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Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web.

SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out.

For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to target specific keywords. The fact that this works means that only well funded companies can succeed by bleeding money at the alter of page rank.

In the old days we had paid search engines. Google promised to replace that by surfacing what you really want. But now we have a search engine that ranks results based on how much money you can spend on silly SEO rituals. Is that really any better?

Yes, I've been saying for years that there's a fundamental contradiction in the paid search model. If the best content moves to the top organically, it doesn't need to pay, so only the not-best content will pay, which degrades search results. So, Google has perverse incentive to put the best content not at the top so it can force them to pay go get to the top. (The same dynamic applies on FB feeds, although the definition of "best" there is fuzzier.)

The solution is that advertising against algorithmically moderated content should be illegal. It breaks the contradiction because now users will have to pay to get the top content, instead of content providers paying for visibility.

> Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web.

Total hyperbole. Google's handling of SEO at worst breaks a web experience that Google created.

> In the old days we had paid search engines

I've been using TCP/IP since 1985. I have been "on the Internet" since 1986. I created the first open website in the Pacific Northwest in 1993. I don't remember ever, not even once, using a paid search engine.

It doesn't matter that Google created the monster that is SEO, thr fact is that it exists and it's how most people navigate the web.

Google creating AMP further breaks it and gives Google even more control. Google is very much the yelp of the Internet.

I understand where you are coming from being an 80s baby myself, however more and more young adults see google as the homepage of the internet, much as many now see Facebook as the internet to the point its where they consume most of their information.

I screamed about all this when Google became an ad machine. I screamed about it when Microsoft released paid DLC for the Xbox 360. Some of us railed, but the children...the children grew up thinking it was all normal and now its just 'how the world is' (SAAS/advertising/misinformation)

That's the real danger here. Companies outlast us and mold the next generation to see them as Deities of the world wide web.

Also- I do not remember paid search engines either.

I would prefer it if it was not necessary to learn "how to use Google". AMP makes that even more necessary than it used to be. I would prefer it if Google faced more real competition (DDG as I understand it is still fundamentally riding on the back of other lesser-used engines).

But "fundamentally broken" is hyperbole.

I think that "Deities" is also hyperbole. The people under 40 that I know regard Google as a corporation that does useful stuff, sometimes almost as if by magic, but not godlike.

Google certainly didn't create SEO. In fact their original search engine was notable because the SEO companies had not figured it out and for a couple of years the results were head and shoulders above competitors like Altavista and Ask Jeeves.

The only search engine that wasn't ruined by SEO was Archie. It was ruined by everybody shutting down their FTP sites.

Ah, Archie! I remember the joys of trying to find something by searching for filenames. 'Course, I was young enough back then that the idea that there were servers with stuff I could download made it fun enough to do it, and spelunk around the FTP site. I still remember a few common servers, like ftp.funet.fi. I don't have any idea what university it is, but I have a soft spot for Finland because of it. (That and being a child in Minnesota.)

> In March 2004, Yahoo launched a paid inclusion program whereby commercial websites were guaranteed listings on the Yahoo search engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!

I vaguely recall paying something like $20 for that back in the day. It's not technically a paid search engine I guess, but I wonder what the effect would be currently if there were some type of nominal fee required for all search placement. I think it would make it more difficult to generate massive amounts of blogspam.

I think spam and commercial entities would be all that were left.

Google is so entwined with the web that they've changed how people interact with and publish content.

Deep browsing sessions through layers of hyperlinks are dead. Instead people jump into and out of pages from Google, Twitter or HN. Personal home pages are dead, instead you need to publish to a platform like Medium or Twitter which will promote your content for you because no one is browsing anymore.

Now we have a world where the web pages primarily about companies (not individuals) create pages for Google (not people) as a way of juicing the search rankings so they can then get people in to download their mobile app.

In a nostalgic way, I miss the old web. But in a more pragmatic way I'm appalled at how inefficient this system is. If you wanted to design a way to index the world's information from the ground up, using toil and SEO spend as a proxy for quality and legitimacy (i.e. a million keyword heavy custom landing pages and bought backlinks) is a terrible way to do it.

> Personal home pages are dead

30% of the links in the top 30 on HN were personal home pages. (your number might be different since they change often)

> I don't remember ever, not even once, using a paid search engine.

I believe he's referring to Yahoo, where you used to have to pay a few hundred dollars a year to get your site listed on their directory.

Google created comment spam.

People always adapt to work the system. It's "juking the stats" and IMO the thing that makes it so easy is that computers are great at correlation, but worthless when it comes to cause and effect.

Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good. Without a certain amount of human intervention and moderation, the computers are extraordinarily stupid.

I think the system that eventually topples Google will be something that's built with an expectation of having a certain level of human interaction. If I had to make a try at it right now I'd focus on local search; restaurants, events, groups, classifieds, etc. and build something that's sustainable via franchises. That way the human component would always be someone local to a community, they could take some of the profit, and they'd act as moderators / advisors for their community.

TLDR; You need more people involved.

> Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good.

Ah, this explains why looking for reviews or comparisons for any type of product returns page after page of fake, single-purpose blogs now. You'd think Google would have wised up to this obvious, annoying SEO strategy by now.

Yep. There are multiple companies that build those blogs en masse. It's called Content Marketing. Those companies are always on the lookout for popular keywords (they use SEMrush, MOZ, etc) so they can build extremely shallow 1000-word blog posts around them for their customers.

They pay peanuts to freelancing writers that don't know much about the subject, and the only "references" they give for the article is from Wikipedia and other similar blog posts. Since some of those companies have control over thousands of (seemingly unconnected) customer blogs, they can link from one blog to another (and from social networks) to increase their PageRank score.

Some of the larger ones are even starting to employ machine learning to write articles, so expect even less quality from now on.

And Google doesn't care for one simple reason: search keywords captured by Content Marketing blogs are worth way more as AdWords.

It’s gotten to a point where for some topics I don’t even regard ‘the internet’ as a realistic source for information. Which is a tragedy, because it used to be. Almost anything related to health or medical topics, or consumer electronics is so inundated with blog spam that the signal to noise ratio is just too low to be useful. So many times I find myself 1/4 the way down an ‘article’ about a topic only to realize it’s nothing but regurgitated ‘content marketing’ spam.

SEO is a racket. Google controls >90% of the search engine market, globally.

That means you're always doing the cargo cult dance to appease the black box that is Google. Always on the verge of success, but never quite making it. Always suspicious of Google favoring advertisers in the organic results. Whether or not that is true is beside the point. Once you lose trust and once you're stuck in the land of abstractions and mirages, the conspiracy theory floodgates open.

The cure is brutal transparency. But we'll never get that. Bitcoin's blockchain is that. The minute price fluctuations on Amazon? Not so much. You're always going to get screwed. That's the internet today. People complain about Twitter putting badges on Trump's tweets and cry "censorship" but ignore the fact that Facebook won't even show your posts to your friends (or vice versa) due to the engagement algorithms. Algorithms which you have zero insight into. Nudges and manipulation, everywhere.

You have it exactly backwards on several levels. Google has been fighting an arms race for decades against antisocial SEO. Google doesn't want people doing that at all both because of user experience and because they already sell the top slots as ads! SEO is a way to try to "cheap out" and get attention without continous ad spending and keyword selections. SEO existed before Google was ascendant - remember keyword peppering on irrelevant pages to get clicks on altavista and askjeeves?

If someone says the internet is broken they always mean "It doesn't work how I want it to!" Can we bury that stupid meme already?

You sound like you might not have been using search engines before Google, because SEO predates Google by... well since the invention of the search engine. People were gaming Yahoo, AltaVista, etc and selling their services to do so long before PageRank was a thing.

> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives, but what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.

This already happens. These platforms go as far as posing as the businesses themselves, using the businesses' names and sometimes even stealing assets from the restaurants' real sites, like the logos or location pictures.

Slice did this to a local pizzeria that opened right before the pandemic hit and has been struggling. It's just so scummy, but the platforms are betting that small businesses don't have the resources to fight them, and they're right.

If I posed as say, Best Buy or Domino's, and created fake websites using their assets, not only would I be dragged into court on civil suits, but I'd be raided by the FBI for trademark and copyright infringement.

Look (listen?) for the cagey answers:

"Is this Restaurant X?"

"I can help you place an order!"

"But is this Restaurant X?"

"I can take your X order when ready!"

Hypothetically, what happens when the answerer wrongly replies "Yes"? The yes would indicate "yes, that is the restaurant your order will goto" but what's next?

I suppose, _hypothetically_, if you were a restaurant owner and didn't violate audio recording laws, and you got this, you'd have a good case against Yelp for fraud or dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception.

> what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.

This is exactly what Slice does. They create a plausible sounding url and outrank small pizza shops. They also replace the phone number so orders get routed through their call center. They end up charging more for both phone and online orders through their site. They also encourage users to install the Slice app.

Before I realized what was happening, I ordered through Slice twice (one online and one phone order) and both times they sent my order to a completely wrong address 15 minutes away from me. That’s what made me dig a little bit and discover their shady practices.

Literally, in TFA :

> In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub. The piece sparked a backlash from conscientious customers pledging to order directly in the future in order to protect their favorite restaurants’ profits. Natt Garun, a Verge writer whose parents own a restaurant, wrote a guide to finding a restaurant’s real contact information and avoid Grubhub’s fees to businesses. This involves dodging Grubhub-owned properties (Seamless, AllMenus, LevelUp, Tapingo, MenuPages, and Eat24) as well as the Grubhub-created websites and the Yelp app.

https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousand...

Isn't this the exact thing that trademarks were invented to prevent? I don't really get how they are getting away with this.

Lawyers are expensive.

Suppose I pay a marketing firm money to run an advertising campaign to promote my business. They wouldn't be violating any laws by using my trademarks as part of doing this job, according to the contract we signed.

That is what Grubhub claims they are doing. They aren't doing this to random third-parties - just restaurants that signed up with Grubhub's marketing service and agreed to allow them to do these things in their terms of service. Unfortunately, in this world of EULAs that are far too numerous to ever read and understand, most of the restaurants didn't realize what they were signing up for.

This behavior absolutely scummy, but the question of whether it is legal is more of a contract issue than a trademark one.

I was once told in the some countries you're not allowed to mention your competitor directly in an ad. No idea if it's true. At first I thought it was a bad idea but maybe not?

Maybe Google should fix that. If you Google a restaurant, your intent is to visit that restaurant website.

If you add “reviews” after the query, then the intent is to read reviews about that restaurant.

It’s trivial for Google to prioritize the actual website over agreegators. Most restaurants already have the ability to set up and “claim” their business on Google. Why not simply surface the “claimed” result first.

A better experience for everyone.

The restaurants we typically order from (all 3-5 of them), the first hit on google is an organic search result for that restaurant. No ads even. In some cases, it's the first two organic results (a main website, and then a direct link to their menu on that same website, which for some reason shows up as two different organic search results - I don't even mean sitelinks or the new indented stuff, I mean full on bona fide second organic search result for the same domain).

The only one that I usually order from for which this isn't the case doesn't actually have their own website.

So in some cases this is working.

What doesn't work for me is searching for the type of food - that's all aggregator sites.

> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives

They do, in the case where people are looking for a specific restaurant.

What about the now-increasingly-common case where people are looking to see what's open and doing delivery nearby? Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map.

Restaurants have two SEO problems: their particular restaurant and the generically hungry searcher. Yelp and co only have the latter. They are, as you say, outclassed.

> Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map.

On desktop, maybe.

Here's my experience trying this out on mobile (safari/iOS) just now:

I searched for "Pizza" with "San Francisco, CA" pre-filled. I am presented with a screen that ostensibly gives me a choice between "Open in the Yelp App" and "Continue to mobile site." I say ostensibly, because I don't get the chance to choose before a second tab opens up with a strange URL that causes iOS to open up the app store to their app.

I close the app store and go back to Safari and click "continue to mobile site". There are some results listed. I click "map".

Yelp asks me for my location. I allow it. It shows me results for San Francisco. I'm about 30 miles away on the peninsula. Now, I know I searched for San Francisco, and maybe that's what I want. But then what is Yelp even doing with my location?

At the bottom is an add for their iOS App. I click "x" to close it. Nothing happens. After four clicks, it finally leaves.

I click "Filters", select "Open Now" and submit.

Yelp asks for my location again. I allow it. It now shows me the results that are open, still ranging from SF to Colma. (So again, I have no idea what they're doing with my location.)

I click on a result. In this case, Golden Boy Pizza. I click on a photo. I scroll a few photos. On the sixth photo, I am presented the option of viewing all 3427 photos ...in the app.

I scroll down to look at reviews. Oh, those stars aren't reviews for this restaurant. They're sponsored suggestions. I scroll down further. I click a review that looks interesting because I want to read the whole thing.

...it takes me back to the app store without even a prompt.

---

So, yeah, it's technically 'trivial' in the sense that you can get a list. But to actually use that list, you have to worry if any random click is going to take you away from the website. Some of the information you want is completely inaccessible without installing their software. (And even if you go through it all, there's no guarantee Yelp's information is current either.) Even if I trusted Yelp, I'd rather use any other method to find a pizza place.

Great summary of how shitty the experience is of browsing literally any website that has a mobile app or unecessary login.

That experience sucks and I totally hate it as well.

FWIW, for Google Maps, Youtube, etc. if you don't want them to try to open the app browse them in an incognito tab (I use Chrome so I don't know if Safari does the same thing in a "private tab") but I'm just guessing the thinking is, in a private tab, auto launching apps would defeat your privacy so it doesn't happen. I didn't try that with the Yelp app. I don't use Yelp at all. There are more reviews on Google Maps for most of the places I visit (not the USA)

You're assuming that Google's algorithm treats a small restaurant website and a site like Seamless equally based on the same SEO ranking factors. That assumption ignores some important factors;

- Seamless have enough capital to buy the ad space at the top of every restaurant search. They'll always be at the top.

- Google weights things like inbound links highly. A massive site like Seamless will always win on those factors.

- Google allegedly considers domain and website age as important in pagerank. Seamless has an advantage over new restaurants there.

- Most importantly though, for all we know Google's algorithm could simply be biased in favor of Seamless. It's a black box. There could be a rule that just says "if (seamless.com) rank += 10000". If Google users prefer SERPs where that gets applied then it'll be there. There's no reason to believe pagerank is fair.

Yelp is winning the SEO race.

When searching for restaurants that I know of, I find the Grubhub/Yelp websites appear well before the actual restaurant's website. I dont know if Yelp does this, but Grubhub has the insidious practice of creating fake websites for restaurants without ever requesting permission to do so.

It's actually Google and Bing that are winning. Everyone else is losing to various degrees.

"SEO" depends on a wide array of factors, such as mobile-friendliness and a semantic link structure. But what ultimately ends up winning are established domains with tons of indexable pages. Backlinks matter, but the difference is negligible for sites that operate on the scale of Yelp.

If an aggregator's page appears before yours on the organic search results, your only choice is to pay Google or Bing to put your listing at the top.

If you are a random restaurant, your 3-page website is never going to beat Yelp.

It just hit me- this rings of an "SEO racket"!

perpetrators fraudulently offer [...] a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket. Particularly, the potential problem may be caused by the same party that offers to solve it

The "problem" is that you aren't the top search result- because they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering

I've seen something like this play out twice already. The first round was quite some years back with Facebook pages beating the restaurants' own websites. Facebook's SEO was so much better than the average website that many businesses, including restaurants, eventually gave up and just put everything on Facebook.

The second round is just starting to happen where I live with a local food delivery startup beginning to beat even the aforementioned FB pages and the official website often being the 3rd or lower link.

In terms of what there is to prevent this: Google has a feature where "business owners" can enter an official URL and that gets a pretty nice boost, but that's just giving more power to Google, who is already successfully competing with all of the aforementioned parties. Other search engines either don't have this feature or do but nobody uses it. Other than that, the only way to combat this is to only ever link to your official site, make it as accessible as possible and try to avoid doing business with a company who is willing to screw you over like that (of course easier said than done).

In my experience a restaurant's real website is always in the top results on google and almost always the one linked from google maps.

> Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless

Interesting choice of examples! Grubhub owns Seamless and bought Yelp's delivery service (formerly Eat24). Grubhub also owns AllMenus and MenuPages. So an individual restaurant has to compete with 5 different sophisticated offerings from one company for SEO position.