You’ve got to add “reddit” to any search term to get answers to anything. Sadly, and perhaps due to the distributed nature of lemmy (and the relatively young nature of the network), lemmy results are still not great.

I run a small business – a niche business in scientific equipment. I have about a half dozen competitors in North America, and maybe a few dozen globally. So you’d think it would be fairly easy to dominate the search results for those specific terms – and we do!

However, mixed in with the search results are a bunch of shell companies that don’t actually have any equipment – they exist only to drive traffic to another company through their website to get a referrer bonus. So it looks like there’s more competition than there is, but really it’s just a bunch of optimizers creating these shell companies to earn referral income. And those sites are terrible! We refuse to stoop to that level.

Unfortunately, google makes too much money now, and is too beholden to their shareholders to change it. So unless a competitor shows up with “don’t be evil” back on the menu, with their own algorithms (and not just repackaged bing or whatever), we’re stuck with this for now I guess.

I miss the google of ~1999 when it was disrupting the crap search engines. Now it’s just another crap search engine.