Google is supposed (SUPPOSED) to serve up closest to what you search for. SEO is the antithesis of this - it games the system to get a given website closer to or in front of your eyeballs even if it’s content is less relevant. And Google has allowed this to continue (or more likely encouraged it on the down low because businesses that are SEO obsessed are more likely to be send money Google’s way) because Google isn’t a search engine anymore - Google is an advertising company with some internet services slapped on. Google ‘search’ is just a clown face for one of their advertising strategies. It doesn’t serve up what’s relevant - it serves up as much results that generate it revenue as possible without being so obvious about it that users get pissed off and switch search engines.
I do SEO as my day job.
I’ve only ever done white hat, and it’s all about content relevance to user intent, creating a site that loads quickly and functions in an intuitive way, and is coded so that search engines can easily understand the site.
Of course the goal is almost always to get you to buy something, but all it really is is best practices for online publishing.
Would you then class the pages upon pages of generated, useless content I get for most Google searches nowadays as “black hat” SEO?
Google ‘search’ is just a clown face for one of their advertising strategies.
It also has a bunch of decent knowledge tools built in, if you know how to use them. I use the stupid calculator thing more than I should; it’s like a cheap wolfram alpha.
Literally used that to subtract 37 today. Could’ve done it myself but you type it in Chrome and it previews the answer for free. Such an easy check. I don’t wanna support Google but they are at least pros at subtraction, and God knows you can’t criticize that
AND “what percent of X is Y” questions! (stupid percentages)
I’m so annoyed we’re here 25 years from Google’s founding, catering to them with the euphemism “SEO” rather than doing what’s best for the web and for humanity and expecting Google, the Search Engine company, to improve its capacity to search optimally.
Enshitification has reached google search too :(((
Do people actually go to cnet.com still? That website turned to shit like 25 years ago
Only to look at the logo occasionally. Wondering who’s idea that was and whether they’re still employed or affiliated with CNET.
Only when shared via yahoo! news
I wonder if this is why so many sites now started including previews of new content on old content pages. It’s made trying to google by date range completely useless because google now thinks a 12 year old post is brand new because there’s a preview of a new post at the bottom when they re-index it.
I’ve already noticed this being a problem. I search for a specific issue that’s recent. Set the search as past year or month. See a search result that looks relevant and the date on it (according the search engine) is recent. Click on it only to find its a 5yo article.
This is because of Google’s monopoly on search. If there were more search engines, then sites would just focus on making high quality articles instead of trying to play with the monopolists policies
I don’t think they’re necessarily so much the number of search engines that currently exist (there’s already currently several) but rather that not enough people use the alternatives that Google had the monopoly. (Also helped by Google actively railroading users into its products and suppressing the competition)
This is an incredibly astute point. Haven’t thought about it like that.
