[asark]

Not just Facebook. Any site without attention paid to on-site SEO is basically impossible to find since Google gave up fighting the spammers and (effectively) stopped trying to provide access to a bunch of the web. That was back in, like, '08 or '09.

The other day I was trying to find a Russian world-traveller photo blog I used to read but lost track of, and it was plain from the results that Google's 1) heavily penalizing low-traffic sites to the point of giving me top results that contain almost none of my keywords when there 100% for sure had to be sites that contained all of them, and 2) barely paying attention to text linking to a site anymore. I'm not even upset I couldn't find the site I wanted using my search terms so much as that part of their surrender to the spammers meant that most of the top results were "legitimate" content-mill spammers-by-another-name. I don't think I could have found anything like what I was looking for. Any similarly-obscure sites are just invisible now.

DDG wasn't much better. The spammers won and "web search" doesn't really search the whole web anymore, or even close to it.

[StrictDabbler]

Oh, that's what's going on. If I search, for example, "proton transfer balalaika" I get search results where the first few results are "Missing: balalaika | Must include: balalaika" but a result after these has all three search terms.

I've been wondering what Google now thinks the word "must" means and why they're putting pages that don't include words that I've used above pages that do.

That's frustrating. Low-volume sites represent a significant portion of the web results I need.

[cygaril]

The "must include" is a hyperlink. Click it and you'll get results that do include that word.

[StrictDabbler]

You know, it's obvious it's a link, and I'm pretty sure I clicked on it and noted it adds the quotes then immediately forgot.

I'm sitting here looking at it now and I still can't believe that's the function. It looks like a link to a search of just that term.

Of course, even when I click on it, I get ads for hotels that are missing "proton" and "transfer" first, then random word dictionaries, both well above perfectly valid results talking about chemists who played the balalaika or research done in the city of Balalaika.

Which means that it's a link to getting a different wrong set of results and it's there as a kind of fig leaf on the sin of distorting searches so heavily.

[pbhjpbhj]

>and noted it adds the quotes then immediately forgot.

I quoted search terms yesterday, but still had to specify by clicking the link "must include" .. first result still didn't include one of the terms.

Come on Google, what is this?

I suppose that top hit earned them money; can't think why else they'd be deceptive about it.

[potta_coffee]

There are whole topics I can no longer search for on any engine because the results are so bad. The example I can think of is product reviews for just about anything - the results are almost always shitty "top ten" Amazon affiliate sites. If I want to find a legitimate opinion about certain kinds of products, it's nearly impossible to find via Google.

[dabockster]

Car repair is another. I drive a 20+ year old vehicle. You'd think that there would be tons of articles about repair since the world has had 20+ years to reverse engineer it, right? The first two pages of Google results are almost always SEO spamfests. It was almost impossible to find out how to change the burnt out lights in my car's gauge cluster since every link took me to a bad copy of Quora with each answer recommending the automotive equivalent of essential oils.

[potta_coffee]

Quora is another gross offender.

[makomk]

Yeah, and the EU is basically taking legal action against Google right now to force them to do an even worse job of removing that kind of spam, under the pretense that it hurts competition.