this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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I was Googling just fine until Google ruined it with "SEO" and AI so that completely irrelevant results dominate the first 2 or 3 pages.
It's this last two years where it has gotten really bad in my opinion. Before you could at least navigate the ads ridden site. Now base Google search is tremendously worse.
YouTube search is SO MUCH WORSE now. it just gives up and shows random stuff after like 3 results
I searched "friends invited me to lethal company". I got 6 results (one of which is a song?) before it gave up and showed "people also watched this" and "you might like this" aka anything even semi related to Lethal Company
Don't get me wrong, fuck google, but how much can we blame google for SEO? That's just people gaming the system, and they'd be doing it no matter how google presented their results.
Maybe there is a whole cooperation aspect that I'm not aware of.
They can only game the system because Google made a system like that possible and has never done anything to combat the gaming of it.
Come on man I don't like google either, but SEO exploitation has been a cat and mouse game since search engines were invented. They're all varying levels of suck the last few years. It's not an easy problem to solve, and AI has made it far more difficult.
Right, but we know how people are (look at torrenting, piracy, drm, etc.), and people would figure out ways to gamify it no matter what, I believe. But you are correct that they don't seem to necessarily have any interest in stopping it. Because of course not, it's all about the bottom line.
Google did a rollback of anti-SEO indexing features because the intention is that users issue more searches. Ever since the ads side of the business won the war for the soul of Google the experience has gotten worse on purpose.