A lot of people dont remember pre-google these days.
Normal search engines worked, but Google was better results.
Now that every website is gaming SEO and the top half of search results is ads that pay to be first…
Google isn’t that much better. I went to DuckDuckGo recently. The only thing Google does better is local results. But that’s because Google always knows where I am and where I’ve been.
There’s no longer a reason to use Google as a search engine, except habit.
I think what really governs peoples habits is whatever their browser of choice sets as the default. Unless they go out of their way to swap it themselves, which they usually don’t.
Not really a direct response to what you were saying, just sort of musing here lol
Yeah I think this might be true. There are a lot of people who are functionally illiterate when it comes to technology and just use things how they come out of the box. I always wish I could do something to help change that.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember browsers ever having a default search engine back then, did they? One had to bookmark it or type it in the address bar?
Yeah, there was definitely a time where you had to navigate to a site to then do the search. I know having Google integrated right there in the address bar in chrome was something I loved when I first started using it (2009 or so maybe?) but I don’t think that was the first time I had ever encountered it. Definitely the earliest I remember.
To this day, just searching from the address bar feels wrong to me lol. I was so happy to discover that Firefox has a setting to add a dedicated search box.
I still search from the address bar on mobile, but on PC it’s always in the search box. I find it easier to switch between search engines and compare results that way as well.
There are a lot of old-school habits that are still baked into my mind.
I remember pre-Google. There were a few human curated sites back then (like DMoz and Yahoo). I’m thinking that might be a way to combat spam and AI sites. As a side bonus, maybe it will help de-Google the planet.
I’m looking for a Wikipedia-but-for-the-web, where human curators find real web content for me. I found Curlie.org, and tried to sign up for it, but never got a response back on my sign-ups. Still I’m hopeful for something like that.
DMOZ had 100k volunteers curating the content at some point, and had a whole complex process to prevent abuse and so on. It will be hard to get going again.
But yeah, who would’ve thought that a mere decade after being discontinued it would become relevant again.
Just to be clear; “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization” is a technique marketers use to craft web pages in a way that tricks search engine crawlers into considering them more relevant. It is not something search engines themselves do, and in many cases they actively fight against it.
So, it’s not whether or not DuckDuckGo uses SEO, it’s whether or not they’re susceptible to it.
To be clear, SEO isn’t about tricking search engines per se. First and foremost it’s about optimizing a given website so that the crawling and indexing of the website’s content is working well.
It’s just that various websites have tried various “tricks” over time to mislead the crawling, indexing and ultimately the search engine ranking, just so their website comes up higher and more often than it should based on its content’s quality and relevancy.
Tricks like:
keyword stuffing
hidden content just visible to crawlers
…
Those docs linked above (that link is just part of much more docs) even mention many of those “tricks” and explicitely advise against them, as it will cause websites to be penalized in their ranking.
Well, at least that’s what the docs say.
In the end it’s an “arms race” between search engines and trickery using websites.
The Google ads team is functionally all of the company’s revenue.
Google search still remains their most used product offering with most of their ad revenue (58.1% in 2022).
Google leadership is terrified that anyone could eat their lunch, because they know the search offering is getting worse and worse.
The origin of Google was taking out complacent search companies that had gotten comfy.
I’m pretty sure when I was laid off (1 year ago yesterday ❤️❤️ thanks Google) it was because they saw LLMs as a threat they hadn’t taken seriously enough… Combined with that asshole billionaire being pissy that Google was only making 1.2 million per employee instead of 1.3 million.
It’s why they care so much about ublock origin and other ad blockers. That is cutting into about 20% of their ad revenue, it is considered the largest consumer boycott in the world. That is not an insignificant amount of money! Not that I feel bad for Google in the slightest lol
With the end result of enshittification, people will migrate if their experience is bad enough. Google wants to strike a balance between making as much money as humanly possible and making the search experience at least decent enough to retain the majority of their users.
I would venture a guess that most people aren’t even realizing that their results are crap. I can’t even see them realizing it until after, I don’t know, all of the products they found via Google search and purchased wound up being gimmicky crap like MyPillow? Even then, I would be really surprised if they figured out what was going on.
True, if you look at YouTube, it’s been getting worse and worse over time and yet people still go there, but that’s also due to there being not that many good alternatives that have a bunch of content. Google has a ton of other good alternatives to compete with, so they’re betting on the laziness factor and probably that people don’t know better.
What fight? Google is making money, and nearly everyone is playing Google’s game following their tune. Google is definitely not losing.
A lot of people dont remember pre-google these days.
Normal search engines worked, but Google was better results.
Now that every website is gaming SEO and the top half of search results is ads that pay to be first…
Google isn’t that much better. I went to DuckDuckGo recently. The only thing Google does better is local results. But that’s because Google always knows where I am and where I’ve been.
There’s no longer a reason to use Google as a search engine, except habit.
Pretty much same with chrome
The main thing that got me switching to Google back then wasn’t the better results, but their promise not to collect or use our data.
That all changed after 9/11, but by then Google had grown so huge it was hard to avoid them.
Even so, I still went back to Webcrawler and the others quite a lot and never really consistently used one search engine faithfully.
I think what really governs peoples habits is whatever their browser of choice sets as the default. Unless they go out of their way to swap it themselves, which they usually don’t.
Not really a direct response to what you were saying, just sort of musing here lol
Yeah I think this might be true. There are a lot of people who are functionally illiterate when it comes to technology and just use things how they come out of the box. I always wish I could do something to help change that.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember browsers ever having a default search engine back then, did they? One had to bookmark it or type it in the address bar?
Yeah, there was definitely a time where you had to navigate to a site to then do the search. I know having Google integrated right there in the address bar in chrome was something I loved when I first started using it (2009 or so maybe?) but I don’t think that was the first time I had ever encountered it. Definitely the earliest I remember.
To this day, just searching from the address bar feels wrong to me lol. I was so happy to discover that Firefox has a setting to add a dedicated search box.
I still search from the address bar on mobile, but on PC it’s always in the search box. I find it easier to switch between search engines and compare results that way as well.
There are a lot of old-school habits that are still baked into my mind.
Interesting I never thought of it as a bad thing! By the way, I am not the one who downvoted you just so we’re clear lol
Maybe I should try setting that dedicated search bar as well on my Firefox and see how I like it. What do you like about it?
I remember pre-Google. There were a few human curated sites back then (like DMoz and Yahoo). I’m thinking that might be a way to combat spam and AI sites. As a side bonus, maybe it will help de-Google the planet.
I’m looking for a Wikipedia-but-for-the-web, where human curators find real web content for me. I found Curlie.org, and tried to sign up for it, but never got a response back on my sign-ups. Still I’m hopeful for something like that.
Yahoo was DMOZ (its directory used DMOZ data).
DMOZ had 100k volunteers curating the content at some point, and had a whole complex process to prevent abuse and so on. It will be hard to get going again.
But yeah, who would’ve thought that a mere decade after being discontinued it would become relevant again.
DDG uses Bing as the search API, and I don’t see any evidence that it doesn’t use SEO as well.
Just to be clear; “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization” is a technique marketers use to craft web pages in a way that tricks search engine crawlers into considering them more relevant. It is not something search engines themselves do, and in many cases they actively fight against it.
So, it’s not whether or not DuckDuckGo uses SEO, it’s whether or not they’re susceptible to it.
To add to that, Google is the big one.
So everyone tries to get around googles SEO prevention measures.the little guys just have to do literally anything different
Coincidentally, I happen to have been reading into SEO more in depth this week. Specifically official SEO docs by google:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
To be clear, SEO isn’t about tricking search engines per se. First and foremost it’s about optimizing a given website so that the crawling and indexing of the website’s content is working well.
It’s just that various websites have tried various “tricks” over time to mislead the crawling, indexing and ultimately the search engine ranking, just so their website comes up higher and more often than it should based on its content’s quality and relevancy.
Tricks like:
Those docs linked above (that link is just part of much more docs) even mention many of those “tricks” and explicitely advise against them, as it will cause websites to be penalized in their ranking.
Well, at least that’s what the docs say. In the end it’s an “arms race” between search engines and trickery using websites.
I need to rollback to Google from DDG because the latter seems to refuse to understand that I want to find specific words with “”
And DDG isn’t perfect either, I need to add Reddit as well more than I’d like to.
Google ignores “” too these days.
Really? I haven’t noticed that…
The Google ads team is functionally all of the company’s revenue.
Google search still remains their most used product offering with most of their ad revenue (58.1% in 2022).
Google leadership is terrified that anyone could eat their lunch, because they know the search offering is getting worse and worse.
The origin of Google was taking out complacent search companies that had gotten comfy.
I’m pretty sure when I was laid off (1 year ago yesterday ❤️❤️ thanks Google) it was because they saw LLMs as a threat they hadn’t taken seriously enough… Combined with that asshole billionaire being pissy that Google was only making 1.2 million per employee instead of 1.3 million.
It’s why they care so much about ublock origin and other ad blockers. That is cutting into about 20% of their ad revenue, it is considered the largest consumer boycott in the world. That is not an insignificant amount of money! Not that I feel bad for Google in the slightest lol
With the end result of enshittification, people will migrate if their experience is bad enough. Google wants to strike a balance between making as much money as humanly possible and making the search experience at least decent enough to retain the majority of their users.
I would venture a guess that most people aren’t even realizing that their results are crap. I can’t even see them realizing it until after, I don’t know, all of the products they found via Google search and purchased wound up being gimmicky crap like MyPillow? Even then, I would be really surprised if they figured out what was going on.
True, if you look at YouTube, it’s been getting worse and worse over time and yet people still go there, but that’s also due to there being not that many good alternatives that have a bunch of content. Google has a ton of other good alternatives to compete with, so they’re betting on the laziness factor and probably that people don’t know better.
Yeah they literally created and enforce the rules that dictate how SEO is done. They could change it whenever they want.