[SinePost]

Good point. I was already concerned about people's reliance on Google's zero-click answers as the deepest level of inquiry before ChatGPT hit the scene. ChatGPT feels like a multiplier of this convenience factor, being also slightly more specific and generally more consistent.

[dheera]

There's also just that Google's search ranking doesn't work anymore.

I searched "lowest temperatures in boston every year" and got some shit-looking MySpace-like website with a table of temperatures, hell knows where it got its data, instead of a link to the correct page on NOAA or something more authoritative.

[zaroth]

This is a fun example;

First hit in DDG for that query is a trash site but at least the data is there…

https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/USA/MA/Boston/...

Versus trying to pull the data from NOAA;

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search

The way that the first site works the keywords into the intro text repeatedly to juice their rank is almost impressive. Can the search engines really not see that the page is garbage?

[soiler]

I mean, what exactly makes the first page garbage? I'm not disagreeing, but "is this site garbage" is not a question that a search engine can ask.

[mh-]

I agree. The real "problem" in this specific case is that the authoritative source (NOAA) seemingly doesn't make the data available in a manner that's discoverable by crawlers.

The currentresults.com page seems.. fine? It has a proper source cited at the bottom of the data. I wish it didn't have display ads, but that's the nature of the web nowadays. That's not a problem solvable by a traditional search engine.

[dheera]

> "is this site garbage"

Why not? If it has headers that say it was made with FrontPage 2003 and has five thousand AdSense boxes, uses old world fonts like Arial instead of HelveticaNeue Light, uses 16-bit VGA colors like #0000ff, or has bgsound and blink tags, it should perhaps be downranked.

[soiler]

Because those things you listed are (potential) answers to my first question, not the one you quoted.

A search engine should not see a site written in Arial and derank it for that reason. Blink tags, sure, they're obviously wrong for accessibility reasons, but there's a huge gap between those two things - and even so, how badly should they affect ranking?

I'm saying "garbage" can be subjective, and when there are objective "garbage" indicators, it's not obvious how to deal with them. What you've listed is only a small set of indicators from a small niche of so-called "garbage" sites. And personally, I don't even want to see old or old-styled sites dismissed from the web if they have good content.

[beezlewax]

Full of Google ads probably