NEWS (heh it contains new) is important to be up-to-date and recent.
But so many things are olds and you should give more weight to older pagerank-verified pages.
They've really let the core search experience be deteriorated so extensively, that we can't blame all of it on SEO.
It would open up a whole new world of chronological meta analysis; a new dimension of cross-referencing.
[I understand that Google has, or had, some limited incarnation of this, in the form of it's Time Range search, but - and without looking deeply into it - I suspect that is an algorithmically different procedure than the one I am describing. That is, I expect that applies a simple filter to a current search, rather than being The Actual Old Search Results]
There are way too many google searches where the best result was the top 10 years ago, and still should be the top. Instead it’s something from this year that has no information.
Googling is now like talking to that person who repeats your question back to you as a statement, as if they added to the conversations. The results are some social media manager who’s job it is to make “content” by writing filler.
So recency bias kinda works against people discovering useful content. But whatever. Google is in decline anyways.
I just ran a Google search on some code I was working on 15 years ago, posted to blogspot.com. It was about card game X, using programming language Y. The relevant keywords appear in the blog post. However, it completely failed to show up in a Google search. Just... nothing, even when I scrolled through the "more results" stuff. There were relevant and more recent links to the same topic (and likely better implemented, but let's leave that aside).
I did find my page on a Bing search after getting it to not ignore an important keyword, so that's something.
This is not even getting into censorship of any political thing that google employees dislike.
The winners of this battle will be the places where content is generated (or curated) - and reddit is perhaps the most important content hub generator (it's not just an aggregator anymore - comments about some news can be often more interesting than the news itself). Indexers (and language models) are useless without content to scrap.
Seems most queries result in something like 30% SEO spam sites, 30% quora, 30% reddit, 10% other.
Edit: I don't disagree that Discord/Youtube/Other closed gardens have taken open searchable data away, but it's not like there's now no authentic searchable data at all. Perhaps Google also needs to learn to search those closed gardens better.
I've watched through a sample of about 20 of the 3,000 videos I'm working through, and the corrected transcription really did an amazing job at restoring the original meaning from the spoken words that was hard to understand from the original machine transcription.
on the flip side, would those blogs have been created at all if they weren't financially motivated by streaming/video to provide the content?
there's a lot of discussion here about internet commuities, but this comment brings to question why blogs started to die down to begin with. At least with reddit you get clout if you share stuff (useless clout, but sometimes you just want a pat on the back).
To be fair, i have the same problem with Duck.
I wish i could backlist sites from my search results. YouTube and Pinterest are not helpful for the things i look for.
Not affiliated, just a very satisfied customer
There's a hard limit at what is allowed by robots.txt since Google abides by this standard.
So Blogs are more useful when they're aggregated through a site like Reddit, where users have already done the vetting on whether the linked page is valuable. Reddit comments are invaluable to pages by adding additional context. Noting when the content has become dated or inaccurate due to external changes, etc. Sites like Brian Kreb's blog are the exception as the author is well known and respected. But the general blogs? It takes time to earn that community respect.
Then beyond that, how often have you gone on the hunt for something obscure only to run across 3 or more blog pages which look entirely unique, but have the exact same article pasted to them? It isn't that the contents are bad/wrong/inaccurate, but rather who do you trust? How much effort are you going to put in to finding which blog was the original, written by the expert and which ones are bots copying the info?
and ironically enough, if you post your own blog on reddit to be critiqued, there's a good chance it is removed for "self promotion". Funny how that "vetting" works, huh? So you get back to "how do I make my blog discoverable so it can be peer reviewed" and we're at square 1 again.
>How much effort are you going to put in to finding which blog was the original, written by the expert and which ones are bots copying the info?
A lot if it's important. Because as is I already have to do that muckracking on reddit to see who is trying to understand or even read the article and who just wants to soapbox their tangential pet rant. tracing a source back is child's play in comparison.
I see this all the time when trying to find information about old computers. So many of the good vintage computing resources are locked in social services or mailing lists that the information never shows up in search engines.
It feels a lot like the days when information was balkanized between AOL, GEnie, CompuServe, American PeopleLink, Delphi, etc.
Search engines were supposed to fix that and make all the world's information discoverable. They didn't.
It's weird.
I used to be considered a Digital Native.
Now I feel like an outsider on the internet.
That's because the web is full of juvenile sub-normie content such as geeksforgeeks (if you consider programming topics for example). It shadows the very specific queries with highly SEO'd Juvenile stuff.
If I search, "The top 10 movies on Netflix", I get sent to this page...
https://decider.com/list/top-10-movies-on-netflix-most-popul...
The top 5 movies above are...
1. The Boss Baby (2017)
2. The Angry Birds Movie (2016)
3. We're the Millers (2013)
4. Zookeeper (2011)
5. Mean Girls (2004)
Is this really the best the world has to offer for my search query? I could spend a week putting together a far better page for that query, but what's the point? It's not going to rank anywhere notable in the Google results. There's no incentive for me to produce that quality content.
Google at this point is literally teaming up with spammers. Just go on a android phone and swipe left from homepage for "Google", count how many clicks it takes to get to an 100% AI generated spam page.
I tried to curate mine for a bit and thumbs down useless sites or content I don't care about. I didn't really succeed in making this feed helpful so I mostly ignore it.
The issue is that ML is very expensive compared to spam generation. And the moment another search engine becomes popular, then the spam cannons will be used against it instead.
Sometimes when I search a topic all I get is video in the natural results, not a video search, and I suspect I'm part of an A versus B test.
I personally don't find it to be a compelling solution and click away because I'm not willing to sift through 10 10 minute videos to see if there is relevant content.
Their shifting from text-only "ethical" ads to being a more-ordinary web ad service, and putting ads inline with results, roughly corresponds with that, IIRC, which probably isn't a coincidence. Your ad-"results" probably get more clicks if much of the rest of first result page is crap. Many of the webspammers probably funnel money to Google one way or another, now. It screwed up their incentives to keep fighting that battle, I'd guess, which is likely part of why they stopped putting so much effort into it.
As long as they can monetize remaining users more than what they lose from users abandoning search, the trend will continue
This is particularly notable when looking for recipes.