A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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I'm a developer, and the shit I've been asked to throw in for SEO is just infuriating.
"Here's 500 keywords we need added"
"Half of this isn't even about our product"
"Marketing says we need it, so add it."
I swear, the two jobs least needed in this world are middle managers and marketers.
Preach it.
I recently started studying social psychology, and sadly the main takeaway from my initial venture into the field is a confirmation of how unaware and automated the average person is.
Middle managers, marketers and the average customer are all caught up in a perpetual feedback loop, constantly enabling each other's addictions. It doesn't help that these demographics overlap as managers and marketers are customers of other marketers and managers, turning the feedback loop into a vicious cycle.
pure cultural poison
This is the opposite of SEO unless your goal was to make sure you never appear on the first page.
They do realize sites that tag spam are heavily penalized by Google?
Off-topic: why do you tag the user whose comment you're directly responding to? Others, sure, but the parent comment already gets a notification of your response.
Maybe a Mastodon user? Mastodon automatically tags poster and commenter you're replying to.
They were posting from mastodon, I guess that's just by default.
This happens automatically on the web client for Mastodon when you reply to a thread. I could have manually removed yours from this one. I have mixed feelings about whether that should be default. Untagging could be construed as rude? On the other hand it can be a bore to be involuntarily involved in some seemingly interminable thread that you only meant to reply briefly to.
I think Google peaked about 6-8 years ago now and then started slipping at an ever accelerating rate.
It’s almost useless for me when searching anything remotely technical or otherwise niche.
I almost consistently need to go to the second page of results now, something I don’t remember doing since like 2009.
I find Bing acceptable. Brave search works well. But I’m actually using Kagi now since I’m hoping their paid model will actually mean I’m not the product.
I tried searching for a comprehensive list of rule changes to the NBA in its history - something that DEFINITELY exists on a webpage. I near exclusively got news results from a recent rule change
duckduckgo is my go to now, but not out of lack of usability. haven't used google for ~4-5 years for privacy concerns
I use Kagi too and it's great, but I think we will move more and more to chatgpt-ish search engines in a year or two.
I imagine they will attempt to put ads in those too.
AI starting out so corporate friendly is a really bad sign imo. Early internet was the wild west (good and bad) but it took time for money to tame it. AI feels like it's coming out of the gate pre-tamed by corporations. Not looking forward to that era.
Brave search works well.
Does brave index data on it's own or is it pulled from Google/Bing?
They do have their own crawler and I believe supplement from bing only when necessary. Something like 98% of results are from their own index across all users. They actually have a breakdown for every search.
I think they actually have the largest independent index outside of Google/Bing right now.
Others that exclusively use their own index are:
Mojeek (results aren’t great)
Kagi (result are pretty good imo)
I pretty much only use google to search other web sites, like “thing im searching for” site:beehaw.org or whatever. It’s completely useless otherwise.
Truly. Most web search engines, including google, are mostly useless these days if you don't already have a good idea where to look or it is a very common search.
You use to be able to click down a bunch of pages till what you were looking for turns up. But now after you go down a few pages it just starts repeating and it is all mostly big tech sites.
You search for anything slightly niche, everything past page one is just rubbish. It's especially jarring when searching for something programming related and 80% of the results are auto-generated stuff scraped from Stack overflow. It reminds me of Amazon where you search for a product and almost all results are chinese-made clones of what you are looking with randomly generated names.
It reminds me of Amazon where you search for a product and almost all results are chinese-made clones of what you are looking with randomly generated names
This is a big factor as to why I shop at Amazon much, much less nowadays. Can't find anything reputable outside of major brands, just feels like a market for dropshipped items
Things weren't anywhere near this bad a decade ago 😒
The most baffling thing modern search engines do, especially DuckDuckGo, is a page of search results in they inevitably throw in some unrelated results involving my location as looked up by my IP.
I'm not sure why when looking for old Sega console stuff it wants me to know about plumbers in what it thinks my city is, but it's sure dedicated to me finding out! :facepalm:
It makes me smile a little when I get ads for restaurants in the suburb in a completely different city where my ISP has its registered business address.
This is just another side effects of the proliferation of AI generated text that is difficult to distinguish from human generated text. Obviously, SEO optimization has always been an issue, but more now than ever, distinguishing the fluff and nonsense from the valid is a significant challenge. I can only imagine small businesses are going to find it even more difficult to stand out when pumping SEO optimized sites requires only a few clicks. How can you compete when the tools are ubiquitous, easy to use, and available to all and the game values the results of these tools rather than the product or company themselves?
"When everyone is special, no one is"
-Syndrome
Use a vast, federated human authentication system?
“But muh capitalism breeds innovation”
My standard response is "capitalism breeds escalation, which can sometimes cause innovation, but always breaks down in absurdity."
You need the last word to end in "-ation" to keep the rhyme going!
“capitalism breeds escalation, which can sometimes cause innovation, but always breaks down into masturbation.”
Done.
gonna steal that
Short sighted behavior is hardly limited to capitalist enterprises, though.
The thing that upsets me most about this article is that when I try other search engines, I still find myself needing to use Google to find certain things. Usually that's information or questions and not products, but if it's this bad for Google I can't imagine it's any easier on the others.
Yeah, I tried for a long time to use DuckDuckGo, but honestly the results are worse than Google, even given the present day enshittified state of Google search. And it eventually just became too annoying.
I use DDG and what solved the problem for me are the "bangs". Not satisfied with the results? Add !g or !b to try another search engine.
Want to look at up at wikipedia? add !wiki? google scholar? !gsc . Super convenient, so I don't really care that much anymore how crap the search engine is because I can use ddg as a searching "hub".
I just use chatgpt 4. Much better at answering questions.
ChatGPT has no concept of truth or sources. It will straight up lie to you.
It's nice for "creative" stuff but never, ever take its responses at face value.
I would urge people.to reconsider this or atleast try out GPT4. I recognize that's a normal viewpoint but from my usage and with back checking it, it was gotten profoundly good. To the point where I take recipe recommendations that it creates because it tastes delicious.
It's generative so it will generate plausible answers with no consistency of truthfulness.
We have common(-enough) sense to be able to pick up on whether it's being sensible or not, after which we take to search engines. Search engines are now the fallback; a friend of mine and I have nearly totally replaced search engines with ChatGPT as the primary way of quickly, initially getting info now. If you stay aware of its limitations, it can be life-changing in a positive way.
Relying on common sense for critical information is a trap. You're "googling" because you don't know. The incorrect answer might be just plausible enough for you to believe it. This is why credible sources are important, to act as a sort of fallback to authority (I trust "source X" to provide correct information).
Don't worry, eventually Google's current project to replace all their own search results with their own "AI" sludge will make using them impossible to get credible information from too. :(
Obviously you need to check everything it outputs if you're relying on that output for anything, but if you use web search it cites sources and you can look at those to check what it's saying. Makes the whole process much easier
Let's not forget bot/AI generated websites that just copy paste some irrelevant content template but fits your search terms, and then feeds you tons of ads when you thought you found answers to your questions.
google "How to do X?"
AI pages are always like this
10/10 best impression XD
There are a little bit of variation for other stuff, but they have their templates. Say if you look for some specific thing "the earliest super nova documented" then chances are it will guide you to wikipedia or some valid sources.
But if your search term contains anything that was trending on google, say if you search some hot game's tip, etc. There will be pages and pages of AI generated contents, from some domain you don't really recognize. (so better put ign or gamefaq or Fextralife/fandom wiki as search term now. )
Either that or the article is a giant ad for a specific tool to do X
I hadn't even considered the quantity of ads on those sites... Any time I accidentally find one, it's a long column of text that starts off with a bunch of filler roughly related to whatever I was searching for, maybe a couple of lines with an answer (right or wrong is a different matter), then breaks down into a bunch of self-contradicting nonsense. I just don't see the ads because of uBlock Origin, so I never see how bad they are. AI generated sites are completely aggravating.
I also don't see the ad with ad block, but when you see the not working weird space or failed embeded blocks, sometimes a same site reference link etc to other not related topics(highly likely to have finger printing) it's like "okay, fuck, they got me again."
Yeah, I've been there. It's just so aggravating, but I try to find comfort in knowing that at least I wasted a small bit of their precious bandwidth!
There are so many times I look for something somewhat niche that I need information on, and the first 10 or so links are all garabage keyword spammed sites. Literally lists of words that drive clicks to their site (I assume for ads or scripts). It's super frustrating. I've blocked entire TLDs on my network (.zip for example) and installed a add-on to allow me to block results in my searches.
I don't understand why Google doesn't give us a blacklisting feature. There are so many garbage results from always the same domains, just let me block websites from search results.
There are browser extensions to hide results, but a search results page with only 3 non blacklisted results isn't helpful either
Yeah... I work for an e-commerce website and ever since chatgpt came to the world we have been making product descriptions and write ups assisted by the tool.
The reason from the product manager: SEO
People search for stuff to buy... and they have to find it usually via Google. My experience, buyers care more about the price and the possibility of an old product they love to still be available.
Descriptions? Well, they're there.