spam from douchebags that provide "reviews" of
| products just to link back to Amazon. Makes it nearly
| impossible to find actual reviews of products.
|
| - People who type whole sentences in natural language into
| Google. I tried since I used the internet to serach for
| keywords, omit as much words as possible that aren't necessary.
| Most people (after I guess ~2010?) don't. This worsens the
| results.
| ivanche wrote:
| Wow! Now people who know how to type using proper grammar and
| vocabulary are a problem???
| gsich wrote:
| When it comes to search engines: Yes. They are.
| purerandomness wrote:
| Not OP, but let's say you want to find out the protein
| content of brussels sprouts.
|
| I would type `protein content brussels sprouts` (without
| quotes) because I fully understand that the information I'm
| seeking might be in some tabular form, or phrased in a way
| I don't anticipate.
|
| Most non-technical people however would type in `What is
| the protein content of brussels sprouts?` literally.
|
| This leads content creators who see these queries in
| "keyword analysis tools" to dump SEO-optimized crap into
| millions of blog posts, with completely irrelevant word
| soups with countless varations of the question, and the
| actual information buried deep within that gibberish essay,
| unreadable by humans, only optimized to drive ad traffic.
|
| Google's optimization for the non-technical use case has
| lowered the overall search result quality immensely.
|
| There was a time when Google didn't simply ignore some of
| your search words, or when control characters like +, -,
| and "" were actually respected (~pre 2010), and the
| introduction of verbatim mode didn't change much IMHO.
| gsich wrote:
| This.
| ivanche wrote:
| Interesting. Why do you think that content creators
| wouldn't see `protein content brussels sprouts` in
| "keyword analysis tools"? Why do you think they wouldn't
| create millions of blog posts containing words `protein
| content brussels sprouts` or countless variations
| thereof?
| purerandomness wrote:
| Because Google optimizes for "quality content" since at
| least the Penguin update. They're using NLP tools to
| assess the writing quality (similar to algorithms telling
| you at what school grade level your writing is).
|
| This was good, because it cured all the copy&pastable
| 2000s era "tag cloud" sites which simply dumped tons of
| search keywords all over the place.
|
| Ideally, it lead to a stronger emphasis on high-quality
| human-written content, but it turns out that this
| algorithm, again, is easily fooled by feeding it "SEO
| essays" that looks like prose, but is irrelevant text
| gibberish, but written coherently.
|
| That lead content creators to expand data that would
| ideally be presented in tabular form on one page, to
| multi-page "SEO prose" that looks like it's written for
| humans, but is completely undigestible.
|
| That, along with Google's auto-suggestion feature that
| finish your sentences after you type in some words,
| especially on mobile, lead to the impression that people
| actually like to search in full sentences.
| gsich wrote:
| They do, but the whole-sentence fraction is probably in
| the majority. Which leads to degraded search results and
| optimisation in the wrong direction.
| ivanche wrote:
| One can easily make them minority by creating a script
| which issues keyword-only searches to Google and let it
| work 24/7/365 from a few hundred machines.
| gsich wrote:
| No, you can't solve it that way.
| comzilla wrote:
| How are you meant to find the most obscure content? If it's
| obscure, it probably means it is not relevant to your search.
| How would a search engine like that even work?
|
| Tweaking importance of some sites seems like a nice idea
| though, but it could also be a bad thing.
| nieve wrote:
| I'm very confused by your definition of obscure. If I search
| for something rare and not covered very well using as set of
| precise search terms Altavista and company used to give me
| almost exclusively relevant results. Modern Google will give
| me windows helpdesk questions for a query about a linux
| driver using lots of of quoted terms, at most one of which
| will appear in the results. Rare results are _exactly_ the
| time that precise queries give higher quality hits.
| Substituting a different word will swamp them. Specifying
| sites to avoid or prefer is an extra signal to help with that
| CameronBanga wrote:
| This is correct. DuckDuckGo is finally better.
| msl wrote:
| My experience is the opposite: while there certainly was a
| time when I felt DDG actually respected my queries [1] that
| time is now gone. The results I get often have very little to
| do with what I typed in the search box. I find myself
| resorting to !g more often than ever before.
|
| [1] I seem to have thought so in last December:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665232
| Jaruzel wrote:
| After the last bout of anti-google posts on HN about a
| month ago, I took the comment advice and switched fully to
| DDG.
|
| My experience was horrible. I don't tend to search
| 'popular' subjects, only technical ones, and hobbyist
| stuff. DDG was just plain useless for this, I had to switch
| back to google after about a week as I was using the !g
| prefix almost all the time.
| eitland wrote:
| > while there certainly was a time when I felt DDG actually
| respected my queries [1] that time is now gone.
|
| I sometimes wonder if they've hired some ex-googlers lately
| because yes, this is my experience as well ;-)
| greggman3 wrote:
| There are definitely sites who's results I wish I could ban
| from my results. I won't visit them so they are just a waste of
| space. My short list, thillist, collider, vulture.
|
| Also related to SEO I think is every cooking recipe seems to be
| 6 to 8 large images and a bunch of unneeded text followed by
| the recipe 8 to 12 screens down. AFAICT it's entirely not
| related to me getting to the recipe and instead either a
| pattern for SEO or ads.
| thomas wrote:
| A Pinterest ban would greatly improve google results.
| newsbinator wrote:
| I'm surprised Google's own Search team doesn't get
| frustrated enough by Pinterest results contaminating their
| own day-to-day searches that they'd consider ranking
| Pinterest results lower.
| KMag wrote:
| They aren't going to de-optimize their careers in order
| to optimize search just for themselves. Google used to be
| somewhat optimized for power users, but I suspect that
| learn-to-rank is over-optimizing search ranking for the
| median user.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22747889
| Kye wrote:
| Recent example: I wanted to find out why the directions on
| those Banquet pot pies say to let it stand for five minutes.
| The words on the box say it finishes cooking in those five
| minutes. I want to find out more about that: why didn't it
| finish in the oven? Is it cover for liability, so people don't
| get burned?
|
| All Google returns is page after page of recipes and posts
| about Banquet pot pies that have no connection to my input.
| Google used to be so good at this kind of thing. I know the
| answer exists somewhere because I found it once a long time ago
| searching for answers to the same question. Google found it
| then.
| ckolkey wrote:
| This could perhaps be illustrated well with a hard boiled
| egg. If you remove an egg at the 7 minute mark, the internal
| temperature is still around 100c, and it will continue to
| cook. To stop it cooking, dunk it in cold water.
|
| Similarly with the pot pie, the filling retains a ton of
| heat, so it still is cooking for those few minutes, as the
| heat dissipates. If you left it in the oven five minutes
| longer (to 'finish') then put it in cold water (like the
| egg), you would have a pie in a similar, though wetter,
| condition.
| laichzeit0 wrote:
| Just use a different search engine. Right now DDG is the only
| viable alternative. Just force yourself to use it, regardless of
| all the edge cases that suck. When DDG becomes as crap as Google,
| we can use whatever alternative exists at that time to replace
| it. The same goes for Instagram, it's slowly but surely turned
| into an ad infested cesspit (Three consecutive ads between user
| stories? seriously?). This is how the cycle goes I'm afraid.
| pictur wrote:
| I think good content is more than shitty html code
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