I’m kind of conflicted about this. On one hand it’s dangerous that the public’s access to information is so tightly coupled to a single organizations decisions, and I can see the danger in Google making a change like this.
On the other hand, clickbait and SEO gaming has gone on so long that using a site like Google has become significantly less useful to actually finding information, and if a site like Kotakus traffic is down by 60% as a result—is that due to Google being dangerous, or Kotaku having a pile of garbage content meant to game the system and bring in traffic?
For what it’s worth I’m using Kotaku as an example because the article used Kotaku as an example—I have no actual opinion or evidence around the actual content on that particular site.
It’s an example of why monopolies are harmful. They create distorted economies that don’t serve consumers. Like ecosystems overcome by a monoculture, monopolies are inherently less resilient, less functional and prone to sudden disruption.
How exactly would it be any different without Google / SEO. Parsing of website content to determine topics would be a shit show historically, or ridiculously computation heavy now that LLMs could conceivably do a decent job at classifying content. So Google created a way for sites to tag the kind of content they have. Pretty much any search engine would need the same kind of mechanism.
And content providers are always going to be incentivized to be the top search result, which means targeting search algorithms. That’s just the nature of the beast.
If there were multiple SEO implementations, that just means more work to target multiple algorithms. And the content owners with more resources, hundreds of developers, would ultimately win because they can target every algorithm.
I really don’t see how Google as a “monopoly” changes these basic fundamentals.
If there were multiple sources of traffic, the pressure to optimize to one source would be lower, and the disruption caused by algorithm changes would be muted. Which would mean more interesting content less driven by a narrow set of metrics
Except nothing else actually does meaningfully better than Google, even with Google being the only thing sites care about optimizing for.
It’s incredibly difficult to do a useful search if sites are hostile and doing everything possible to muddy the results.
That’s the rationale Google uses. “We’re the best, that’s why users pick us.” They built a moat of investment in search and the browser that other companies can’t compete with. But as a consumer, I am not willing to accept that argument. Ma Bell claimed the same thing. We’re a lot better off economically in a world where Ma Bell was broken up, and Microsoft was forced to stop their anticompetitive activities. Google will be better off as separate companies, worth more than the sum of its parts
None of this is relevant to the fact that your claim isn’t even the weakest of weak evidence for your position. It is literally completely unconnected. SEO is a problem because searching through adversarial data inputs is not a problem anyone has shown any capacity to solve.
And Google’s search engine is a singular product. There is nothing to break it off from. Its position is exclusively the product of the fact that there is no other option that’s remotely functional. Search is hard and no one else even has developed even a mildly interesting alternative.
On the other hand, clickbait and SEO gaming has gone on so long that using a site like Google has become significantly less useful
That’s the same old game of “whack-a-mole” that every search engine since the beginning of the internet has had to play.
Search engines try to provide useful results to keep users trusting them enough to keep coming back, and advertisers keep trying to use SEO to manipulate themselves to the top of the search results
When a handful of monopolies decide that no factchecking will be seen by anybody, anymore,
and only profitable-to-their-dictatorship disinformation will be seen,
then humanity will not have any means of countering that:
it will be too late.
We are “the frog dropped into the slowly-heating pot of water”.
People pretend that monopoly is “maybe” harmful, economically, but it is an existential-threat to countries, and with globalization, now to civil-rights as a valid-category.
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Google search has enshittified far faster than I ever thought possible. It used to work like magic. Too bad capitalism dictates that usefulness has a ceiling.
I’ve switched to Kagi recently and honestly it’s better than Google ever was. You can assign weights to sites to see more or less of them in your results, it automatically cuts the listicle crap out, it has various built in filters for specific things like forums or scientific studies.
Downside: it’s $10/mo. But I’m at the “I’d rather pay with money than data” stage of my life. Especially if it actually makes the experience fucking usable again.
Another happy Kagi user here, it’s great.
I’m at that point as well I think. Thank you for the suggestion!
There was something bad with Kagi.
TL;DR; “AI bad, they made some t-shirts, and the owner says some stupid crap sometimes.” 🙄
As long as the results remain the best and they don’t screw me over, I’m happy to keep paying for them.
But lets be honest, even Duck Duck Go is better than Google these days. It’s fine if folks don’t want to pay for search, but you’ll have a better experience avoiding Google, either way.
But lets be honest, even Duck Duck Go is better than Google these days.
I hate to say it, because I love their privacy policy, but it we’re being honest, it’s not. DDG mostly uses Bing, and I struggle to find what I’m after on that engine. I have better results with Brave search, who now run their own index (but their tech bro CEO leaves me nervous at every turn)
You’re linking to a halfhearted attempt at an exposé written by someone who acts unreasonable towards any attempts at clarification.
That’s not the point though. The point is that the ceo of the company hounds the person with their wall of text over something that they had virtually no exposure on at all. If not for that, it’d have remained completely obscure.
virtually no exposure at all
That is not correct: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314
Wasn’t the explosion of that after the fact?
I’m gonna keep it real with you, I’ll take “weirdo CEO and optional AI tools” over “corporate entity so powerful that society has literally warped around it, whose primary business model is psychological manipulation” any day of the week. The other search engines are so poor at what they do that they’re not viable options.
The world is a much worse place with bad search. We need a search system that is treated like a utility and paid based on success not ad views.
This sort of thing is why Google’s monopoly on the internet is so dangerous.
Because they are making so that we get less results that are just cheating the system to show up at the top?
SEO is a bastardization of a useful tool, solely meant to game the system artificially
SEO is only feasible in the first place because we have one dominant search engine instead of a bunch of equally-prominent ones with different algorithms that would need to be optimized for differently (and maybe even mutually-exclusively).
Copy paste.
There are a ton of them, the problem is none of them are as good as google.
I hear there are good pay ones, though I have never tried one.
I can usually find what I need on google pretty damn quick, although I have seen the end page more than once
I found search results surprisingly bad when I had to use is on another computer. I use Kagi (and yes it costs money but I rather pay that than pay with my data) which gives me way more accurate results. Google might have been the best search engine until a few years ago but from my experience it is not anymore.
Kagi is just Google’s index with fancy features and filtering on top. They include a few other sources but for regular search it’s almost always going to be Google’s index providing the base results.
That’s not true. They use their own index
Wow, looks like they just updated that page and removed all references to their external indexes. Very shady stuff, Kagi. I’d go as far as to say they are now lying by omission.
The archived version of that page from March does open with (emphasis mine):
Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Mojeek and Yandex, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, and other APIs.
Then it goes on to say:
Kagi’s indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and “small web” discussions surrounding a particular topic.
Now reading between the lines, and more importantly knowing how much sheer capital goes into indexing the entire web, I can say with much certainty that Kagi is probably powered mostly by Google since it and Bing (which they aren’t using) are basically the only meaningful players in the space. Yandex is for the Russosphere, and Mojeek is nice but nowhere even close to Google or Bing’s coverage. By their own admission Teclis is more narrowly focused and not meant to replace Google’s index. So I’m going to go ahead and call them big fat liars.
I wouldn’t even care that Google is their main index, that’s fine and they can’t be expected to compete with the billions of dollars Google spends on indexing. But the lack of transparency and shady business practices are a big turn-off for me.
Another account with exclusively Kagi shilling comments? Add this one to the pile.
This is not in any way true.
SEO is an almost impossible to solve problem because sites know any search engine exists.
Well, yes, but in a broader sense, they have way too much of a stake in the control of global communications altogether. Even just a hiccup on their servers or slight change to their system has a global impact, as obviously evidenced here. The world is dangerously reliant on a centralized private company for daily functioning.
Such a powerful entity shouldn’t be controlled by private parties and needs to be governed in a way that the benefit of the people is kept paramount.
So you are wanting to do what here exactly?
Not really anything to do but draw attention to it… It’s not like we have an effective globally governing body to oversee something like this objectively.
No, i meant what solution would you like to see here.
Like just taking the business away from the company and have the government seize it?
Because other than just building a new one that organically grows and becomes better, then I don’t see a solution.
Maybe regulate the hell out of it, but that’s basically just seizing it and forcing them to do what you want.
I do agree it is a precarious situation though
I mean, I’m a fan of regulatory action, in the same vein as what was proposed with net neutrality originally, and dissolution of the monopoly. The services Google provides are vital to the functioning of the internet, and as such, must be treated as a governed utility the same way internet provision should be, with tight definitions of services and regulations to control what can be done and when. In that regard, companies like Google and Amazon(in regard to AWS) would be classified as utility providers similar to ISPs with the same degree of accountability in regard to service provision, availability, transparency of policy and actions, liability, etc.
In addition, break up the monopoly accordingly. Entertainment services, telephony/internet/communication services, electronics development, however it would be appropriate. Problem is how many of those services overlap and likely where they’d argue that the company can’t be broken up.
Like you said, that’s like seizing their business from them and it also doesn’t account for global factors. However, each nation is ultimately responsible for how companies operate within their borders, internet service providers should be no different.
So what should a regulated search utility do about SEO spam? Maybe publish an open source algorithm so I can test my spam before submitting it?
Because they are making so that we get less results that are just cheating the system to show up at the top?
No, because they are failing to hide low quality search results. Something the would invest more money in if an alternative search engine existed.
There are so many websites now that just shouldn’t exist at all. And they wouldn’t exist if Google didn’t send tons of traffic their way.
What websites do you think shouldn’t be allowed to exist here?
You find what you search for, shitty companies game the system with SEO because they are shitty and it’s the only way for them to get access.
Google is trying to make that harder for them to do.
Why is them making SEO harder a bad thing?
If there were more search systems/engines there would be a wider variety of ways search results are optimized. Meaning SEO would have a greater level of diminishing returns. Having a single player creates a single point of weakness in search.
There are a ton of them, the problem is none of them are as good as google.
I hear there are good pay ones, though I have never tried one.
I can usually find what I need on google pretty damn quick, although I have seen the end page more than once
I can usually find what I need on google pretty damn quick
It depends what you’re searching for. Some things are very hard to find that used to be easy.
The solution I’d like to see is for Google to stop being anticompetitive. For example it just leaked that they pay half of their company wide profits to Apple in order to stop Apple from using (or creating) another search engine.
Stop spending tens of billions of dollars per year trying to keep competition away, and instead invest all of that money into making Google Search a better product.
They also pay Mozilla over $400 million a year for the same. And as around 90% of the income for Mozilla is from the search engine deals, they’d go out of business without them.
Mozilla wouldn’t be struggling if another monopoly (Microsoft) hadn’t destroyed their company.
to be fair, they specifically target the way google ranks these websites. If google would rank them with less impact of what the website “bastardizes”, this could be generally less of an issue in the first place.
That’s what they’re doing with this AFAICT
Because they down ranked sites blatantly shoveling shit for the sole purpose of gaming their algorithm?
sites blatantly shoveling shit for the sole purpose of gaming their algorithm
That’s the definition of SEO right there.
Good. Websites are spammy garbage now. I can’t fucking believe how shitty the experience is when I’m not using a browser with uBlock origin.
If this is a way to punish that, punish away.
Who wrote this? I’m supposed to be upset that a bunch of big websites are lower on Google results? Why should anyone besides their shareholders care?
Edit: Oh, he co-founded the website hosting this article. So he does indeed have a vested personal interest.
I see it as just more proof that Google’s shit is becoming increasingly useless. So much so, it doesn’t even give results for the big boys who pay to stay number 1. Can’t find the niche things, can’t find the big obvious things… What the fuck does it find?
It’s not as if Google’s results have improved in that time span. They are significantly worse now.
That big list of sites looks suspiciously like the big list of shit I have to scroll past in order to find actually relevant results.
I welcome this change.
I don’t see pinterest on this list.
Pornhub, xtube, I know these names better than Google knows my own grandmother’s. Youporn, xxn, redtube, panty jobs, homegrown Simpsons stuff…
Edit: This isn’t my fault it’s the source articles for using that image.
That’s one of the most trash articles I’ve ever read.
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Does anyone know the best lemmy community to ask about SEO and web/finance tech in relation to a small business? I have a small business that is doing very well, but SEO and word of mouth is a direct contributor to its success, and I think I’m getting screwed over in cost by the company I’ve been paying to run my site building, hosting and, SEO.
you can also DM me. Lead gen manager for a $5MM software company, 11 years experience digital marketing.
You can dm me if you want. I ran an agency that did SEO for a several years before I sold it in 2021. I’m can’t provide you with much in the ways of strategy anymore but I can give you an idea if your current provider is doing reputable work or not
Considering the general types that actually use lemmy, you’re on the wrong platform for that kind of community. No offense
I would assume that the amount of people working in the IT-sector far outweighs any other job occupation.
But IT is not marketing, which is the subject of this discussion…
But google is NOT a monopoly. Right?
What the heck is Dexerto?
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