zlacker

>>i13e+(OP)
The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while.

Over the last year, its become palpable.

Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet.

This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their searches. They can do better. They've chosen to not do so.

>>Rosana+K9
I see this sort of comment a lot, and I honestly don't know what it's talking about. What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering?

It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge.

I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yahoo!? Back in that era, if I were looking for something as simple as the University of Michigan, I clicked and drilled down through a Yahoo directory. The obvious search query would have been useless. Google changed all that.

I view Google as the yellow pages. It works well for that. Is it an oracle of knowledge? Of course not. How could I possibly expect to find knowledge on a place where there is no reward for making it available? People producing knowledge don't work for free.

I've tried ChatGPT and it's no better. It serves up stuff that is flat-out wrong.

>>massys+7d
Things that i *know* were parts of the internet, that I could find via google 5-10 years ago are no longer possible to find. I get single page search results sometimes, with not even the capability to keep browsing 'more' pages to see things that may be tangentially related. Google has just decided to not show them at all. Remember when the bottom of the page was "Goooooooooooooooogle" and you could click each "o" to go to that page? Haven't seen that in a while, right?

>>qrio2+Je
What makes you think these origins still exist? Google is not going to direct you to a page that can't be reached, even if we assume that your memory is accurate and the page existed 10 years ago.