• ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    Five years ago this was valid. Hell even two years ago.

    Today… You’re most likely to get a bullshit sales pitch disguised as a blog that doesn’t actually answer any question you asked but has one word in it from your question sentence.

    • herrcaptain@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      God, this is so infuriatingly true. A few months ago I searched for info on types of spiders in my province, because I wanted to learn more about my many housemates. All of the top links were SEO blog spam that were clearly duplicate pages rebranded for different keywords (something that Google’s algorithm used to penalize but apparently no longer gives a shit about). I know this because, no, black widows are not fucking native to Manitoba, Canada.

      Not to mention that goddamn annoying way of writing that SEO blog spam uses where they are so obviously reaching for long tail keywords. My job used to involve some of this stuff back when the search engines pretended to care about good content - when you were at least nominally rewarded with page rank for content that read like it was written by a person with a soul. Now it’s just a wasteland of mechanical prose. There’s still good stuff being said out there, but good like finding it with a search engine.

    • SeekPie@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      I’ve found best search results with either DDG or Startpage, no ads, (probably) more private than Google.