Technology

It's not that this article is bad, but it is what frustrates me about tech journalism, and why I started writing about tech. None of these people have any idea how the internet actually works. They've never written a line of code, or set up a server, or published an app, or even done SEO, so they end up turning everything into a human interest piece, where they interview the people involved and some experts, but report it with that famous "view from nowhere."

Some blame Google itself, asserting that an all-powerful, all-seeing, trillion-dollar corporation with a 90 percent market share for online search is corrupting our access to the truth. But others blame the people I wanted to see in Florida, the ones who engage in the mysterious art of search engine optimization, or SEO.

Let me answer that definitively: it's google, in multiple ways, one of which isn't even search, which I know because I actually do make things on the internet. SEO people aren't helping, for sure, but I've seen many journalists and others talk about how blogspam is the result of SEO, and maybe that's the origin story, but at this point, it is actually the result of google's monopoly on advertising, not search. I've posted this before on this community, but google forces you to turn your website into blogspam in order to monetize it. Cluttering the internet with bullshit content is their explicit content policy. It's actually very direct and straightforward. It's widely and openly discussed on internet forums about monetizing websites.

There are some people that make 99% of the world 1% worse for the profit. The author lets them off the hook because “they’re just trying to make money”. As if having an understandable motive would redeem the “SEOs”.

Newsflash, it doesn’t. These are organized crime groups as far as I’m concerned. The law just hasn’t or $won’t$ prosecute them for the selfish damage they’ve caused.

If I have a society of 100 people, 2 start a search engine for the others, 1 starts an anti-search engine whose stated goal is to mislead the other search engine users while stealing profit from the 2 innovators who bettered humanity.

I spare no positive feelings for these pond-scum criminals.

IMO the problem really took off when smart phones entered the equation. When any idiot can get online with almost zero barrier to entry, then every idiot will get online. It's why I like Lemmy; it's not popular and the difficulty to access it is marginally harder than Reddit's.

Once the Internet was saturated with idiots then marketing and monetization followed along. Capitalism is seriously the 5th Horseman of the Apocalypse.

While the author describes them as nice and sympathetic, literally every action described and every quote makes them seem like insufferable douchebags. Maybe the author...

Neither. Monetization is the cause. If the standard were still "your site is a hobby, you should expect to fund it out of pocket", none of the rest would matter.

Now you’ve outdone Google.

Alright, calm down. If they "outdid" Google, they would have their own SEO dreamland platform. All they did was work within the confines of Google's algorithms, A/B testing until something works. When Google makes changes they repeat. Overall the Internet is in a reeeeally shitty state due to the marketization of search results. There have been some things I have searched for whereby there were pages of what was essentially cloned articles. Many times I'm unable to even find what I'm looking for. Recent example, there was that article posted about that AI service / software that aimed to poison images, I don't remember the name. I tried searching for the actual software / website. I gave up and never found it through the utter bullshit "articles" all spouting the exact same thing and clearly taking advantage of the "freshness" and relevancy of the tool.

Maybe people are to harsh on the author for their writing style. They tell the reader that they don't have experience in the field themselves but rather dipping a toe in the world that is SEO. I for one had no idea of the scale of the enterprise, figures they quote from years ago which make your jaw drop.

Obviously the people who work in SEO will make it sound like honest work. As long as there are search engines which got to have accurate results, there will be people trying to place their website above another one. High rolling SEO consultants probably aren't that concerned with the content they are promoting though, just the fact that it gets promoted, raising ethical questions.

As of a some years ago, I too noticed a decline in quality from search results. The face that Mr. Sullivan made snide remarks about it actually improving made me frown pretty hard. Between displaying the same spam website multiple times under different urls, literal bait and switch scams and literally impossible to find niche shit sometimes. I've unironically used Bing more this year then ever in my life, but mainly DDG for a good 5 years.

I've been using Kagi and I like it. It's not perfect. It's not great. Hell, it might not even be good. But it's better than Google. And I decided I wanted to support a search engine that does not depend on ad revenue.

Before reading the article: Is it the right wing fascist nutjobs that have infected every platform and space, destroying everything in their wake slowly but surely over the past decade?

oh

They're "prompt engineers" now :/

They finally got around to introducing themselves.

Pais Ajit? Pronounced "piece of shit". He broke the Internet allowing some traffic to get faster speeds than other such that YouTube can be fast but if you serve your own it's slow.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Maybe I could even repackage such a tragedy into a sensationalized anecdote for a viral article about the people who do SEO for a living, strongly implying that nature was here to punish the bad guy while somehow also assuming the ethical high ground and pretending I hadn’t been hoping this exact thing would happen from the start.

He was the kind of tall, charming man who described himself multiple times as “a nerd,” and he pointed out that even though working directly with search engine rankings is “no longer monetizing at the highest payout,” the same “core knowledge of SEO” remains relevant for everything from native advertising to social media.

As sunset turned to dusk, I found Daron Babin again, and he started telling me about one of his signature moves, back in the ’90s, involving fake domain names: “I could make it look like it was somebody else, but it actually redirected to me!” What he and his competitors did was legal but well beyond what the dominant search engine allowed.

Unlike the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world, who went from geeky teenagers to masters of the universe, the dorks who grew up to do SEO have stayed the butt of the joke, beholden to the fluctuations of the algorithm, frantically pulling levers behind the scenes but ultimately somewhat hapless.

Google was slow to allow someone to talk with me, possibly because of the giant PR clusterfuck that has been the company’s past year (accused by the federal government of being a monopoly; increasingly despised by the public; losing ground to Reddit, TikTok, and large language models), so I decided to start by meeting up with a chipper, charismatic man named Duane Forrester.

Once he represented Bing, Forrester more or less stopped drinking at conferences, as had long been the case for his counterpart at Google, an engineer named Matt Cutts, who helped build and then ran the company’s web spam team before stepping back in 2014 and leaving in 2016.

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