I find it hard to believe Google doesn't have the data required to figure out which sites should be getting domain authority, but I understand it's an antagonistic and ongoing battle between SEO spam and search engines.
I owned a basic wordpress site with some guides written during COVID for a couple of popular (at that time) mobile games. It appeared in top 3 searches for the <game name> + <guide/event/best ...> combination.
Ad revenue was around ~$100 per month peaking around ~$150 at the new content drops. I have abandoned the website since, but it still is generating $100 here and there without me actively working on it for the past 2 years.
To the point - yes, there's lot of money if you own a network of similar websites. My competitors were paying $10-30 per guide submitted on their website because a few guides could easily get paid off in a couple of months from ad revenue and keep generating it years afer.
I could write more detailed story if someone's interested.
Probably one of my most-used prompts, and it's batting close to 1.000.
Every now and then it will make a mistake, like forgetting the salt, putting a step in the wrong order, or the like, but far less often than you'd think. If you already have even a middling amount of kitchen experience, it's a fantastic use case.
A reasonably comprehensive cookbook like The Joy Of Cooking or something specific to your preferences seems like less effort overall vs Google or a LLM.
they are operating under the assumption you are a decent cook. any decent cook will know how to taste for salt and what is safe temperature wise. if you blindly follow instructions you are not a decent cook.
I may be biased though, "skim a recipe and wing it" is my default style anymore after all.
Think easting something in a restaurant then replicating something similar at home the next day just based on the flavor. Doing that for a few things is easy, but it takes significant time to get to that level across a wide range regional cuisines.
Also, portion adjustments are quite useful, as I mostly only cook for one or two people. Scaling isn't always linear, so that's been a helpful step.
Likely won't pair hot sesame oil with milk, for example. (someone please tell me that's not a thing).
The tool is currently best used by people who already know how to code/cook and don't want to spend too much cognitive bandwidth, but have the skills to mofidy as needed.
On the other hand, those Stack Overflow clones get top billing all the time. I do not think this is a data problem, but an incentives issue. More ads=good
There was a time when Google Search would nearly always nail it with the first result, but now it feels like you have to wade through several results and be a prompt engineer to find relevant results.
Now we have 45 minute youtube videos of "100 new player tips and tricks for Red Dead 2!"
There's only one...for horse upgrade recipes. I also didn't know that GameSpot acquired them.
I too mourn the lost era of GameFAQs.
At some point I'm gonna say fuck it and simply maintain my own list of searchable links, which score each ad with a single negative point, and each relevant keyword or phrase with a single positive point.
Nobody wants to see a page of copies/duplicates by SEO rank. I recall years ago there was, for a while, a similar issue with Wikipedia clones but that problem was addressed. Not just games, recipes, but music lyrics, chords, etc - googling almost evert niche interest is rife with it.
I think the massive amounts of data collected by android devices while we're not using the internet and all the data collected by chrome while we are browsing means that Google no longer needs to mine our internet searches to collect the most intimate details of our daily lives. That's why Google no longer cares about investing time and money into making their search useful for us.
In fact, it's better for Google if a company's customers can't find their website due to all the spam because it means that company now has to pay Google to place an ad at the top of search results in order to be seen at all.
Instead, it's better for Google to let the search go to utter dog shit, blame issues on "algorithms" and get sites to pay to play with ads.
The top domain for almost every result in my niche is a shitty wordpress with centered text on a purple background. It makes about $10-15k a month even with its lackluster content. It's had spyware ads and porn ads. Still #1 for every query.
The funny part is, bing, ddg are even worse. Welcome to webapps in 2023.
I absolutely loathe to use fandom for that very reason. They game the system to appear first, even when another, better, wiki exists.And it is nigh on unusable. Sadly one game that really depends on the wiki, that I play only has a fandom site (warframe)
Many of those wiki ecosystems are used to view-pump twitch channels with embedded players, such as Fextralife's webring of wikis being bought up and built up, and don't forget those "1-feature VIP memberships".