I think they’re believable because google started by providing things that weren’t wrong. If you search for a time zone google shows it in your local time, if you search for currency conversion google does that. All those things that it’s done for ages, which were things that were also typically correct.
Then the snippets show up, and they are presented in a similarly trust worthy fashion. But the snippets are really just the really just the result of which ever site has the best SEO, and that’s often a really worthless metric these days. The time zone and currency stuff is easy, because it’s math, but opinions aren’t. The thing is though that even if google didn’t have the snippets, those sites that gets snippets would still be the top results that we clicked, and we’d still get the wrong information. That would probably be better, because it might be easier to spot obvious bad sources, but I still think there is just a fundamental flaw in how SEO professionals have learned to game the google bot to bring the world useless information.
I mean, part of it is certainly on google. No one in their right mind wants to comply with Google’s ranking terms, unless you make money from google searches. Which means a lot of useful personal blogs have dropped off the face of the internet, unless you’re really lucky to see them linked on a place like HN.
I wish libraries would band together and make a privacy focused and curated search engine, because librarians are actually kind of good at finding you the correct information.
Then the snippets show up, and they are presented in a similarly trust worthy fashion. But the snippets are really just the really just the result of which ever site has the best SEO, and that’s often a really worthless metric these days. The time zone and currency stuff is easy, because it’s math, but opinions aren’t. The thing is though that even if google didn’t have the snippets, those sites that gets snippets would still be the top results that we clicked, and we’d still get the wrong information. That would probably be better, because it might be easier to spot obvious bad sources, but I still think there is just a fundamental flaw in how SEO professionals have learned to game the google bot to bring the world useless information.
I mean, part of it is certainly on google. No one in their right mind wants to comply with Google’s ranking terms, unless you make money from google searches. Which means a lot of useful personal blogs have dropped off the face of the internet, unless you’re really lucky to see them linked on a place like HN.
I wish libraries would band together and make a privacy focused and curated search engine, because librarians are actually kind of good at finding you the correct information.