Fun article, thanks for sharing. I think it does a good job of pointing out one of the problems that SEO is causing, especially when paired now with LLMs. Garbage, practically auto-generated...
Fun article, thanks for sharing.
I think it does a good job of pointing out one of the problems that SEO is causing, especially when paired now with LLMs. Garbage, practically auto-generated websites, that aren’t even helpful in showing the answer you’re looking for. It’s becoming harder to actually use just blanket searching of the internet for anything useful.
It’s why when searching for anything now, a lot of people (including me) include “reddit” or “site:reddit.com” just to get a more-likely human written comment/thought (but with the reddit API fiasco, this isn’t as useful or it won’t be in the future if more people end up leaving reddit - for example, I was looking for male fashion advice and that subreddit is still private (luckily there was some redirecting to a Substack with guides)).
not terribly related but i hate that, through the article, i've been introduced to some despicable "SEO hacking" weirdo who is just ruining the internet. (not the author of the article—they linked...
not terribly related but i hate that, through the article, i've been introduced to some despicable "SEO hacking" weirdo who is just ruining the internet. (not the author of the article—they linked to some twitter post claiming to generate 150k blog posts using AI, and you know for sure they are all literally a waste of electricity)
Wouldn't it be weird if we ended up back where Yahoo was trying to take us in the early 2000s with a human-curated directory of the internet instead of a search engine? Honestly, I wouldn't hate...
Wouldn't it be weird if we ended up back where Yahoo was trying to take us in the early 2000s with a human-curated directory of the internet instead of a search engine? Honestly, I wouldn't hate it. I used to use the Yahoo directory all the time!
What a fun post about a very un-fun topic :) He's totally right that search engine results and LLMs are going to "get weirder". It's already so full of garbage that google knows it has to serve up...
What a fun post about a very un-fun topic :)
He's totally right that search engine results and LLMs are going to "get weirder". It's already so full of garbage that google knows it has to serve up !r results, and now that we have LLMs making more garbage that somehow still makes google money, we have a full oroboros: search ranked garbage that trains models to spit out garbage that ranks well.
Will we ever stop using Google? The answer is palpably "yes"! I am just old enough to remember when MS was really horrible and email was just spam and everyone's tired of typing in URLs from literal directory printed books. The market is ripe for disruption once again and google is already too pinned down by its golden handcuffs to pivot.
My hope is for some kind of gamified, humanized version of Clickworkers/mechanical turk: every human participating gets paid some kind of stable, local living wage equivalent per hour to meaningfully organize a common wealth information dataset. Artists get paid fairly for art model training and refinement. Humanity coming together to catelog vanishing cultures and languages. One can contribute expertise or time rating content for credits, and spend them on search credits when we need to search stuff.
Adult swim's "digital gardener" skit might have been a joke but it doesn't need to be.
I don't think it's that easy to predict what will happen with an adversarial game like SEO. Google has lost ground to click farms before, but later they figured out how to filter them out, and it...
I don't think it's that easy to predict what will happen with an adversarial game like SEO. Google has lost ground to click farms before, but later they figured out how to filter them out, and it wasn't by going to fully manual filtering. Maybe they will do it again?
For example, the strategy of putting a useful result in the middle of a long article is known, so I expect Google could counter it eventually.
There is a Cisco Introduction to IoT course that must have gotten pretty popular recently. One of the potential questions on a sample final exam is about Hadoop, which, as we all know, is a comprehensive ecosystem of open source software for big data management!
This means that thousands of students started searching for “a comprehensive ecosystem of open source software for big data management” every month as they studied for their final IoT exam. And the SEO analytics dashboards noticed.
The really interesting thing about this case though, is that the original source content driving this search interest is not publicly available or indexed. This query is copied and pasted verbatim from an exam, which are famously not something you want to be found on Google.
Fun article, thanks for sharing.
I think it does a good job of pointing out one of the problems that SEO is causing, especially when paired now with LLMs. Garbage, practically auto-generated websites, that aren’t even helpful in showing the answer you’re looking for. It’s becoming harder to actually use just blanket searching of the internet for anything useful.
It’s why when searching for anything now, a lot of people (including me) include “reddit” or “site:reddit.com” just to get a more-likely human written comment/thought (but with the reddit API fiasco, this isn’t as useful or it won’t be in the future if more people end up leaving reddit - for example, I was looking for male fashion advice and that subreddit is still private (luckily there was some redirecting to a Substack with guides)).
It can be worth using Marginalia search.
hmmm, searched for new zealand railways and it showed a link to a topic on tildes.
not terribly related but i hate that, through the article, i've been introduced to some despicable "SEO hacking" weirdo who is just ruining the internet. (not the author of the article—they linked to some twitter post claiming to generate 150k blog posts using AI, and you know for sure they are all literally a waste of electricity)
Wouldn't it be weird if we ended up back where Yahoo was trying to take us in the early 2000s with a human-curated directory of the internet instead of a search engine? Honestly, I wouldn't hate it. I used to use the Yahoo directory all the time!
Link aggregators, ie, reddit, tildes, are pretty close to human curated internet.
What a fun post about a very un-fun topic :)
He's totally right that search engine results and LLMs are going to "get weirder". It's already so full of garbage that google knows it has to serve up !r results, and now that we have LLMs making more garbage that somehow still makes google money, we have a full oroboros: search ranked garbage that trains models to spit out garbage that ranks well.
Will we ever stop using Google? The answer is palpably "yes"! I am just old enough to remember when MS was really horrible and email was just spam and everyone's tired of typing in URLs from literal directory printed books. The market is ripe for disruption once again and google is already too pinned down by its golden handcuffs to pivot.
My hope is for some kind of gamified, humanized version of Clickworkers/mechanical turk: every human participating gets paid some kind of stable, local living wage equivalent per hour to meaningfully organize a common wealth information dataset. Artists get paid fairly for art model training and refinement. Humanity coming together to catelog vanishing cultures and languages. One can contribute expertise or time rating content for credits, and spend them on search credits when we need to search stuff.
Adult swim's "digital gardener" skit might have been a joke but it doesn't need to be.
I don't think it's that easy to predict what will happen with an adversarial game like SEO. Google has lost ground to click farms before, but later they figured out how to filter them out, and it wasn't by going to fully manual filtering. Maybe they will do it again?
For example, the strategy of putting a useful result in the middle of a long article is known, so I expect Google could counter it eventually.
From the article:
For anyone wondering, as I know I was, the article is currently ranked 8th, much higher than the writer expected