I’m a developer, and the shit I’ve been asked to throw in for SEO is just infuriating.
“Here’s 500 keywords we need added”
“Half of this isn’t even about our product”
“Marketing says we need it, so add it.”
I swear, the two jobs least needed in this world are middle managers and marketers.
Preach it.
I recently started studying social psychology, and sadly the main takeaway from my initial venture into the field is a confirmation of how unaware and automated the average person is.
Middle managers, marketers and the average customer are all caught up in a perpetual feedback loop, constantly enabling each other’s addictions. It doesn’t help that these demographics overlap as managers and marketers are customers of other marketers and managers, turning the feedback loop into a vicious cycle.
This is the opposite of SEO unless your goal was to make sure you never appear on the first page.
They do realize sites that tag spam are heavily penalized by Google?
Off-topic: why do you tag the user whose comment you’re directly responding to? Others, sure, but the parent comment already gets a notification of your response.
This happens automatically on the web client for Mastodon when you reply to a thread. I could have manually removed yours from this one. I have mixed feelings about whether that should be default. Untagging could be construed as rude? On the other hand it can be a bore to be involuntarily involved in some seemingly interminable thread that you only meant to reply briefly to.
I think Google peaked about 6-8 years ago now and then started slipping at an ever accelerating rate.
It’s almost useless for me when searching anything remotely technical or otherwise niche.
I almost consistently need to go to the second page of results now, something I don’t remember doing since like 2009.
I find Bing acceptable. Brave search works well. But I’m actually using Kagi now since I’m hoping their paid model will actually mean I’m not the product.
I use Kagi too and it’s great, but I think we will move more and more to chatgpt-ish search engines in a year or two.
I imagine they will attempt to put ads in those too.
Brave search works well.
Does brave index data on it’s own or is it pulled from Google/Bing?
I pretty much only use google to search other web sites, like “thing im searching for” site:beehaw.org or whatever. It’s completely useless otherwise.
Truly. Most web search engines, including google, are mostly useless these days if you don’t already have a good idea where to look or it is a very common search.
You use to be able to click down a bunch of pages till what you were looking for turns up. But now after you go down a few pages it just starts repeating and it is all mostly big tech sites.
The most baffling thing modern search engines do, especially DuckDuckGo, is a page of search results in they inevitably throw in some unrelated results involving my location as looked up by my IP.
I’m not sure why when looking for old Sega console stuff it wants me to know about plumbers in what it thinks my city is, but it’s sure dedicated to me finding out! :facepalm:
You search for anything slightly niche, everything past page one is just rubbish. It’s especially jarring when searching for something programming related and 80% of the results are auto-generated stuff scraped from Stack overflow. It reminds me of Amazon where you search for a product and almost all results are chinese-made clones of what you are looking with randomly generated names.
It reminds me of Amazon where you search for a product and almost all results are chinese-made clones of what you are looking with randomly generated names
This is a big factor as to why I shop at Amazon much, much less nowadays. Can’t find anything reputable outside of major brands, just feels like a market for dropshipped items
Things weren’t anywhere near this bad a decade ago 😒
This is just another side effects of the proliferation of AI generated text that is difficult to distinguish from human generated text. Obviously, SEO optimization has always been an issue, but more now than ever, distinguishing the fluff and nonsense from the valid is a significant challenge. I can only imagine small businesses are going to find it even more difficult to stand out when pumping SEO optimized sites requires only a few clicks. How can you compete when the tools are ubiquitous, easy to use, and available to all and the game values the results of these tools rather than the product or company themselves?
Let’s not forget bot/AI generated websites that just copy paste some irrelevant content template but fits your search terms, and then feeds you tons of ads when you thought you found answers to your questions.
google “How to do X?”
AI pages are always like this
- X is very useful
- ads
- X is used for a,b,c application
- ads
- Generic advice about how X can be done which everyone knows
- ads
- One line in the entire page which nudges you towards how to actually do X
- ads
- You should really try X
10/10 best impression XD
There are a little bit of variation for other stuff, but they have their templates. Say if you look for some specific thing “the earliest super nova documented” then chances are it will guide you to wikipedia or some valid sources.
But if your search term contains anything that was trending on google, say if you search some hot game’s tip, etc. There will be pages and pages of AI generated contents, from some domain you don’t really recognize. (so better put ign or gamefaq or Fextralife/fandom wiki as search term now. )
I hadn’t even considered the quantity of ads on those sites… Any time I accidentally find one, it’s a long column of text that starts off with a bunch of filler roughly related to whatever I was searching for, maybe a couple of lines with an answer (right or wrong is a different matter), then breaks down into a bunch of self-contradicting nonsense. I just don’t see the ads because of uBlock Origin, so I never see how bad they are. AI generated sites are completely aggravating.
I also don’t see the ad with ad block, but when you see the not working weird space or failed embeded blocks, sometimes a same site reference link etc to other not related topics(highly likely to have finger printing) it’s like “okay, fuck, they got me again.”
