[goodroot]

Danny is clearly upset, and I would be too. We all love the Internet. Imagine being fingered in an article as some mad SEO guy who is among "the people who ruined the Internet". The Verge is a big platform...

Also, SEO is of the more voodoo & charlatan filled branches of technical esoterica. Very little of it is falsifiable or clear. And there is quackery as far as the eye can see.

Transparency into search algos would be better for us all. But the cost of algo transparency is transparency into adtech. And that's a hill Google will die on, and why we need alternatives.

[JohnFen]

> SEO is of the more voodoo & charlatan filled branches of technical esoterica.

It's very, very hard for me to avoid thinking of the entire SEO industry in the same light as I think of the adtech industry: a plague that is helping to destroy everything that makes the internet good.

[jfengel]

I much prefer adtech to SEO.

Adtech is at least trying to be a non-zero-sum game. They bring dollars to the Internet to try to get your attention off the Internet, to buy a real-world product (even that product is itself delivered online). That allows the Internet to provide a lot of creativity for "free".

SEO is purely zero-sum, or negative-sum. There's a fixed amount of attention and they want to drag it from wherever it would naturally be to some place you don't really want it to be.

Advertising also does a ton of privacy violation and other shenanigans, because wherever there is money there is evil. But at least there's a baby somewhere in all that bathwater. SEO makes the Internet worse without improving anything at all.

[tsimionescu]

> There's a fixed amount of attention and they want to drag it from wherever it would naturally be to some place you don't really want it to be.

That is exactly what ads are trying to do. It is the very essence of advertising: get your attention. This is ingrained to the extent that everyone knows "there's no such thing as bad publicity".

And it's just as much if not more 0-sum as SEO. The stated purpose of advertising is to make you spend your money on something that you otherwise wouldn't have. That's sometimes about spending your money on product A instead of A's competitors, and sometimes just to spend your money on X instead of saving/investing it.

Even worse, advertising is trying to convince you to spend irrationally: instead of doing your own cost/benefit analysis, advertising's purpose is to convince you to act out of emotion, or to outright lie about the cost and benefit of the product.

[JohnFen]

> I much prefer adtech to SEO.

I'm exactly the opposite, actually. I have to actively and constantly defend against the attacks of adtech stuff. SEO only really affects how web pages are designed.

But the two fields are pretty closely linked.

[shadowgovt]

You can install an adblocker to filter out adtech.

What kind of blocker should we install to filter out the thousand enshittifications publishers would add to win the SEO game?

Worth noting in this conversation: there's a philosophy that these two techs go hand-in-glove because adtech is the alternative to spending money on SEO. Instead of trying to game the machine, just pay to show up in the "People who thought they were so important, they paid money to get your attention" slot. Much like the notion that in the absence of copyright and patents, you don't get free information but guilds and hitmen... In the absence of adtech you don't get a bright, attention-optimized, clean web but an enshittified web where companies like Proctor & Gamble are trying to SEO their way into showing up above Unilever in searches for 'toilet paper'.

[JohnFen]

> You can install an adblocker to filter out adtech

If only it were that simple. If you want to avoid adtech spying on you, you have to do a whole lot more than that.

[johnnyanmac]

>What kind of blocker should we install to filter out the thousand enshittifications publishers would add to win the SEO game?

well that's what Kagi is trying to do for you. But you can definitely spend a lot of time homespinning some unholy middleware filter on google results to try and cull down the most frequent offenders.

[dredmorbius]

How about neither? Neither would be good.

[shadowgovt]

> Transparency into search algos would be better for us all

I think that the jury's out on that topic. Danny's absolutely right in asserting that if the full algo were known, people would write to optimize against the algo, which would defeat the purpose of the algo.

Goodhart's Law is in full effect: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

[pseg134]

So then the algorithm is crap and that is why they don’t want to show it. If the “full algo” actually prioritizes high quality content we would certainly want everyone to optimize against it!

[shadowgovt]

In general, these models are approximations of an ideal, or some kind of statistical summary across systems that are too complex to completely model.

There's a wide gap between "this algorithm is crap" and "this algorithm stops working if we publish the whole thing publicly and people can explicitly tune data to make number-go-up." That's like claiming a machine learning algorithm is crap because it's possible to build bespoke counter-inputs that maximize badness in the output; that's possible with most ML algorithms, but when someone's not trying to break the machine on purpose, those algorithms often work great.

[johnnyanmac]

>but when someone's not trying to break the machine on purpose, those algorithms often work great.

To be fair, that's the exact thing that's wrong here. Creative tools for professionals can assume good faith; no one is trying to break an IDE unless their job is QA for said IDE.

Tools for advertising almost always have bad faith actors, or those actors are the largest presence. The problem becomes untenable when the tool creator has a symbiotic relation with the bad actor.

[flenserboy]

How about sites that are shown to use SEO or game the algorithm simply cease to exist on Google after a warning period? Change the incentive structure entirely.