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Comment by brucethemoose2 | Hacker News Reader

The root cause of all this madness:

Ads.

As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse.

A genuine desire to help incoming traffic doesn't really matter either. Anything helpful will be infinitely cloned, as long as there is incentive to clone it.

I dont really know a good solution either. Targeted ads are incredibly useful to small businesses, and that genie is out of the bottle.

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Education is the path out of this: advertised products are ALWAYS worse value. You are overpaying to fund convincing the next sucker.

The market is pretty efficient, and there are always alternatives. If you aren't lazy, you can save a huge amount of money by not buying advertised products.

On the rare occasions I see an ad for something cool that I want, I search for it on aliexpress and 90% of the time find it for 1/3 the price.

Whenever someone tells you that they bought something because of an ad, you should make them feel a little embarrassed about it. There should be mild social punishment for admitting an ad hijacked your brain and made you get out your wallet - it means you're a sucker, a rube, a feebleminded lazybones.

It's been fun watching the score of this post bounce up and down every time I refresh. People who earn their living off ads do NOT like being reminded that they are building a societal cancer.

It's not only that, I think. Traditional full page ads, for instance, had a signal value:

"We may not be best. But we are credible and big enough that we make a shit-ton of money on our product and can afford this incredibly expensive ad."

Today, an ad possibly just means "Google matched two suckers with each other and will pocket the difference."

How do you get eye balls to educate?

No it's not just ads at all. SEO drives traffic. There are many ways to monetize such traffic, and ads are just one.

A lot of SEO is driven by local business owners who hire SEO people with dubious track records that make big promises. They invariably clutter up their websites with 10,000 articles along the lines of "best plumber in dallas".

It's funny you mention ads though. One reason that it's so hard to find an SEO person that's actually worth anything is that if they were really good at what they did, they could just throw up their own websites with ads and make a much better living that way than selling SEO services. They don't of course, which should tell you something about how good they really are.

The problem isn't that websites owners want to promote their website to the top of the search results, the problem is that Google's financial interests are aligned with those pages instead of its users.

If Google was putting significant resources towards combating SEO spam instead of encouraging it, the sites returned from a query (e.g. the sites that make Google the most money) would be the ones that the user most wanted, not the ones that maximally participate in Google's ad-extortion business.

> It's funny you mention ads though. One reason that it's so hard to find an SEO person that's actually worth anything is that if they were really good at what they did, they could just throw up their own websites with ads and make a much better living that way than selling SEO services. They don't of course, which should tell you something about how good they really are.

That doesn't even make sense. SEOs exist to make sure websites are more consumable by bots for search indexing. They likely have no backend experience or much experience working directly with css/html, and are more likely dealing with full stack developers who have no desire to understand how their code is functional for users but isn't consumable by bots. The most successful deal with brick and mortar companies which require actual capital to create and not just SEO skillz, and anyone with a brain would know dropshipping is so 2014 (there's like a million of these failed journeys documented on random boards like blackhatworld where people try to monetize search like you suggested, but it's a hella minority because we are deep into the enshittification of search). SEO is important to deal with things like the proliferation of angular 1, which was a hellhole abyss for startups in search because google wouldn't index their shit and developers needed to iterate fast. Hell, a large part of the react community is based around things like server side rendering just to get around google bot refusing to let JavaScript load and search results were polluted with handlebars variables for years because of that. Google bot still has problem rendering webpages while I do all of that shit all day with google's own puppeteer.

Tl;dr: SEOs are a cottage industry to help companies deal with the ongoing enshittification of search, and basing their value or success on whether they could launch their own site isn't a good benchmark.

> SEOs are a cottage industry to help companies deal with the ongoing enshittification of search

SEO is a $122 billion/year industry. That doesn't seem like a cottage industry to me. And it exists in order to get companies to rank higher in search results.

I think the SEO industry is a large force helping to make the web much worse.

That's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of marketing at 5 trillion. SEO is surely making the internet worse, but google is also incentivizing the absolute hell out of it by dedicating resources and promoting personalities a la John Mueller and other Search Advocates within the space. Currently, Google's inability to assign value to pages in a coherent way is making it worse. The Google SEO guidelines, proliferation of tools like lighthouse, AMP pages, and an outdated search algorithm encourage the homogenizing of the web, too. It's a bit like if Google built a factory in the tropics where they organize pools of water. Their goal is to encourage more water, stagnant or not, because their job is to organize pools... but then folks complain about the mosquitos as if they weren't invited. Welcome to the jungle.

But you have heard of me!

-- Capt. Jack Sparrow, SEO guy

> One reason that it's so hard to find an SEO person that's actually worth anything is that if they were really good at what they did, they could just throw up their own websites with ads and make a much better living that way than selling SEO services. They don't of course, which should tell you something about how good they really are.

It's incredibly expensive to rank highly for something. There are tips and tricks to make your site amenable to the search engines, but it takes a lot of time or money to get it to actually notice you.

> The root cause of all this madness:

> Ads.

> As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse.

Search will only get worse for google users, not for google or google customers.

Google can easily produce only quality search results, by penalising a result by the number of ads it serves.

They don't do this.

They can identify the SEO people and companies, and heavily penalise their clients.

They don't do this either.

They can, because you're logged in, allow you to maintain a blacklist. They don't.

Trust me, for google this is an easy problem to solve; it's just that, for google, this is not a problem, but works as intended behaviour.

While i'm not naive anymore (i hope not, there's no way to tell lol), and i know most business is simply a scam/based on people's delusions or addictions or other vice without providing any value, the ad industry can't stop surprising me. In all my career i never seen a case of any paid ads actually getting people anywhere. But they continue to spend, and spend, and spend.

Retargeting may be the only exception, although it is annoying as hell, it won't let people forget about your stuff (and comes very cheaply because very few people will ever see it), so probably generates positive returns... But i'm not even sure about that one.

The web is still a zero-sum game without money involved. Search has 5-10 slots for whichever topic and if you're not in it, you effectively do not exist.

This was even true before search, in web directories. It has a limited amount of slots, you need to be on it at all and as high as possible.

> The web is still a zero-sum game without money involved. Search has 5-10 slots for whichever topic and if you're not in it, you effectively do not exist.

Well that is a ridiculous problem that only exists because of Google's UI.

What if, for instance, thet slightly randomized search results?

Right. If we didn't have ads, then nobody would illegitimately get traffic to go to their website LOL total crap who comes up with this shit

Have you seen a 419 scam? Doesn't have any ads. Just a direct intro to get scammed.

The thing about such scams is that they require input. Somewhere along the chain, a human user with a wallet has to send personal or financial info.

The internet as you know it would not exist without ads.

That would be awesome.

It would exist as we knew it back in the 90s / early 00s. It would consist of Wikipedia, McMaster Carr, BBS forums, and weird guys' hobby blogs. It would be one million percent better.

Webrings, the original Web 1.0 that many gush about on this site, were partially designed to farm adsense revenue.

AOL started putting ads on your dashboard less than 2 years after it launched.

There wasn't a very long period of ad-free internet.

Static banner ads with no (user) tracking aint such a bad thing IMHO.

I wonder how this could be implemented at a technical level. How do you avoid gaming the system?

tongue in cheek, I don't remember any ads in gopher sites, back in the days.

This river which has turned into a giant gutter would not exist without the filth.

True! That's the problem with ads. They changed the web for the worse.

Don't you go threatening me with a good time.

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