this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Out of the loop
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Define "sudden".
This has been a progressively worsening problem for a good while now.
To be fair to Google, it's not entirely their fault, there's a whole industry now that's entire purpose is to fuck up the results. But even so, Google has absolutelly lost what made it useful. It's far too concerned with try to curate for you instead of just doing damn search for the words. That helps them get more bullshit and some ads in there.
I disagree, Google has encouraged and profited massively off of SEO, they could've maintained the integrity of result but instead they bent over backwards to make sure SEO methods worked as long as folks were paying Google
Can you explain a little what you mean by “a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results”? I’ve never heard of that before and it sounds alarming to say the least
I’m guessing they meant SEO - Search Engine Optimisation. It’s much more complex than this, but essentially finding high volume search terms and writing website content based around those terms so your page shows up higher organically.
It’s why recipe pages or simple how to guides have paragraphs semi related text that sounds like it was written by committee. The content needs to be human readable, otherwise Google flags it as spammy, but at the same time it only serves to drive up clicks based on those search terms.
I'm assuming they're talking about SEO(search engine optimization). There's companies that offer it as a service to boost websites rankings so they are closer to the top.
The worsening has definitely been progressive over the last 10 years, but I feel there were some sudden changes over the last couple of months that make it a lot less usable than before. For some searches I get the feeling that there's some kind of whitelist of websites that are included in the search and a huge part of the internet is being excluded. I was looking for a pretty basic diagram some days ago, nothing too obscure, and there were maybe three dozens of results in the image search. I also find more and more pages that are obviously badly translated English content when I search for German terms. I never had that problem in the past. The same goes for product testing. I tried to find a good office chair, but the websites that claim to test different models obviously try to lead you to one specific product. The texts feel like auto-generated content to simulate real articles about the products being tested, but at the end chair X, and only chair X, is the right one to buy.