The video can be summarised into three main points:
- Advertisement offering Google a perverse incentive to make its search results worse, so the search ad results look comparatively better.
- Search engine optimisation.
- Generative AI integration with Google enshittifying the platform.
I’ll focus on #2. Federated search might alleviate the problem.
It’s counter-productive to optimise a page for multiple search engines, running different algorithms; it might perform better on [let’s say] Google, but worse on [let’s say] Bing, or vice versa, since they run different algos that prioritise different things. As such, almost all SEO is made for Google results.
And, in an environment where no search engine dominates the market, and the search engines use different algos, SEO goes away.
The problem with that is people don’t want to use multiple search engines - they want to use one, that they believe to bring the best results on. (That’s why we have a problem called Google on first place.) If only there was some way for those search engines to coexist, and to benefit from each other… well, that’s basically federation, right?
How I see it working:
- each instance crawls the web separately, focusing on the pages that it wants to
- each instance has its own ranking algorithm
- each pair of instances may opt to federate with each other or not
- each instance can relay search queries to each other, if they’re federated
- as a user inputs a search query, based on keywords and/or user preferences, the instance might decide if it should service the user with local results (from that instance), with results from a federated instance, or a mix of both.
I believe that this system would make SEO really hard to do; in practice you’d be better focusing on good content. It would also lead to a situation where different search engines want to specialise, but still keep each other alive - as they benefit from their peers.
It needs to work and be reliable, else it becomes something like YaCy, that doesn’t work that well. Well, Mastodon and Lemmy work fine, so that’s a first step.
without watching the video - google search is falling apart because there’s a lot of shit content, a lot of bad articles being written.
and there’s a lot of bad articles being written because there’s a lot of authors that just want to make money from advertising, without actually caring about the content. in other words, it’s advertising’s fault that the quality of content is dropping. and ironically, it’s mostly google’s fault that advertisement on the internet got so big as it is today.
Not quite. It’s largely because a manager decided that an important metric for Google to be better at was “how much time users spend on the results page” which turns out you can game by just making the results worse so users have to stay there longer. Management made a decision to focus on metrics that are counter to what users would actually want because… well, here’s a better article that explains it:
Goodhart’s law is an adage often stated as, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”
Forget the content. Ads in general are ruining basically everything they’re allowed on. It’s a fuckin cancer.
The bigger reason is that most sites use Google AdSense for showing user ads. Most SEO bullshit sites are basically just empty content as a pretext to show said AdSense ads. Google will rank up these websites because they directly make them money via the revenue cut they take. Simple as that.
i don’t need a video on why it’s shit, been using it for the past 14 years
The fact that we have to watch a video about it is emblematic of the problems with Google and internet search.
The only surprising thing here is that it has taken so long for many people to realize this. I stopped using Google years ago because the first half dozen links were sponsored and the results that did actually pop up were complete shit. I knew it was much more than shitty companies playing the SEO algorithm. I switched to DuckDuckGo but I can’t say the actual results are a huge step up. But at least I am not spammed with unrelated ads or the search engine pushing scam products to me while purposely making the results useless.
Not really related, but I believe this is the first time I’ve seen an emoji as a link 🤯
