[xbkingx]

The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users.

When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, and abandoned). If we're lucky, we'll be back to dialup BBSes by the 2040s.

[Animats]

Yes. We can point to the exact moment in time when Google turned to the dark side. It was on August 9, 2006, when Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, addressed the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] This was the moment that SEO, now officially endorsed by Google's CEO, became respectable. Until then, SEO was considered to be a branch of the spam industry. There were conferences such as the Web Search Spam Squashing Summit in 2005 on how to kill it.

[1] https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html

[AdamN]

There was/is whitehat SEO: properly creating links to relevant content within a site, using keywords that help bots find relevant content, traversing your own site to make sure there aren't dead zones with content that will never be found.

Google should have leaned into just this small segment of tooling and done much more of a ban hammer on the bad actors. They didn't and a bunch of people have left. I use DuckDuckGo mostly and sometimes Google but never by default. I don't even like DDG that much but it's good enough.

[nine_k]

> web rings and link indexes

The popular "Awesome ${whatever}" collections are very much that, link indexes for relatively narrow areas.

Curation matters. This is something computers are still bad at, or are too expensive to deploy for a mass-market service.

[anotheruser13]

In general, listicles suck. (Business) Insider is a good example of this.

[eastbound]

SEO sends the message that you have a content writer, and, thus, that you are a well established business (The content that is required to be produced is more nefarious than having hamster marketing guys spin in wheels, but the nature of the work is irrelevant to Google).

[cout]

I feel like the turning point for me was when Google removed the ability to always exclude certain sites from searches. I had a number of sites configured Ty always be excluded because the results were always useless. Ever since, the list of useless sites in my search results has been slowly creeping up.

[Quekid5]

Yup, same for me.

It really seems high-quality search is fundamentally in opposition to serving ads, alas. (At least once every page in existence probably serves ads via the search operator's network.)

[LaundroMat]

That's exactly what Brin and Page said in the paper where they presented Google...

"[W]e expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers"

and

"[W]e believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."

Both from The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (1998)

[dmvdoug]

have they ever addressed this in later years? Like, what was their justification for Google becoming the AdMonster it did?

[Quekid5]

They're now richer than god. Why would they care about anything other than money? Societal rules don't affect them very much at this point.

[liveoneggs]

Yes but you can't hear them because they are on yachts

[dmvdoug]

Sounds like a job for the orcas…

[wpietri]

Totally. Advertising is fundamentally about distracting someone so you can put money in your pocket without regard to the impact on that someone.

I have a lot of complaints about, say, McDonald's, but they make their money through giving people something of value to them. Advertising legitimizes the making of money in a way unrelated to value delivery. (The same is true about a lot of finance.)

When you combine that with up-and-to-the-right numerical goals and standard executive incentives, over time you pretty much guarantee what Doctorow calls "enshittification". Delivering value becomes at best a side effect of the system.

[AlecSchueler]

Aren't McDonald's one of the biggest advertisers in the world? They sell poor quality food on the basis of brand recognition.

[praptak]

That's unrelated to the point GP is making. The point is that they are not incentivized to put poison into burgers to get money from the poison industry.

[courseofaction]

Well put. Ads are the poison of information.

[symonda]

This is a good point. The problem is that it is very hard to make a living serving high-quality results which is likely why ad-funded search still dominates. The vast majority of the world will likely never want to pay for search on its own.

There are, of course, a few relatively successful paid general purpose search engines but these serve a niche demographic if you consider the world-wide scale of google et al. Possibly specialized search (we build one) will be able to thrive in the future, but these engines also serve niche markets in the end.

Thus, the real competition to ad-based search is not high quality search and that is likely why search results don't get better.

[paradox460]

I've used uBlocklist to filter these things since Google removed that feature

[pentagrama]

I think that there are current SEO practices that make sense that a search engine uses as a ranking signal, like accessibility (mobile friendliness, screen reader compatibility, +), time to load (performance, image optimization, no js bloat), security (https), no stuff appearing on top the content (modals), use of h tags and breadcrumbs to order content, srucured data for bots and more.

Of course people game the system, apply shady practices, sell courses with tips. It is a nuance topic, the name now is bastardized by marketing companies doing shady things, but on his core is just practices to create good websites and provide a good user experience

[pupppet]

Oh man can you imagine Yahoo, playing the long game, brings back their user-managed indexes and becomes the dominant search engine again.

[drpixie]

You might have stumbled onto a practical and useful application of LLMs. Yahoo (or whoever) could crawl the web, categorise each page, and provide a genuine "Index".

Like in the back of a book, or an old subject based card catalogue ... Dewy-decimalise the web :)

I've always felt that an index by subject would be more useful than string-match based searching. Of course, the index might rank links within each sub-sub--sub-sub...category with something like the original page-rank.

Now if Yahoo (or whoever) could avoid the enshitification trap ... imagine what a fabulous resource that could be.

[flyinghamster]

> Like in the back of a book, or an old subject based card catalogue ... Dewy-decimalise the web :)

Now that is an awesome idea. I really do think we need to have category-based indexing as well as page search.

[wintermutestwin]

Until ChatGPT came along, I figured it was inevitable that human curated search came back into ascendancy as the crawler model has become such a failure.

Now we can use ChatGPT to filter through Google's infested mess, but this double edged Sword of Damocles will be able to create infinite attempts to bury genuine content with ad spam.

[jnurmine]

I might pay like max. 3 EUR a year for this to get a search engine that gives the good results without ads, SEO spam and bogus clone sites.

That amount of money is probably more than Google now makes from my online presence because I adblock, block 3rd party cookies, tend to click "block" to everything including the idiotic "legitimate concern" and never ever click on ads.

[llamaLord]

Can't remember exactly where I saw it, but last number I saw said that Google makes ~$12 a year per user. Which begs the question... why have they not atleast tried a "Google Premium".

Fuck it, I'd pay $15 a year to have a Google search that puts as much effort into finding me the shit I actually want as Google does today in serving me BS ads I never pay attention to.

[kalleboo]

> Which begs the question... why have they not atleast tried a "Google Premium"

They announced "Google Contributor" at one point but it never went anywhere

[praptak]

First thought is that it's the most profitable users who would choose adless.

The ads industry would not like their reach to be limited to those not paying for premium search.

[hakfoo]

I always wanted to see just a "price transparency" aspect.

Tell me exactly how much the advertiser paid for his placement, and that's a hugely important signal here.

If I'm searching for weird hobby parts, even though it's a high purchase intent query, they're probably paying pennies per click.

But if you start searching, say, financial stuff and the ad placement figures start showing multiple dollars per click, it's a warning "these people are willing to spend THIS MUCH MONEY to present a message to you, this probably means there's something sketchy involved."

I know, for example, anything pertaining to insurance and financial products is highly likely to turn into a farm of cross-selling and personal-information harvesting, because the cost per acquisition is so high and the tendency for everyone to sell the information to everyone else is so great.

[HelenePhisher]

I'd argue most people do not even realize they click on ads. My mother! The ad call-outs got so inconspicuous that they're almost indistinguishable from ordinary search results. And if you don't realize that and just click on the top results, you're amongst the top profitable users.

[bryanrasmussen]

>I might pay like max. 3 EUR a year

wow, Search really isn't worth developing.

[jnurmine]

I might pay more if they didn't sniff any other data from me. Search is just one color of light from the prism, so to speak.

Edit: not beam but color

[DeathArrow]

I would pay 10 EUR. :)

Would 3 EUR or even 10 EUR / year for each customer be enough to run operations?

[symonda]

This is an interesting point. User managed or curated indices offer unique advantages, especially when 'depth of coverage' is more important than 'breadth of coverage'. I believe that we are witnessing people shift away from demanding 'search breadth' as we speak, so someone might possibly decide to do this.

[noizejoy]

> User managed or curated indices …

Do you mean self-managed?

Everything else is effectively the influencer scene. Which is increasingly deplorable as well.

Anything with wide enough reach becomes cost-effective for gaming.

So one would have to return to a highly fragmented world to make gaming the system cost prohibitive.

And that would get us to a pre-Internet world. But then again, it’s not entirely unthinkable that we’re headed towards increasing Internet fragmentation if various governments get their way.

[DeathArrow]

I thought Altavista was the dominant search engine, not Yahoo.

[DougN7]

Brilliant idea!

[flyinghamster]

> If we're lucky, we'll be back to dialup BBSes by the 2040s.

Unfortunately, there's no going back - the closest we can get is BBS-via-SSH. The entire landline phone infrastructure is crumbling around us (or in many cases, completely gone). Voice calls are packet-switched now, rather than circuit-switched as in the past. The upshot is, fancy modulation techniques that made full-duplex 33.6k possible over voice-grade connections aren't going to work, and even good old Bell 103 (300 baud) may end up being problematic.

I'm not sure I can even get new landline phone service, and if so, it's going to be expensive - and the wire plant is an unmaintained mess. When I got my folks off their landline and onto VoIP some years back, their old landline had so much hum it was nearly unusable. Once the inside wiring was disconnected from the landline and connected to an ATA, the hum was gone. It wasn't our wiring.

[collaborative]

I am trying something different that might work for you with aisearch.vip

The challenge will be staying true to not showing ads, respecting user privacy, and not requiring a subscription. So far, the only thing that works is free daily quota + pre-paid