alongtheray
alongtheray

An SEO expert friend of mine is stressing over an upcoming search algorithm update that will hammer a lot of sites.

Google has gotten so big that it dictates to the Internet. It should be the other way around — the Internet should be dictating to Google. Sigh.

|
Embed
mdrockwell
mdrockwell

@alongtheray this. How do we convince people to switch? And what to? DuckDuckGo? Maybe Brave's search engine will be good?

|
Embed
numericcitizen
numericcitizen

@mdrockwell switched to DuckDuckGo a long time ago.

|
Embed
numericcitizen
numericcitizen

@alongtheray first, consider this: https://numericcitizen.me/2019/11/16/ok-google-what-happened-on-november-8/

Then, also this: https://numericcitizen.me/2020/06/01/will-this-blog-ever-recover/

I’m prepared. I shouldn’t give a shit.

|
Embed
mdrockwell
mdrockwell

@numericcitizen same. I wish more people would.

|
Embed
pimoore
pimoore

@mdrockwell @numericcitizen I switched to DDG long ago too, and Google couldn’t pay me to go back to them. The control that corporation has over content — and the internet — is terrifying. Unless you use something else you see what Google wants, and it’s about to get worse.

|
Embed
scojjac
scojjac
@peterimoore I recall an article expressing concern that DDG surfaces extremist content if your search doesn’t have enough legitimate results or isn’t common enough, but I haven’t experienced that. I treat Google as a backup for search and maps, and don’t often have need for it.
|
Embed
pimoore
pimoore

@scojjac I’ve never encountered that either, seems implausible to me. Same as you I only use Google as a backup if I don’t get good results from DDG — which isn’t often — and it’s a quick !g away. DDG’s !bangs functionality is absolutely stellar, I can’t imagine not using it.

|
Embed
alongtheray
alongtheray

@mdrockwell Good question. I use DDG as well and whenever the subject comes up I tell others to try different engines. I do have a little concern that DDG relies on Bing for results though... would that be switching from one monopolist to another?

|
Embed
mdrockwell
mdrockwell

@alongtheray they have their own web crawler and index, though. I think they're just using Bing for some search features (not sure what ones specifically).

|
Embed
alongtheray
alongtheray

@numericcitizen Excellent write ups and revealing as well. Google has a disproportionate impact on my sports media business — our reporters put out high quality, informative content (that even our readers pay for) and yet tons of junk websites show up way before we do in Google’s results no matter what we do.

One of the ways we’ve lessened reliance on Google is to make it as irrelevant as possible; ie we have a big community and forum that pulls in via word of mouth. It helps but I’d like to see Google’s influence on the Internet reduced.

|
Embed
numericcitizen
numericcitizen

@alongtheray Google looks like a kingdom’s king that we have to feed and please, isn’t? I like this image.

|
Embed
alongtheray
alongtheray

@numericcitizen Ayup. Time for a peasant uprising! ; )

|
Embed
alongtheray
alongtheray

@mdrockwell Thanks for the clarification!

|
Embed
mdrockwell
mdrockwell

@alongtheray 👍

|
Embed
pimoore
pimoore

@numericcitizen @alongtheray J.F. that’s brilliant, I’m totally bookmarking that line! 👍🏻

|
Embed
In reply to
alongtheray
alongtheray

@scojjac I haven't see this happening in my results so far. @peterimoore Agreed, love the bangs! Makes it easy for the times I need more outside results.

|
Embed
alongtheray
alongtheray

@numericcitizen Speak of the devil... just saw this:

The End of AMP – lafoo – ramblings about the online world

Let me package that up for you – Google, the most dominant search engine globally – used that dominant market position to encourage publishers to adopt technology so that Google could store and serve publisher’s content on Google’s domain.

|
Embed
alongtheray
alongtheray

An interesting aspect in article showed AMP pages brought in less revenue than non-AMP pages (and were faster).

|
Embed
numericcitizen
numericcitizen

@alongtheray AMP was a bad idea from the first micro-seconds an engineer thought about it.

|
Embed
numericcitizen
numericcitizen

@alongtheray by disabling AMP pages on my main blog site (numericcitizen.me), my page insight score went from 27 (very bad) to 74 (which is not perfect but way better). mobile users are a minority on my blog. so, there's that!

|
Embed
mdrockwell
mdrockwell

@alongtheray AMP was such a bad idea. I hate that Google used their influence to convince people to use it.

|
Embed