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
Search before Google was bad. e.g. I could easily ignore 80% of the results on the first page, but at least it was all actual content.

Then, with Google, it got better and almost all results were relevant.

But we’ve been regressing over the years, and now we’re at the point where 80% of all results are both irrelevant and simply SSO spam.

I find it really hard to believe Google has some of the smartest people in the world on search and they cannot identify this.