Google has a hard time getting me what I want these days, and sites I do find do things to get found that make me like content a lot less (that's you, inane story on top of every recipe required to get ranked)
> This Chrome browser extension helps cut through to the chase when browsing food blogs. It is born out of my frustration in having to scroll through a prolix life story before getting to the recipe card that I really want to check out.
The little guys don’t really have a chance, unless you have a search engine specifically biased toward them.
I'm no SEO guru, but I suspect that some of those VPN services created numerous clones, which all linked to TheBestVPN.com, and so improved its ranking. For example, ExpressVPN had at least 128 clones. Such as expressvpn..., buy-express-vpn-..., get-xpress-vpn...., and xpress-vpn.... I used myip.ms to get hosting information, and they were linked. Also, I bought subscriptions from a few of them, and they all provided working ExpressVPN apps, with the right certificates. And I found no evidence of affiliate codes in the traffic.
Basically their engagement numbers were better for a larger amount of people by making search engines counterintuitive for early adopters.
We personally need a good robotic search engine that indexes like a robot. Everyone else needs a semi-sentient thing that makes many assumptions about what they want to see.
I still use DDG as I find it generally less annoying but I really don't get why they too had to start behaving like the pre-Google search engines.
Which also makes sense ... if you present the "right" result immediately, the user visits one site and has completed whatever he sought to do. if you make him click through 10 pages, he has way more chances to see an interesting ad.
That user wants fingerprint based ads and recent articles
Google is optimized for that
We are the only ones that want a “search engine”, a service distinctly good at indexing the known universe, instead of merely presenting the paid and compliant universe
Nobody has gotten better than Google, but Google has gotten much worse (and shaped the Internet for the worse with it).
It is a de facto search monopoly and without competition it rots. (or degrades to a symbiotic money harvesting machine between searcher and searched)