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
I also challenge people’s memory of it being so much better. Was it really? Or just different?

>>emoden+Xg
It was mostly better.

The competition for many kinds of search terms is causing a race to the bottom. E.g. tech docs, lyrics, recipes, reviews.

That’s why Kago has a lense for “non-spammy recipe searches” — there’s just so much noise on popular, easily copyable material.

You don’t get the best site by popular vote like PageRank was known for, you get the one that generates the most ad revenue.