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Yes. They both did.
Google came to prominence because it sidestepped the first gen SEO of keywords.
Then it became a bloated corp run by MBAs.
SEO took off and it did little to nothing as its search platform was now there to deliver eye balls to advertisers.
It’s worse than that, in Google’s current antitrust suit, the government showed that Google stopped searching for your exact text…. Instead they replace your text with the most profitable text that’s close to what you’re searching for. So you can’t actually get better results by refining your query anymore.
Meaning that Google is defrauding their users (making it look like they searched for something they didn’t give you the results for) and they defrauded AdWords clients because I paid for an ad when someone searches for X but Google manipulated a search for Y into X so that I’d have to pay more even though the user didn’t actually use my keyword.
Aaaaand we wonder why Google sucks now.
….. always the same reason that a company turns hostile to their clients….. “I’m big enough I don’t care, and I want more money, fuck you”
Wired retracted that article because the writer misunderstood the slides.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/
That’s interesting… I’m curious now….
They may have misinterpreted it, but now I wanna know what it REALLY is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37802116
If you search for "kids clothing", when it goes to pull ads to put above the results, it fuzzes the search phrase for synonyms. So for example if TJ Maxx has purchased ads for "kidswear", that's a semantic match, so they'll show the TJ Maxx ads even though it's not one of the exact keywords they picked.
While I’m not arguing your point, it certainly appears you’re right…..
I just can’t help but feel like the original story (despite the inaccuracy) was on to something.
A few years ago when Google stopped processing quotes in the search properly, their search engine started shitting the bed HARD.
I’ve always felt that since that time they’ve been searching the wrong things. Search has gotten worse. It’s been better for finding items I want to buy, but complete dogshit for everything else. I don’t particularly buy that seo’s got a sudden unexplained boost at that time.
I don’t know, the article (despite the inaccuracies) really felt like it explained everything nicely. So the article might be wrong but…. There’s still something there Google isn’t telling us. I kinda wonder if it’s true despite the lack of evidence.
Wait quotes no longer work?
It’s not that they don’t work entirely, they just started “fuzzing “ them like normal search.
They’re no longer a hard explicit.
Probably explains why sometimes i can't seem to find what i really want
I feel this, especially when I'm looking up technical information. I'll specifically exclude keywords and they show up in the first result.
Half the time I feel the search engine doesn't care what I'm looking for.
Same algorithm that sends you right wing bullshit whenever you try to find anything. I sure as fuck don't want to see that but they seem to.
Many things have ruined the Internet, corporate greed, the proliferation of low quality content, paywalls, advertising, websites infested with user registration, AI, bots, shitty web page builders, etc... This was such a great article except the alligator was only five and a half feet long.
I noticed something was wrong when every article repeated what I was asking as many times as possible.
They're all pretty much written in the same style now, and it's next to impossible to find the actual information you're looking for under all the bullshit.
I don't blame SEO 'experts' or Google. I blame greed.
right, we're all guilty -- not the powers that be that enabled it in the first place with the sole aim of fleecing the masses
Does anyone ever talk about how we can fix it?
Use different services.
We're already in the process of fixing it by using Lemmy instead of reddit.
I started using Kagi. By paying for the search engine, at least I can ensure the search engine's goals align with mine, instead of with whoever pays most for advertisement. I haven't used it for a long time yet, but so far I'm satisfied with its results!
I've been using Kagi for about half a year now, and I've definitely been very happy with it. As you pointed out, the fact that you pay for it with actual money and not with your attention (ie. ad views) means that they actually have an incentive to show you good results instead of endless walls of spammy links that lead to pages using their ad network.
People don't seem to realize that Google's not a search engine company with an ad network, but an ad network company with a search engine: the ads pay for all of Google's services, so they're incentivized to fill your search results with bullshit that you have to dig through, but that uses their ad network – every useless spam link you have visit when looking for the thing you actually searched for means more 💰 for Google.
The fact that so many big online services are ad-funded has led to the situation where people seem to believe that we're entitled to have everything for free online. While open source projects run by volunteers are definitely a thing (as is obvious considering where we are), I don't think it's reasonable to assume that every online service should have rely on voluntary donations and volunteer work, and that developers should work on your free pet service during their time off from their actual work
Hate to bust your bubble but Kagi is just a fancy meta search engine that still uses bing,google and a few others for its queries. Its not a real search engine in its own right. A good searxng instance like https://paulgo.io will give you similar results without paying 10$ a month for it.
Support people who host these free and open source services out of pocket with donations. Not yet another business offering yet another subscription. Promising 'were not like those other guys, for reals jut trust us' while not being able to gaurentee they won't turn into greedy bastards and start whittling your user rights/rolling in the ads later.
We need some 10 foot alligators to fix it.
I think it's not in our hand. We can only hide annoyances by a content blocker.
SEO experts AND GOOGLE
Unregulated capitalism did.
I did a word search of the article and capitalism wasn’t mentioned once. How can we heal the illness if no one can mention the disease.
Just keep calling it out. I'm hopeful things can get better
Why is it “or”..? It’s as if the Verge has lost the ability to write a non-clickbait title.
And the answer is “both have” of course. The folks who make the game are as guilty as those who played it.
That article downplays SEO and mostly argues that Google is responsible, and it still gives Google way too much credit. I mean, it's gonna take a lot more evidence to make me believe they broke the internet by accident, for one. People knew all this crap would happen before Google was even a thing.
Greed broke it. Mostly Google’s, but you’re right, if it weren’t Google, it would have been someone else.
It already was someone else. I am old enough to remember when all these conversations (and the very accurate warnings about algorithmic filtering and artificial content promotion) being directed at Altavista and Yahoo.
And Facebook isn’t innocent, TikTok etc…. You’re entirely right.
We are our own worst enemies.
Yes.
Perhaps this is why nearly everyone hates SEO and the people who do it for a living: the practice seems to have successfully destroyed the illusion that the internet was ever about anything other than selling stuff.
Ah, the author is young. Many of us remember the Internet before e-commerce.
It was the battle between SEO "experts" and Google that did it.
Greed of both SEO and Google.
They both contributed.
I think this 8000+ word article's length is indicative of the "real" answer: it's complicated.
I read the whole thing. Lots of great personalities and examples spanning from AltaVista to Large Language models and everything in between.
I think the quote that resonated with me the most, to summarize this article's main thesis in a sound bite, was this:
You can’t just be the most powerful observer in the world for two decades and not deeply warp what you are looking at
In essence, it's the fault of having a dominant algorithm dictating what the Internet "is". Google is the tool most people use for most of their information seeking. Thus, getting a high ranking from Google is the difference between success and failure.
imho, the only real solution is decentralization. Federated services, local newspapers, new search engines, idk.
And yet, Google is still my default search engine. So I'm part of the problem.
What strikes me is that Google doesn't fix some of the blatant offenders. For example, the other day I was looking for tablets, so I seached for "best tablets of 2023". And it's obvious that many websites are auto-generated, that the content itself was written several years ago, and the years have magically been updated to the present. Half of the first ten links are to pages like this.
I don't expect Google to de-list things. But I do expect that the developers would look at the top ten results for common searches like this and penalize major websites for intentionally creating deceptive content.
Similarly, I would expect all search engines to lower ratings on websites that are ad-heavy. Users want information, not sparkly ads. This is easy to detect and optimize for.
But hey, people wanna make their money, so they'll do what they do.
It was the unholy marriage of the two