[HN Gopher] As the public begins to believe Google isn't as usef... ___________________________________________________________________ As the public begins to believe Google isn't as useful, what happens to SEO? Author : DASD Score : 89 points Date : 2023-11-01 13:32 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.theverge.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com) | michael1999 wrote: | The reverse-takeover of Google by DoubleClick is the Fall. The | poison apple. All else is commentary. | thegrim33 wrote: | This is a meta-level comment, but a technique I've been using for | a while now, which I've found pretty helpful/useful, is that if | an article starts off with an anecdote I immediately know not to | bother reading it. It shows you that the author is more | interested in pushing a feeling/emotion/story rather than | relaying actual information. They're trying to manipulate how you | think about the topic from the very beginning. It's really hard | to describe the pattern but once you see it you can never unsee | it. Just food for thought. | j7ake wrote: | Also a lot of (newbie) start up pitches are like this. | rexpop wrote: | This is a standard rhetorical technique for illustrating in | personal terms what's difficult to imagine at a systemic or | statistical level. It doesn't mean they're trying to manipulate | you any more than you're trying to manipulate us, ie writing is | pleading. | dustincoates wrote: | A "fun" game I like to play with articles from the Verge is how | many words until there's a first person pronoun. (It's almost | always in the first sentence.) Maybe I'm getting old, but I | don't need the journalist's backstory before I get the meat of | the article. | escapedmoose wrote: | There's more than one reason to read an article. Often the | story is the point. | robertlagrant wrote: | That's true, but not great. "I'm here for you to subtly | impute how I should feel about something by bypass my | critical faculties" is a poor substitute for people who want | to be informed. | zztop44 wrote: | This one might be a false positive. The article contains | lengthy first person descriptions of conversations with SEO | "pioneers" and reflections on how they've shaped the internet. | | I'd also question the heuristic in general. Anecdotes serve a | range of purposes. And in any case, it's quite easy to subtly | push a feeling/emotion/story without anecdotes if that's what | you want to do. | pier25 wrote: | > _They 're trying to manipulate how you think about the topic | from the very beginning._ | | Isn't giving context exactly that? | sysadm1n wrote: | 'The People' when really it's mostly bots these days, and getting | smarter with LLMs too. Only a few blogs/articles are written by | actual humans, and something strange has happened to my cognitive | abilities lately; is discerning whether an article is written by | an LLM or a human. I regularly play a game called 'bot or not' | now. | heshiebee wrote: | This article is surprisingly(for the Verge) unbiased, really well | written and balanced. The title is definitely misleading making | it seem like the author will be taking the authoritarian side. | 100% worth the read. | ilrwbwrkhv wrote: | The internet was ruined when it was de anonymized by Facebook and | LinkedIn etc. I remember growing up in a completely anonymous | internet. You could be who you are, say what you want and explore | digitally. Then you would go back to society as the real you and | temper yourself a bit to fit in and work with others and that was | ok because you could blow off steam on the internet. | amadeuspagel wrote: | There are many anonymous websites, like 4chan, and you are free | to create your own, which is itself something you can do | anonymously. | lukas099 wrote: | I'd even wager that the number of people posting content | anonymously has only grown in absolute terms. | postalrat wrote: | How are people you to find your forum if sites indexing sites | like google apparently won't link to your site: | https://www.google.com/search?q=anonymous+English- | language+i... | asdfman123 wrote: | The internet was ruined when your normie older relatives got on | it, unfortunately | bdw5204 wrote: | They were using the internet before 2008 or so but mainly for | sending and receiving emails. Younger people who weren't that | into computers mainly used them to message their friends on | AIM and pirate music on Napster then Kazaa then Limewire (the | platforms kept getting shut down). In the post-2008 world, | Facebook replaced email and AIM and Spotify/Netflix replaced | piracy. The difference is, the people who used to just use | the internet for email now spend far more time online because | Facebook is designed to be addicting. | drivebycomment wrote: | The Internet is more useful than it ever was for a lot more | people. It has more information on more stuff, and you can do a | lot more than you ever could, and a lot more people benefit | from it in more ways than ever. Is it universally better in | every way ? No. Could it be better in many important ways? Yes. | But hyperbolic statements like "the Internet was ruined" is | just nostalgia and hyperbole. | leptons wrote: | > You could be who you are, say what you want and explore | digitally. | | You can't even really do that on HN without getting your | account deleted. I don't think the blame belongs solely on | Facebook and Linkedin so much as anyone who has any kind of | power online using it on others as they see fit. | StableAlkyne wrote: | Which is ironic, considering the Internet was also "ruined" in | 1993 when ISPs gave everyone Usenet access, flooding the Reddit | equivalent of the day (if Reddit were the only real forum) with | anonymous users who cared not for cultural norms. Prior to | that, it was mostly people posting under their real name with | their real workplace or college in their email address. | smeagull wrote: | Get this - you can have an anonymous facebook and linkedin | account too. | phendrenad2 wrote: | "The internet" doesn't really exist, now, now does it? 99% of | users are living in an AOL-style world, where they live within | walled gardens. Why leave | twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit? There's nothing | out there but a wasteland of crumbling has-been sites. Sometimes | you'll find yourself on a blog or news article, but you just | click/tap the back button to go back to the walled garden. Nobody | is subscribing to your RSS feed. And what really did this is | mobile devices. And it isn't necessarily a bad thing, although I | do miss the old vbulletin discussion days. | asdfman123 wrote: | There's lots of good content out there, but the problem is | finding it. A Google replacement wouldn't be any better, | because everyone's attention would be directed into optimizing | new replacement site. | | It frustrates me when people say "Google should search reddit | by default." The reason reddit is still halfway decent is there | isn't as much money in gaming it, but there would be if the | entire world was sent to it. | bdw5204 wrote: | I think the best path to a "Google replacement" is probably | to reinvent Yahoo or dmoz. You'd still have to human curate | the worthwhile sites through a ton of SEO spam and, if you go | the dmoz route of volunteer curators, that's an attack vector | for spammers but I think it'd be much more manageable than | trying to build an index of the entire web and search it. A | new general purpose web directory would also help mitigate | probably the biggest harm that Google's algorithm has caused | to the web: the death of the "links" page as a standard part | of a web site due to sites trying to increase their pagerank | by reducing outbound links. | asdfman123 wrote: | That kind of web directory would work if it were just used | by a small group of adherents. | | But it would encounter the same problems typical to big | tech once any "real" money started flowing in. | superkuh wrote: | Your perception is how the vast majority of people see the web. | But you're completely wrong about "nothing out there" and | "Nobody is subscribing to your RSS feed." Just because you're | trapped in the gardens doesn't mean there aren't communities of | people who never went in them in the first place. | | Yes, there's a thick layer of for-profit walled garden crap on | top but the actual web of websites (not applications) is still | out there and it's bigger than ever despite being | proportionally much smaller compared to the smartphone/megacorp | users. | dang wrote: | Related ongoing thread: | | _Some thoughts about The Verge article on SEO_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38104407 | xwdv wrote: | SEO has always been a moving target. So now it's all about social | media optimization. Think channels, not search results. | richforrester wrote: | Plus a lot of it has been about semantically correct formatting | of your content and code. | | It's a moving target in that a lot of orgs try to "game the | system", or at least exploit it as best they can :) | | Good content will mostly rise to the top because that's what | search engines strive to optimise. | | Nothing really changes that much probably. Just semantics. | zeruch wrote: | I cant foresee a scenario where an endlessly growing mass of AI- | generated noise, stacked upon itself, will be useful to anyone. | Humans will invariably find a less contentious path (maybe its | seeking out more localized options, maybe its balkanizing into | various specialized domains, maybe its $NEWTHINGYETTOBESEEN, or | all of the above. But the current trajectory cannot hold. | | Someone else mentioned the "reverse-takeover of Google by | DoubleClick is the Fall" and I find that spot on. | | The Dionysian appetites of adtech will be its own downfall. | w0m wrote: | Eventually; someone will create an index to sort through the AI | output and determine what's true/relevant and return it to the | consumer. | | Call it 'airank' maybe? | cyanydeez wrote: | yeah definitely not truth value. | | probably a "exploit" trigger. hard to think how reality and | predictive power are going to be mediated through some kind | of source index. | lobochrome wrote: | Yahoo! | viburnum wrote: | This is maybe the worst-written article I've ever read. So much | random detail about dresses and Canadian hometowns and almost | nothing to say about the actual topic. | haltist wrote: | An art project making it obvious why the economic engine | (advertising) that pays for Google's electricity bills is not | sustainable: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Google+will+eat+itself | zenincognito wrote: | SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 | years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents. | | Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the | HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in | the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most | ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or | "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bring ton of | revenue every day. | | Ofcourse, Google is trying hard to monetize every little real | estate but still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at | all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in | the past 3 years. | | The other aspect of this the "paid ads" also immensely valuable | to advertisers. We have people spending 3 million dollars a month | on paid ads returning 8X ROAS. Google & FB are still the most | lucrative channels for ecommerce. | rgrieselhuber wrote: | As a SaaS / data vendor in the space, I can confirm. | preommr wrote: | > because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve | | Do you actually think this or is this just a polite way of | saying lots of HNers are out of touch? | btown wrote: | > still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. | Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the | past 3 years. | | The more Google trains its normal users that "generic queries | will get you spoon-fed generic-ness, so you have to be specific | to get what you want..." the more valuable placement on long- | tail keywords will become. People aren't going to stop | searching, they'll just hate Google more when doing so. And | they'll begrudgingly adapt. | | The SEO industry will be fine. Startups that naturally breathe | long-tail SEO will excel. Incumbent advertisers will see | keyword costs rising across the board, though, and perhaps pass | costs to customers. That's not inherently a bad thing - but | there's a lot more to the debate there than just this aspect. | userinanother wrote: | The SEO industry has been the big winner from the crapification | of Google. No surprise there | ge96 wrote: | I don't get the argument about gpt replacing a search engine. If | gpt trains from search engine data how does it get new data? I | guess the usage of gpt over time. | postalrat wrote: | Why would gpt train from search engine data instead of the | actual documents being indexed? | ge96 wrote: | Not just documents, everything, every website that becomes | searchable information. How would that work in the future if | people don't use search engines, how does the gpt/llm bring | that info in. Not saying it's not possible, would there be an | API people submit their content into... | | Edit: actually I wonder if wikipedia will make one (model) | they have so much info | adhesive_wombat wrote: | It's always surprised me that confirmed SEO shenaniganery doesn't | bring an instant ion-cannon strike from Google. I know they are | apparently allergic to having a human ever decide anything ever. | It's just that if I were them, with an infinite data lake to find | the vendors' traces, trillion-dollar C-suite morals and the SEO | was messing with the bottom line, there would be no quarter when | a nest is uncovered. Delist everything to do with them, delete | all their accounts and salt their persistent data profiles. Most | of them are abroad and will struggle to do anything about it. | After all, occasional Gmail or Android developer bans are meted | out with various levels of capriciousness. | | I guess it's good that they're not obviously going Judge Dredd | left, right and centre, but it's still surprising to me that you | can run up to them, slap them in the virtual face and stay online | to do it again. | | Or perhaps it is not messing with the short-term bottom line | because the SEO sites are crawling with ads? And until ChatGPT | what were you going to do? Use Bing? | qvrjuec wrote: | Isn't this what happened with rap genius around a decade | ago[0]? Maybe this was long before their policy of zero human | intervention. | | [0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/25/5243716/rap-genius- | plumm... | spookie wrote: | Their lengthy apology is.... I don't know how to describe it. | It reminds me of relationship I had, in a bad way. | | The part where they go on to say "We messed up" cracked me | up. You don't "mess up" when you are fully aware of your | actions, and perform them as planned. | spookie wrote: | They'll only start noticing when it's too late. For now, I | assume, the bling is still flowing enough to be as addictive to | them as the SEO spam is for most. | Nextgrid wrote: | SEO doesn't mess with the bottom line though. If anything, it | could _improve_ the bottom line by making the ads look more | attractive if the organic search results have all been polluted | to hell. | fsckboy wrote: | I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My | assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything | very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google | is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told | her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween | house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was | already pulling up pictures of it. I had said the house looked | like it was melting, so she typed in "melting house", I think. | Not that that's genius or quirky or anything, but I would never | dream of typing in something I was thinking "informally", and her | approach is more like "whatever whackadoo thing I'm thinking, | probably other people think just like me" and she finds anything | I ask her about. (I've pretested that query, and turns out that | there are melting houses all over the world, just gotta look in | your neighborhood) | | so to the point here, I lament that Google doesn't work any more, | but she doesn't, she thinks it works great. Now if I can just get | her to stop finding restaurant recommendations on TikTok... | wildrhythms wrote: | How would you have phrased that query? | Raidion wrote: | I think Google still deserves a ton of credit. Online shopping | is tricky, but information is incredibly easy to access, | especially if you do know how to avoid clicking on Quora or | WebMD style sites. | | Google does a great job of shepherding you towards information | and at the very least gives you additional context that you can | use to corroborate or tune your search. | mushufasa wrote: | I can see AI decrease some of the traffic for content writers who | relied on SEO taking a hit; like political blogs or various sites | that paid for ads to drive traffic and then essentially sell more | ads to those users on their own site. But the writers/platforms | that have great content can also use AI to improve their own | content, so I don't think this is going to be a 'fall off a | cliff' style event. | | I don't think that SEO is going to be decreasing anytime soon for | e-commerce, which is probably the best use of SEO. AI generation | images and content are no substitute for physical goods, like | shoes. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-01 23:00 UTC)