this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Keyword searches stopped being useful years ago. Every site owner stuffed every single word they could think of into that field making the whole thing effectively useless.
It’s like how they’re now returning results stuffed to the brim with AI-written crap. Google can only show what’s on the web and that’s all the web is now.
They could attempt to quantify how gamed the result is and reduce its ranking. Also punishing domains with lower ranking the more they return SEO optimised pages. They could also increase the ranking of older pages.
This doesn’t really help google, it only really improves their search results. Google wants these hyper SEO optimised results with lots of advertising. Additionally, the less relevant the result is the more searches a person does. Each search is an additional set of ad impressions.
Google search is better than ever. Because it generates more advertising opportunities for google. Google isn’t in the business of returning good search results, they are in the business of displaying ads.
Google's Execs have been degrading the quality of search to increase engagement with ads.
Its a bit worse than that, because the goal is to get you to scroll around and look at multiple search result pages trying to find what you want. Every new page you visit contains new ads. So Google doesn't want you to click the first thing you see. The goal is to show you a bunch of bad results and force you to test more and more links, hunting around for what you used to find easily.