[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)