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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
If your perspective is that of an advertising company, then I can agree.
If your perspective that of a user, then no fucking way.
Advertisers and those that use them are trying to suck every penny from every corner of the web using psychological manipulation to get you to buy things you don’t need with ever increasing precision.
The internet of today is a shell of what it used to be. Either you are too young to have experienced the good internet, or you work in advertising.
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.
Every time I see an article from the verge all I can think of is Stefan and his disastrous PC Build video. The Verge lost all credibility after that for me
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 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 don’t have a ton of experience with it yet, but I don’t have to scroll through a bunch of actual ads, followed by a bunch of not-really-but-basically-still ads, before finding what I’m looking for.
I’m paying for the service, not because I just fell for their marketing, but because I actually have the impression of getting noticeably less “polluted” results, especially when searching for something easily advertisable (e.g. “best X to buy 2023”). I don’t need to convert anyone else. Everyone can just try it themselves and judge whether they feel it’s worth their money or not. As of now, for me it seems to be the case.
How on earth does paying for a service mean someone’s “being taken advantage of”? You do realize that Google, Bing et al aren’t actually free? The whole problem with eg. Google is the fact that they’re an ad company with a search engine and not the other way around, which creates perverse incentives to show you bullshit results as long as it means more ad views for them (and they control both the supply and demand side of that ad network, which makes it even worse). That’s literally the reason why Google’s results have gotten so bad.
While I’d love to live in an economic system where people could just build good web search engines for free and on a volunteer basis, unfortunately we don’t find ourselves in such a system at this time. I’d rather pay for a search service than use one that’s incentivized to not show me what I’m searching for, and I’d also rather pay for developer time than assume that they’ll work on services for free during their time off (which is the reality with eg. Lemmy admins)
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 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.
It doesn’t really matter to me if they use their own crawler or use results from another search engine. What matters to me is the results i’m seeing for my search queries. And if they “roll in the ads later” or the service deteriorates, I can still switch to another search engine.
No need for “just trust us”, if you can just compare the product yourself🤷♂️
I hope that if that day comes you may consider trying out some searxng instances, as they do probably give similar results as kagi as both pool results from the same true search engines. I am so fustrated that we are at a point where people feel the need to pay 120$ a year for something that has been a staple of the free as in freedom internet forever, especially when things like SearXNG exist.
But no solution is really free. Either you pay directly (Kagi), or it is paid through ads (Google) or it is some free open source solution, which then is paid through the time people put into it in their free time and in that case there should be donations or contributions as well, at least from people who can afford it. 🤷♂️
Its the third option, and no while nothing in computer infrastructure is ever truly free as theres always operational+maintenance cost as well as dev time and setup time, when nothing is at cost to the end user and the hosting provider isn’t trying to make a profit off their information then I consider it good grounds to it a ‘free’ service. I actually just posted a guide to alternative search engines over at !technology , you may find it an interesting read.
Something that has been SEO’d for Google is still going to feature prominantly on ddg or bing. There are other reasons to switch off Google, but seo isn’t going to stop being a problem.
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