No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Yes. If you do a search on this site for posts about google, you'll find multiple threads about this. Basically it seems that google is losing the arms race against SEO, and new LLM bots are mostly responsible.
What does this mean in particular?
Companies are better at getting their shitty product/spammy pages to the top of search results than Google is able to find high quality pages to show you.
Google has to create algorithms to judge pages based on their content and get good results , companies only have to fine tune their pages to match the algorithm.
IIRC Google penalizes sites if they are detected to be abusing the SEO system. Not sure how effective the detection is though.
Poor, if my google search results are anything to go by
It's actually very tricky to implement because people have used it to do "negative SEO". Which is essentially making it seem like your competitors are abusing the system to get their results lowered.
People with mediocre content using SEO to get themselves higher in the search results than sites with actual information on them. That way when searching for something you need to dig through the shit to get to the nugget of actual useful info.
Search engines tried to rank pages based on how big the chance is the info the user is looking for is actually on that page. SEO makes it so that pages with a lower chance of containing the right info, are ranked before pages with a higher chance. This leads those pages to get more hits and thus marketing thinks it's done their job. But in reality it just pisses off users, blaming the dumb sites that do this and more often the search engine. Search engines are trying to fight this, but SEO is big business, so they are losing the battle.
Now these days there are more issues, like search engines not having access to a lot of info in so called walled gardens. So more good info gets created in places where it can't easily be found. Also search engines have become more and more advertisement machines instead of search engines and with this shift in priorities, the user experience deteriorates.
But yeah SEO sucks and has always sucked.
Search Engine Optimization. Not providing the best search result, but tricking the search engine into thinking you have the best result.
It means if you search for anything, your first 3 pages of hits are the same useless websites that exist to push ads vaguely related to your search rather than real info. Trying to research a broken TV used to return things like AVForums or reddit threads or samsung support sites. Now it's "TEN BEST TV's IN 2024" that are nothing but sponsored content and affiliate links to tvs on amazon.
Google can't figure out how to tell the difference between the former and the latter, and isn't motivated to because they get paid for the ad clicks, and not for the forum clicks.
Oh they know, they just choose to shovel the shit for money.
If google detected continuing searching after a page visit, then that page you looked at was probably not having the right answer, right?
SEO solution : make super long pages with the history of what you are looking for and adding mumbo jumbo stuff to bloat out the page so you stay there longer. Now google thinks you found what you looked for.
And a lot of other crap ofc.
Ahhh, that's the goal behind those overly long explanations about how Jimbo Jimboson invented the spoon when I just want to look up soup recipies.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
The technicals of all the ways this is done nowadays are complicated, but basically SEO itself is now a pretty huge industry, just website owners paying SEO companies to show up higher in search results.
Basically the scenario we are now in is that companies that can afford to game and manipulate the way google's search algorithm works in terms of prioritizing 'relevance', ie, what you see first, have been so successful at this that it has essentially ruined the ability to find any website that cannot afford to do so.
This would be something like 99.999% of existing websites are going to be much harder to find without going through pages and pages of results, whereas a tiny number of websites that can afford massive SEO are going to show up on the first page, as well as in search results for search terms they are barely related to at all.
SEO (search engine "optimization") is how a search engine ranks its results. The more webpages link to a certain result (as determined by a webcrawler), the higher it is displayed. That is why bloggers are often paid by bad actors to publish editorials that link to a scam, virus, or gambling website.
Google popularized the concept in its early years, back when SEO was an organic indicator of a result's popularity. It made them the single best choice. Then, capitalism happened, and SEO became a resource to exploit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bARSNVobUk
Google chose to ignore the SEO arms race. Winning it is trivial, if you detect anything even remotely grey-hat, blacklist the entire domain. Forever. Then SEO stops being a thing because no one wants to risk toeing the line.
What incentive does Google have to even put up a fight? Worse results = more time searching = more "traffic" = more ad revenue. It's not like they really have to worry about search engine competitors. Please do not try to recommend DDG to me. It is just a different flavor of garbage.
It was bad before LLM spam became widespread, it's just even worse now.
Yes, there's a great article I read a while back about how and why recipe web sites became so bad and frustrating. Basically, a good website would show you the recipe, you would read it and leave. However, since you didn't spend much time on the site, google would rank it much lower.
On the other hand, if you encountered a long rambling story that you had to read through and scroll through ads, before getting to the useful information, then google would rank the site higher because you spent more time on it. That's why there are so many memes about how bad recipe website are.
And of course, even before LLMs, it was trivial to implement a copy paste bot to create a massive number of web sites.