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« Last post by superboyac on December 30, 2009, 01:44 PM »
I can't say I'm an expert on internet history other than having used it extensively over the past 15 years, but it's my opinion that SEO has almost ruined the internet. Now, it may not just be SEO, but I'm using that word to represent all the things related to artificially promoting things so that they show up in web searches. There's so much out there that is crap, and finding what you really need to find is next to impossible. If I sound incoherent, it's because I am not the expert in the details of what has happened.
I was speaking to a friend of mine. He wrote a couple of websites for the sole purpose to rank high in search engines using SEO. He wrote about online education. He knows nothing about online education, but he wrote articles about it, just to have some content. The articles contain advice. But they were written strategically using the right words and strategies to rank high in search engines. The point is, the articles are useless. This is everywhere in the internet. Software download sites, review sites, blogs,...90% of them are beyond useless, they are often nonsensical.
It's almost the search engine has lost it's true value: to be able to find information. Since there is so much crap when you search for something, and because the crap may very well be ranked high, that's all you will see. The good stuff will be either lost in the mix, and often not there at all. The only way to find good stuff is by word of mouth: someone like here on DC sending you the link of where to go. So, the fundamental characteristic of the "search" engine has lost it's value.
I mean, I can't find anything anymore that is good and reliable without asking someone where to find it. For example, recently I was searching for good weather software and the top country songs in 2009. Using just the search engines, the results were frustratingly poor. No good, intelligent, reliable matches. Just things infested with ads and fake SEO articles that seem to be obviously written for the sole purpose of click revenue. For the weather software, I had to rely on our forums here to find the answer. And that's great, but the sad thing is that the search engines were a catastrophic failure.
It seems the only good I get from search engines is to find a match when I've already figured out 90% of what I need to know. For example, let's say I want weather software, and I've heard Weather Watcher was good. Well, I type "weather watcher" in the search just to find the exact address. Well, all the search engine did was tell me the exact address i was looking for, I did most of the figuring out myself. Now, if I searched from scratch for weather software, I would never in hours of searching come across the site for the program Meteo Fusion, which I ended up liking. This is true for just about any search.
But, if I really think about it, that's the way the world works. Eventually, word of mouth is the most reliable source of information, even before internet days. If you were shopping for something, you could go to a mall and try to see what's good and what's not. but it's better if someone tells you of a great store, that you would never find on your own because it's in the middle of a street somewhere. So, that part is normal and not so surprising. however, the internet has potential to be so much more, yet it is so not. Thankfully, there are sites like Wikipedia, which have managed to remain very good all this time. it's almost more useful than the search engines.
So, that's what I've been thinking about. I feel like the true nature of the search engine is just about gone. You can't search for anything and trust the results. And it's not even close. I'd be ok if you could trust even as little as 30% of the results you get. But if you do a cold search for something, with no help from anyone else, you won't come close.
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It's true. In the classic words of one of my friends, "That...was...bad." Of course, I wouldn't have minded seeing a little more of the 70's show girl.