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by darsoli 2008 days ago
I agree that SEO has made it harder and harder to find good content on the internet.

I don't agree with Google being blamed for this. They're trying desperately to fix the problem. Maybe they're not as effective as you'd hope, but why would a "multipolar" search world be better? Wouldn't all search engines be plagued with people trying to game the system?
4 comments
awhitby 2008 days ago
Google's dominance creates a monoculture, so that any weakness in their ranking is immediately exploited by SEO folks. If there were multiple real search engines using different ranking algos, it would be harder to game them all at once, which would shift the balance somewhat towards just making good content.
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jjk166 2008 days ago
Even with multiple search engines, if they are all trying to solve the same problem, you'll get convergent evolution.

Let's say you have 10 search engines each with their own algorithm. 1 of them has an exploitable weakness. Either they close this weakness by switching to one of the superior algorithms or they get exploited and become much less useable than their competitors. In either case, you soon have 9 search algorithms. Repeat this process a few times and you're back to a monoculture. Best case scenario, you reach a stable equilibrium where a few different search engines are all plagued by different but roughly equivalent issues, such that none is good enough to beat out the others.

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rchaud 2008 days ago
> Wouldn't all search engines be plagued with people trying to game the system?

Remember that a big selling point for Mac computers is that "they don't get viruses". Since that's not true, it's taken to mean that the number of viruses targeting MacOS is minuscule compared to Windows OS.

An alternative search engine that doesn't play favourites (AMP, Youtube results) and isn't predicated on selling ads could definitely do better in answering queries in specific niches.

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carapace 2008 days ago
Google is the source of the problem: If they didn't rank search results and aggregate "eyeballs" there would be nothing to optimize.
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jjk166 2008 days ago
If you don't want ranked results, you can always type random strings into the url bar.
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bserge 2008 days ago
Yeah, they're trying to combat it, but they also fill your screen with ads, which aren't any better than the "SEO optimized" trash on the first page.

Half a screen of shit, either way. The difference is in who makes the money from it. And it's not the user.

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