I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had said the house looked like it was melting, so she typed in "melting house", I think. Not that that's genius or quirky or anything, but I would never dream of typing in something I was thinking "informally", and her approach is more like "whatever whackadoo thing I'm thinking, probably other people think just like me" and she finds anything I ask her about. (I've pretested that query, and turns out that there are melting houses all over the world, just gotta look in your neighborhood)<p>so to the point here, I lament that Google doesn't work any more, but she doesn't, she thinks it works great. Now if I can just get her to stop finding restaurant recommendations on TikTok...
SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents.<p>Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bring ton of revenue every day.<p>Ofcourse, Google is trying hard to monetize every little real estate but still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the past 3 years.<p>The other aspect of this the "paid ads" also immensely valuable to advertisers. We have people spending 3 million dollars a month on paid ads returning 8X ROAS. Google & FB are still the most lucrative channels for ecommerce.
"The internet" doesn't really exist, now, now does it? 99% of users are living in an AOL-style world, where they live within walled gardens. Why leave twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit? There's nothing out there but a wasteland of crumbling has-been sites. Sometimes you'll find yourself on a blog or news article, but you just click/tap the back button to go back to the walled garden. Nobody is subscribing to your RSS feed. And what really did this is mobile devices. And it isn't necessarily a bad thing, although I do miss the old vbulletin discussion days.
It's always surprised me that confirmed SEO shenaniganery doesn't bring an instant ion-cannon strike from Google. I know they are apparently allergic to having a human ever decide anything ever. It's just that if I were them, with an infinite data lake to find the vendors' traces, trillion-dollar C-suite morals and the SEO was messing with the bottom line, there would be no quarter when a nest is uncovered. Delist everything to do with them, delete all their accounts and salt their persistent data profiles. Most of them are abroad and will struggle to do anything about it. After all, occasional Gmail or Android developer bans are meted out with various levels of capriciousness.<p>I guess it's good that they're not obviously going Judge Dredd left, right and centre, but it's still surprising to me that you can run up to them, slap them in the virtual face and stay online to do it again.<p>Or perhaps it is not messing with the short-term bottom line because the SEO sites are crawling with ads? And until ChatGPT what were you going to do? Use Bing?
I cant foresee a scenario where an endlessly growing mass of AI-generated noise, stacked upon itself, will be useful to anyone. Humans will invariably find a less contentious path (maybe its seeking out more localized options, maybe its balkanizing into various specialized domains, maybe its $NEWTHINGYETTOBESEEN, or all of the above. But the current trajectory cannot hold.<p>Someone else mentioned the "reverse-takeover of Google by DoubleClick is the Fall" and I find that spot on.<p>The Dionysian appetites of adtech will be its own downfall.
The internet was ruined when it was de anonymized by Facebook and LinkedIn etc. I remember growing up in a completely anonymous internet. You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally. Then you would go back to society as the real you and temper yourself a bit to fit in and work with others and that was ok because you could blow off steam on the internet.
My first job out of college was writing SEO articles for [unnamed failed startup]. It was exactly the sort of daft, fluffy, "let me Google that for you" content you would think a 20 something SEO writer would come up with.<p>And it's these kinds of fluffy, non-clickbait content that people are complaining about when they talk about Google's search results these days. I don't think the real problem are two-bit hustlers sneaking in bait-and-switch content here and there - it's that Google's own rules encourage mediocre and non-authoritative content.<p>So one of the reasons people gravitate towards ChatGPT (or, to a similar degree TikTok) is that both will give you strong and authoritative advice (even if it's wrong!)<p>I don't necessarily believe the internet is <i>worse</i> today (if you have any false nostalgia, try searching a forum for an answer to a technical problem). But experts who were actually putting out good content and information were consistently getting ripped off by knockoffs for decades and we shouldn't be surprised that nobody is contributing anymore.
Related ongoing thread:<p><i>Some thoughts about The Verge article on SEO</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38104407">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38104407</a>
This article is surprisingly(for the Verge) unbiased, really well written and balanced. The title is definitely misleading making it seem like the author will be taking the authoritarian side.
100% worth the read.
Long ago there was a slashdot story about someone who returned to their office to find a co-worker looking at a long printout with a number of peaks circled on it. This printout turned out to be a frequency spectra derived from a covert recording device monitoring the 3 phase feed into the facility. This turned out to be useful for estimating Uranium enrichment yield. I thought it was a damned cool story, but now I can't find it any more. 8(<p>Google won't help me find this story... but it did at least once in the past. And now I can't even find that reference to the earlier reference.<p>Also... try finding something about marking up hypertext documents... you can't... you have to know that "annotation" works instead... at least it used to. Who knows what Google will spit out these days. Google-fu isn't what it used to be, because Google goobered it up.
I appreciate the author trying to humanize these people who have profited off of ruining the web. I freely admit, with moderate shame, that I hoped the story ended with the floor of the party collapsing.
>> Why does it always seem to surprise me, even after all these years, that the way we behave on the internet is often quite different from how we act in real life?<p>Because you don't actually know the people you interact with on the internet. Anonymity invites deception, which builds a sort of distrust over time whether people realize it or not. Authenticity is rare on the net.
'The People' when really it's mostly bots these days, and getting smarter with LLMs too. Only a few blogs/articles are written by actual humans, and something strange has happened to my cognitive abilities lately; is discerning whether an article is written by an LLM or a human. I regularly play a game called 'bot or not' now.
> Maybe an SEO professional would get attacked by a gigantic, prehistoric-looking reptile right there in front of me.<p>Props to the author for having the ability to bang out her damn essay without getting bogged down in every little rabbit hole. If she were prone to compulsively editing-instead-of-writing she probably would have found out that alligators are not just prehistoric-looking; they're prehistoric itself. They appeared "94 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous" (wiki) and in fact their clade, Crocodilia, is only surviving sibling clade of Dinosauria, and so crocodiles & alligators are the closest living relatives of birds.
People trying to game search engine to rise to the top have always existed. Before Google it was easy, and search engine results were crap.<p>Then Google managed to return relevant search results despite all the people trying to game it... And at some point Google stopped trying. The problem isn't SEO experts successfully gaming the organic results, but Google mixing ads in a misleading way and giving up on fighting SEO.<p>So don't blame SEO experts for trying to get their pages to the top, that's their job. Blame Google for stopping doing the one thing that made them popular: return relevant search results despite everyone trying to game it.
I can see AI decrease some of the traffic for content writers who relied on SEO taking a hit; like political blogs or various sites that paid for ads to drive traffic and then essentially sell more ads to those users on their own site. But the writers/platforms that have great content can also use AI to improve their own content, so I don't think this is going to be a 'fall off a cliff' style event.<p>I don't think that SEO is going to be decreasing anytime soon for e-commerce, which is probably the best use of SEO. AI generation images and content are no substitute for physical goods, like shoes.
Until the LLM stuff scales sufficiently to replace free Google searches at scale SEO will stay.<p>And judging by everyone and their dog in ai space running at a loss even when charging id say that’s not imminent
This is maybe the worst-written article I’ve ever read. So much random detail about dresses and Canadian hometowns and almost nothing to say about the actual topic.
"The alligator got my attention. Which, of course, was the point." ... "you can’t quite stop yourself from being curious".<p>The first three sentences of the post basically counter the author's narrative. Clickbait is ruining the internet. It doesn't matter whether it is Google, or Tiktok or Facebook or whatever, what gets popular surfaces to the top. If people like clicking on clickbait content, why blame platforms?
An art project making it obvious why the economic engine (advertising) that pays for Google's electricity bills is not sustainable: <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Google+will+eat+itself" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Google+will+eat+itself</a>
I hate the way Google answers the question it wishes you had asked, but didn't.<p>E.g. you search for something obscure or specific, but all the results are relating to a similar search, that has loads of results.<p>It's as if Google just want to give you lots or results, and not care if they answer the question.
A pet theory of mine is that google pushes SO clones because they contain ads and google gets revenue from sending users to sites with ads. Talk about perverse incentives. The pre double click acquisition search results were much better.<p>So can DuckDuckGo let me easily search for sites without ads?
My preferred narrative for enshitification is death by 1000 bean-counters. A manager who needs to hit performance targets to get their 6-7 figure bonus is heavily incentivised to juice the stats this quarter. If they already show you 2 ads before a video, why not 3 or 4? Who cares if the platform as a whole slowly becomes less usable, my numbers are up!<p>What is required is strong vision at the top, telling the bean-counters to dial it all the way back, to be able to see when the golden goose is becoming a boiled frog. Google used to know that what's good for the internet is good for Google.<p>Sundar Pichai, you're not that guy pal.
I feel like there’s a place for smaller, more niche products and that the pendulum is swinging back to it. A few million users only. No expectation of ever becoming a hundred billion business.<p>Something like Kagi, the old Dropbox, old Twitter. It’s never going to appeal to most people by design.
This made me think, people use machine parsable formats to accommodate crawlers.<p>If the "crawler" turns out to be a LLM, should websites serve vector files instead?<p>If so, we need a standardized tokenizer at w3c.
I don't get the argument about gpt replacing a search engine. If gpt trains from search engine data how does it get new data? I guess the usage of gpt over time.
yes, LLMs will have a massive impact on SEO<p>but the dirty secret here... GPT is trained pretty heavily on reddit data. theres a reason why there hasn't been an IPO and their api got crazy expensive. OpenAi is trying to build a moat with Reddit and with regulation. I really don't think its going to be that long till people figure it out, but who knows
Hopefully, it'll die in a fire?<p>Not that I <i>really</i> think that. There's too much incentive to fine new and exciting ways to game the system, instead if actually just being relevant.<p>Google and, to a lesser extent, other search engines, deserve some of the blame for having easily gameable ranking algorithms. Still, it's mostly on the bad actors doing the gaming, and the people hiring them to do it.
now that you mention it... I went away from google a while ago, duckduckgo was okay for a while, but nowadays, I find myself using hackernews or just youtube(disapointing me a lot xD) before I google
> I began to think that the reason I found them<p>> endearing and not evil was that while many had<p>> made quite a bit of money, almost none had amassed<p>> significant power. Unlike the Elon Musks and Jeff<p>> Bezoses of the world, who went from geeky teenagers<p>> to masters of the universe, the dorks who grew up<p>> to do SEO have stayed the butt of the joke,<p>> beholden to the fluctuations of the algorithm,<p>> frantically pulling levers behind the scenes<p>> but ultimately somewhat hapless.<p>Translation: they were "endearing" because, instead of actually trying to build something, they just made piles of money ruining things for everyone else. Sure, they're parasites, but at least they aren't (god forbid) _productive_.
This is a meta-level comment, but a technique I've been using for a while now, which I've found pretty helpful/useful, is that if an article starts off with an anecdote I immediately know not to bother reading it. It shows you that the author is more interested in pushing a feeling/emotion/story rather than relaying actual information. They're trying to manipulate how you think about the topic from the very beginning. It's really hard to describe the pattern but once you see it you can never unsee it. Just food for thought.