A glitch in the SEO matrix (opens in new tab)

Google are playing every trick in the book to extract every possible cent from advertisers, spying on their business and sales to maximise their own profits. Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. People complain about the tracking of users/visitors, but the tracking of businesses is just as bad.

They probably have better insights into the economy and market trends than most governments and banks.

The penny is dropping, advertisers are noticing, my long term expectation of Google's business are not what they were.

Since ads are a red queen's race, wasting people's attention and assuming we don't want to outright ban them then the next best alternative is to tax them heavily. How about 0.00001 cent per pixel-second-view?

Then people will only put up ads when there's some real value in it, not just to keep up with the competition.

I resort to Duckduckgo and Brave's searches among many others. Even things like Yandex give much deeper dives now.

And gob help you if you dare search for alternative to _____.

And given the game is won by the highest bidder, all of the surplus created by technical progress goes to advertising which, as you point out, adds zero value and, in fact, detracts from rational agents making optimal decisions.

This is /exactly/ the kind of market failure where those of us who prefer smaller government want to start talking about appropriate regulation.

https://metaphor.systems/ is pretty good for exactly this kind of thing. The way the search algorithm is designed also make it extremely difficult to game.

For businesses, there is no good alternative to Google. Many are investing a lot of effort and money in social media, but the returns are very low compared to Google.

If you are trying to sell a product, I know one weird trick: Just make a product that people enjoy, and they will recommend it to others.

No need to pay for advertising, no need to play the SEO game. The only marketing you need for a decent product is a website with docs and a download button.

This works especially well if you have some sort of freemium product, because then the 90% of people who use the free version still act as multipliers.

I don't know if it works for all businesses, but it's worked for me over the last decade or so.

There are plenty of searches where I want to find what real people are thinking, not what some company's article says. This kind of thing could easily be crowd-sourced a la SponsorBlock.

What would a fair review site look like?

On top of that the worse the search results, the more likely the user will click an ad rather than an organic result. The Google of old wouldn't have been tempted by that incentive, but that Google is long dead.

Bad search result = more revenue from ads.

Obviously it's a fine balance, they don't want to loose users, but they will have the metrics to (religiously) work from.

As someone who used to run ad campaigns on Google until a couple of years ago, they are doing the same to advertisers. Users will happily click an ad, go back to the result and try another, many many times. Google have systematically made the advertising on search results worse, showing ads more regularly for poorer placements, removing control and visible auditing. It's all so they can extract more revenue from the advertisers.

If I recall correctly, it was made available in response to another big wave of criticism directed towards Google about "Content Farms". It has been interesting to see the difference in response between the "Content Farm" debacle and what we are dealing with currently.

[0] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-m...

It is absolutely this, yes. They tell people where to go, and they also profit from the ads they put on the places they tell people to go, and they have no real competition[1]. It has made them one of the most valuable companies on the planet. There is no incentive for them to rank higher quality results over ad-filled pages.

We need to break up big tech.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/un...

They do, a lot actually. We're just not the end users. The advertisers are. Thet don't need to care about us since they're a monopoly. Use Brave Search, DuckDyckGo or something elae to help change that. Get other people to too.

Just for you, especially for you in fact, I went and dug out this link to an interview with Corey Doctorow where he explains his theory of platform of “enshittification”.

https://podtail.com/en/podcast/future-tense-full-program-pod...

I think it will interest you to hear a reasonable theory as to why Google doesn’t care as much about their end users as you might think they should.

Like you said, a first step would be blocking spam domains.

Another would be a return to how the algorithm used work, prioritizing results that are frequently linked to elsewhere using the relevant keywords. In the '00s, this was quickly gamed by companies setting up endless blogs to link to their own products, but I feel it could be mitigated by assigning some kind of trustworthiness score to the sites doing the linking. It shouldn't be hard to recognize that a site being recommended a lot on Reddit or some other well established repository of user-generated content is going to be more genuine than "recommendations" from some random blogspam site nobody's heard of.

1) Google and you are defining spam differently.

2) Spam is adversarial. They have the ability to block spam domains from last week, but it’s an ongoing investment as the adversaries adapt.

That said I do think Google depends too much on human raters who are not customers. It’s caused a lot of drift between the customer’s expectation of quality and Google’s.

by who??? Google itself "blocks" or downgrades spam websites all the time. If they open it up to "the people", the same SEO crowd will rush in with scrapers to decimate competition, including any legit websites. So strange to see people jumping into conspiracy theories here without thinking of the consequences for a second.

Personally I can't find much on Google if I'm actually searching for something I don't know about. Finding the local mechanic is fine but querying a programming question, health problem or recipe is absolutely fucked. I sold all my Google stock recently but should have done so sooner. The value they have is in gmail and gsuite accounts but I can see the search business is circling the drain.

Conspiracy theory: they love showing shitty sites because those sites display adverts making Google money.

"Google knows this, so it adds a “Question and Answers” block before the first SERP result, probably diverting a tremendous amount of traffic away from that page."

They scrape answers from sites that they used to send traffic to and publish it themselves. In many cases, though, those sites won't exist without the incentive of organic search traffic.

I get why Google does it, but it does create a feedback loop where less of that info will be out there to scrape.

I don't think this is a search problem, I think Google is legitimately surfacing what's available on the Internet for given query. I think this is the dead internet theory at play, and that there just isn't anything valuable to show!

People who would (in the past) run their own website or blog now post that same content on social media, which is why Reddit has become mandatory for people looking for genuine opinions.

Yea sometimes LLMs hallucinate, but sometimes websites are just wrong. For a variety of topics LLMs are just a better form of search.

The market is pretty efficient, and there are always alternatives. If you aren't lazy, you can save a huge amount of money by not buying advertised products.

On the rare occasions I see an ad for something cool that I want, I search for it on aliexpress and 90% of the time find it for 1/3 the price.

Whenever someone tells you that they bought something because of an ad, you should make them feel a little embarrassed about it. There should be mild social punishment for admitting an ad hijacked your brain and made you get out your wallet - it means you're a sucker, a rube, a feebleminded lazybones.

A lot of SEO is driven by local business owners who hire SEO people with dubious track records that make big promises. They invariably clutter up their websites with 10,000 articles along the lines of "best plumber in dallas".

It's funny you mention ads though. One reason that it's so hard to find an SEO person that's actually worth anything is that if they were really good at what they did, they could just throw up their own websites with ads and make a much better living that way than selling SEO services. They don't of course, which should tell you something about how good they really are.

> Ads.

> As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse.

Search will only get worse for google users, not for google or google customers.

Google can easily produce only quality search results, by penalising a result by the number of ads it serves.

They don't do this.

They can identify the SEO people and companies, and heavily penalise their clients.

They don't do this either.

They can, because you're logged in, allow you to maintain a blacklist. They don't.

Trust me, for google this is an easy problem to solve; it's just that, for google, this is not a problem, but works as intended behaviour.

Retargeting may be the only exception, although it is annoying as hell, it won't let people forget about your stuff (and comes very cheaply because very few people will ever see it), so probably generates positive returns... But i'm not even sure about that one.

This was even true before search, in web directories. It has a limited amount of slots, you need to be on it at all and as high as possible.

Have you seen a 419 scam? Doesn't have any ads. Just a direct intro to get scammed.

    PS: secretly, I hope that this post starts ranking for “a comprehensive ecosystem of open source software for big data management”, which is why I have said it verbatim so many times and added a helpful callout at the top for students. To be honest, I'd settle for the 19th spot: just above highadviser.com.

These Cisco certifications are such a scam tbh. Cisco commands and CLI are the most confusing, illogical designs for any feature. And they make sure to put in tens of thousands of features and hundreds of ways to configure every different feature. Then they create these overpriced courses and pay for their own employees to take every single one. Since Cisco employs a lot of people, and prefers people with Cisco certifications, this creates a lot of demand for the courses.

Most of the certifications could be replaced with a single 2 month networking course that explains the workings of features, provided they redesign their CLI to be slightly usable.

It's the real content that's going to get disrupted/destroyed.

The article links to a tweet where hustlebros build a 500-page WP site with "best shoes 2023" type articles with affiiate links. It's already semi-automated, AI GC is just the final piece.