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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

I was afraid of this. Now, it's a matter of time before Google search will get even worse as SEO hustlers push more of their useless crap to the top now that internal algorithm data has been published.

Guess I should look into that Kagi thing people keep mentioning.

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The leak essentially confirmed what SEO experts already suspected (knew) but Google denied. SEOs have spent 2+ decades observing Google search behavior and honestly I wasn't even a little bit surprised their observations were proven correct. At this point, the "garbage" on Google isn't SEO optimized organic results, it's the ads.

For what it is worth, Google has favored macro-parasites over micro-parasites. The bigger companies have access to the ears of market regulators, etc. The average small publisher or affiliate site has almost nobody care if it disappears.

Part of the most recent Google update was penalizing high authority trusted sites for publishing off topic content from third parties. There is a concept called "goog enough" explaining how the likes of Forbes ranked for just about everything. https://www.blindfiveyearold.com/its-goog-enough

I doubt that will happen. One becsuse the leak didnt really disclose any major secrets that most marketers didnt already know.

2, even if some of this wasnt widely known, its not like you can take advantage of it overnight. Theres no quick hack to building a trustworthy domain or getting lots of trustworthy links for example

> Theres no quick hack to building a trustworthy domain or getting lots of trustworthy links for example

Sure, but there are other potential hacks that this leak exposes that marketers may now be focusing on more so now they would have otherwise based on the information in the leak.

It doesn't look like this leak will do that. This doesn't have "algorithms" in any real sense of algorithms.

Before SEO communities argued what were part of the model, thinking some things like clicks didn't matter. Truth is Google did everything you can imagine, including clicks, now they all know it instead of having to guess.

Still wont change much though, its very hard to game since Google has a lot of ways of mitigating click farms or it would have discovered a long time ago.

Back in the day a friend mentioned you could choose what version of a phrase you wanted to make the canonical for a search autocompletion by embedding a broken image call to a SERP page for the version of a keyword you wanted to be more popular.

Google has tons of ways to identify real users versus fake users. And lots of the fake it until you make it efforts leave statistical outliers that can lead to ignoring or smoothing away much of the benefits, especially if there is no fire following the smoke trail.

What could be worse than recipe pages that are 20 pages worth of text with the recipe hiding somewhere among the text?

They could split it in multiple pages instead of a single page! Imagine having to click “next part” >10 times just to see if you eventually end up with a section that contains the actual recipe

And unskippable ads after every third image. Then the moment you get to the final image there’s an email registration wall. It has a little X button that doesn’t work on iOS.

I see that we have a connoisseur of the devil’s work here :)

The thing is, there's a limit to how many times the typical user would do that before just clicking back to google for a different recipe.

They also break the back button.

That's why I open search results in a new tab, and close the tab to go back to the search.

Me too, but I still hate it when they break the back button.

Create a fake google page, inject it into their history, the users goes back, sees something google like, now you’re 100% evil, congrats! :)

For me the recipe sites are pretty usable (with adblock), there is generally a "jump to recipe" button to skip past the text. And sometimes I even read the text, if it is a good recipe the text often has useful information like substitutions and preparation techniques. Certainly a "just the recipe" website format would be worse SEO-wise, but I am not so sure it would be more useful.

Almost all of them now have a "jump to recipe" link at the top of the page.

Sites that have a poor user experience by design create the ranking signals for their own demotion by such design. Get a lot of traffic from search with not many people liking the destination page and that ranking will quickly go away.

Isn't Kagi dependant on Google for their results? Doesn't seem tenable in the long-term to me.

Are you thinking of ddg? Afaik kagi runs their own independent engine from scratch.

>Our own index of the finest results augmented by the results from the best search engines on the market.

https://kagi.com/

The design is too monochromatic.

DDG uses Bing. Them blocking trackers except when they come from Microsoft (because of this search engine deal) is why I don't really care about using DDG.

You can use bangs to search on Google, but that's not the default.

Kagi is a Meta Search engine (it uses other search engines API e.g. Google, Yandex, Brave Search, Marginalia, ...) + it has its own (tiny) index, their own index mostly consits of their "Small Web" pages.

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