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How do people find good information on the internet these days? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by catch22@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

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It used to be that you would do a search on a relevant subject and get blog posts, forums posts, and maybe a couple of relevant companies offering the product or service. (And if you wanted more information on said company you could give them a call and actually talk to a real person about said service) You could even trust amazon and yelp reviews. Now searches have been completely taken over by Forbes top 10 lists, random affiliate link click through aggregators that copy and paste each others work, review factories that will kill your competitors and boost your product stars, ect.... It seems like the internet has gotten soooo much harder to use, just because you have to wade through all the bullshit. It's no wonder people switch to reddit and lemmy style sites, in a way it mirrors a little what kind of information you used to be able to garner from the internet in it's early days. What do people do these days to find genuine information about products or services?

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[–] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

SEO solved the problem it was meant to fix, i.e. "users arent looking at our site enough." You're fooling yourself if you think it was ever about making searches more useful for the user.

The very conceit of SEO defeats the purpose of a search. The idea is the search combs through sites, finds what the user wants, and returns it to them based on what it believes is the closest match to what the user wanted. It's a process between two parties: the user and the search engine. The second the websites start trying to inject themselves into this process by adjusting their content to the search, it corrupts the process.

Picture yourself in a library looking through the card catalog. You're searching for something, using a system to locate it. Imagine if the books you're looking for spontaneously changed their titles or authorship just to "help you find them" while you're flipping through cards. Imagine if you're walking down the shelves and books are literally shifting around like fucking Hogwarts, trying to get in front of you.

That is the inherent issue with SEO. No one but the user knows what the user wants to see, the content trying to adjust itself to appear in the results more consistently isn't about helping the user find what they want, it's about making sure the user sees that specific content.

Because every website wants traffic. That's all it is.