We must be close to a turning point with the web?

[brotherhood of LAN]

Plenty people complaining about G's results beyond the tech sphere, or so it seems.

AI predictably has hobbled search engine results. For the past year+ people append 'reddit' to results to find actual human being content.

Does anyone have an optimistic future for how content on the web turns out for people? :-) Asking because I've never read one.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Take it Brett's algo blocks Foo posts from the active list if there's only one post or some such... even for us older contributors... it's ok. so paranoid :-)

[Brett_Tabke]

>Plenty people complaining about G's results beyond the tech sphere, or so it seems.

Astroturf campaign. Nobody of merit is saying that. Same thing happened before Panda so they created a consensus to radically change.

We are on the verge of the most radical change in Google history. They will move from a Search Engine to a "whatever you want to call it" answer engine. In order to do that, there has to be buy in for change. That starts with the astroturf campaign about how bad the results are...

What I see people complaining about are Ads and Google sites. I think half the stories about "google results" are actually about AdWords where with the new "sponsored" notations, people are clicking on them by accident when they meant to click on the first result. So they get a spammy AdWords advertiser site and think it is a "seo" problem.

> For the past year+ people append 'reddit'
> to results to find actual human being content.

Just noise. There is no real uptake in reddit readership over the last year. Especially since so many people left the site over the various issues.


> Does anyone have an optimistic future for how content on
> the web turns out for people? :-)

Depends on what you mean. I have found a ton of great content in the last year. Some from SE's but mostly from word-of-mouth.

[Martin Potter]

> ... mostly from word-of-mouth. <

Yes, word of mouth, at least from informed people, scores highly in my own criteria for Web content that is relevant to me. I do use SE but find that personal suggestions from like-minded colleagues is much more reliable.

[Brett_Tabke]

Also, let me be the lone voice in the wilderness - I love TikTok. I watch it 30-60mins a day. I am getting so much breaking news there. Yes, you have to train the algo by following people's content you want to see. Yes, it takes some time, but when done, it is a precious new source of entertainment, news, insights, and education.

[graeme_p]

Try different search engines too.

I have mentioned Kagi before. Marginalia is also interesting. There are others I have not tried yet.

@Brett_Tabke do not trust them enough to want to see that much of my search history. I am also usually searching for text, not video.

[engine]

20-years ago search engines were needed. Nowadays, we have brands, and people don't need to use search engines to get a result:. I am generalizing, of course.
Amazon is Google biggest competitor, not Bing, or any other search engine.

Publishers creating editorial content, whether it be news or creative content, simply need to follow the opportunities, including, as Brett mentioned, TikTok.

What about the smaller publisher/webmaster? Unless you follow the opportunities, you're destined for traffic loss.

AI provides answers and solutions, it's not going to provide a service, such as people have known with referral from ten blue links.

I've always advised people to follow the opportunities, and to not spend time lamenting 20-year-ago SERPs.

When people search for an answer or information they really don't care about the source. Those of us around here do, of course.

[brotherhood of LAN]

>word-of-mouth.

Which has always been the best way. But presumably you wonder how those people found out about it, a wee bit beyond your trust of those people? Quite likely subject to FAANG algorithms which are increasingly struggling to deal with people targetting their algos more and AI lightening the amount of work needed for them to chuck spaghetti at the wall.

And people here are more likely going to know people who are educated and will offer them a trusted recommendation, just because they're the same way.

How does it go for your children and their peers?

>Just noise

The fact Duckduckgo get 100M searches a day for being essentially a Bing proxy speaks a lot for their marketing and a lack of understanding about the fundamentals. Maybe the same could be said for Brave who don't even announce their crawling agent but are 'crawling' the web.

>AI provides answers and solutions

Obviously there's lines to that. Time of day in London provides one answer. Generative AI nowadays based on other peoples content... grey lines.

We all know the generative AI can be misleading, which may not be dangerous for the people here but can mislead a whole many more people.

>answer engine

I guess most people thought it would head that way and if it were right 100% of the time then that would be fine, but it isn't.

Also the idea that much of the web is opinion based.

I'm not seeing an optimistic future without a much more democratised view of content and opinions on the web.

>When people search for an answer or information they really don't care about the source. Those of us around here do, of course.

Probably true in the main, but then there's laws like copyright etc.

[brotherhood of LAN]

>destined for traffic loss.

It does seem like there's some cross purpose in these conversations on this forum based on "people wanting traffic" vs objectively minded people find information. It sounds iffy in itself saying that but there are plenty objective people in the world as there's always have been.

Don't get me wrong because I know some SEOs would happily cross many lines legal or not, but my thread intention was about information discovery.

>When people search for an answer or information they really don't care about the source. Those of us around here do, of course.

Again, so important.

I've never really understood the ruthless continuation of AI at the expense of actual human beings with real word experience espousing their real world experience. Google replaces DMOZ. Google potentially replaces wiki and the entire world's knowledge and there's no longer a web, it's just 95% of the Western World searching on Google's interpretation of it. Their model takes several billion hours of human curated content to create an answer .

Everyone else writes it, they monetise it. Decades worth of knowledge, just because they have a roundabout way of understanding the English language. A bit absurd.

[engine]

There are a number of non-seo searches I do on a regular basis and i'm waiting for more changes to come through. Non-seo searches are those I class as not related to promotion, marketing, and any seo activity, or serps monitoring for ranking, etc., they are genuine searches to find "stuff".

Desktop is completely different to mobile, so it's worth noting where these changes come though first.
Mobile serps are very cluttered, but the visual real-estate is far smaller, so it's more difficult to see what's there, and, surprise surprise, it's packed full of entries to click that are monetised. Desktop has the space to display more, and that's why it also looks cluttered, but we can dig more.

I'm still waiting for the next significant shift as of today.

Brett posted this as a marker. [webmasterworld.com...]

[blend27]

-- append 'reddit' to results to find actual human being content --

Guilt.y...

AI/Goog/Youtube feeds me half Rising Prices of Eggs in Russia, Bananas exchange for Crud Oil used to blackmail whoever, CRUD is in Software development, +++1, in Newark NJ if I use VPN, Yeeey!

VS

...me looking for definition of what CFOBJECTCACHE definition is/was with a link that points to a .ORG website(HTML 3.5), and they were proud that their site is proudly best works in IE version 5.5 (Soul Food for me, i have a certificate of Certified Developer by Allaire, Macromedia and then Adobe for a loooooong, loooooong time!).

+reddit makes things Awesome Source!

[brotherhood of LAN]

>.org

was it this one? [mojeek.com...]

I dunno. There does seem a lot of amenability to whatever is most popular.