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
> What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering?

Not optimize for "most documents indexed" but "highest quality of results". One of them encourages adding spam to their index, the other encourages removing spam from their index.

>>luckyl+Pd
There are giant teams of people at Google whose only job is trying to define things like "spam" and "seo abuse" more precisely in more diverse contexts. There are equally large armies of people outside of it trying to outwit the first group and find more and more elaborate loopholes and workarounds.

HN is constantly pushing this notion that "spam" is some well-defined, solvable problem, so obviously Google wants it. That narrative just doesn't make sense from any angle. The notion that more click bait improves Google's bottom line is absurd

>>gipp+Cf
What's the reason for these giant teams of presumable well-paid experts and geniuses to not define "a clone of SO with some of the answers juggled around between questions" as spam?

> The notion that more click bait improves Google's bottom line is absurd

If you don't find what you're looking for on the first try, you'll need to try again, and see more ads. What else are you going to do, go elsewhere, visit a library, ask the town elders or give up on looking for things you want to know? You don't have a choice, you know it, they know it.

I find it equally plausible that Youtube's search sucks badly because they don't care what you're looking for, they want you to watch videos that they predict will lead to the maximum time spent on the site, again so you watch more ads. What other explanation is there that the world's leading search engine has the search of one of their flagship products run at 1999 quality? Presumably they have giant teams of people working on that too?