Comment on I didn't know HOW bad Google search has gotten.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Part of the problem is that Google nowe defaults to “All” (web, shopping, news, video, etc) instead of defaulting to Web only and allowing you to select if you want video, or shopping or news etc. That’s a lot of what I see complained about most.
This is first and foremost because Google is an ad aggregation company and they literally want to keep you on the page longer to serve you more ads.
The second problem is that the SEO for Google is so abused at this point that it’s laughable. Search engine optimisation was useful until companies and people started trying to hack it in order to have their results show up before competitors. Because large competitors also have money, it’s no longer enough to just pay to play.
BigDiction@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Feel free to correct me as I see other comments saying the same thing, but I don’t believe Google wants you to spend a lot of time reviewing a specific search result.
They don’t have refreshing display or video ads where time on site really makes a difference. They want you to click on a sponsored result, which is a paid action worth way more than a viewed impression.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The more you scroll, the more ads they can serve on one page. So if you scroll to the bottom, don’t see the results you want, you’re likely to try to reword what you were searching for which will bring up new results and more ads. When you think about the fact that 4-5 of the first results are ads generally (if not more) and you have to scroll past those to get a result that isn’t an ad, you recognize that they are maximizing time spent looking at ads because that’s what they are selling to their real customers (the ad services for whom they aggregate).
This scenario makes it more likely that you will click on a sponsored result, backtrack, scroll some more, not see what you’re looking for, re-word your search query, click on maybe another sponsored result, backtrack etc.