Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? - The Verge
Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? - The Verge
SEO experts got very rich filling the web full of garbage. But are they to blame or is Google?
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Does anyone ever talk about how we can fix it?
Use different services.
We're already in the process of fixing it by using Lemmy instead of reddit.
Something that has been SEO'd for Google is still going to feature prominantly on ddg or bing. There are other reasons to switch off Google, but seo isn't going to stop being a problem.
I started using Kagi. By paying for the search engine, at least I can ensure the search engine's goals align with mine, instead of with whoever pays most for advertisement. I haven't used it for a long time yet, but so far I'm satisfied with its results!
Hate to bust your bubble but Kagi is just a fancy meta search engine that still uses bing,google and a few others for its queries. Its not a real search engine in its own right. A good searxng instance like https://paulgo.io will give you similar results without paying 10$ a month for it.
Support people who host these free and open source services out of pocket with donations. Not yet another business offering yet another subscription. Promising 'were not like those other guys, for reals jut trust us' while not being able to gaurentee they won't turn into greedy bastards and start whittling your user rights/rolling in the ads later.
It doesn't really matter to me if they use their own crawler or use results from another search engine. What matters to me is the results i'm seeing for my search queries. And if they "roll in the ads later" or the service deteriorates, I can still switch to another search engine.
No need for "just trust us", if you can just compare the product yourself🤷♂️
I hope that if that day comes you may consider trying out some searxng instances, as they do probably give similar results as kagi as both pool results from the same true search engines. I am so fustrated that we are at a point where people feel the need to pay 120$ a year for something that has been a staple of the free as in freedom internet forever, especially when things like SearXNG exist.
Maybe I will take a look at that, why not?
But no solution is really free. Either you pay directly (Kagi), or it is paid through ads (Google) or it is some free open source solution, which then is paid through the time people put into it in their free time and in that case there should be donations or contributions as well, at least from people who can afford it. 🤷♂️
Its the third option, and no while nothing in computer infrastructure is ever truly free as theres always operational+maintenance cost as well as dev time and setup time, when nothing is at cost to the end user and the hosting provider isn't trying to make a profit off their information then I consider it good grounds to it a 'free' service. I actually just posted a guide to alternative search engines over at [email protected] , you may find it an interesting read.
Yikes.
I think it's not in our hand. We can only hide annoyances by a content blocker.
We need some 10 foot alligators to fix it.