this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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Technology
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This whole SEO business disgusts me. It’s destroyed the web, meaning the content is no longer as important as the stuff you do to make Google suggest your site. I try to restrict myself to sites I know well, ones whose content I trust. Yay web! Not.
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.
Actually other search engines do much better with Lemmy. Kagi's search works wonders if you select the filter for Fediverse Forums. And you can assign that filter to a bang, such as !lemmy, so that when you search "!lemmy query here" it'll search only on the fediverse A few examples:
Interesting. I just signed up for their "trial" version and punched my keywords in -- "geophysical equipment rentals canada" and my region to Canada -- my company came up first, followed by our primary Canadian competitor. It wasn't until item number 8 that the SEO crap pages started showing up. Very nice. Now I just need to figure out how to make this a business expense ;)
Their search results constantly impress me and honestly it's 10 bucks for unlimited searches, it's worth it even if it's not a business expense, plus since you're paying for the service they're less likely to track you. I wish their code was FOSS, but I'll take it, still better than google, bing, and all the others I've tried.
Also they actively promote the small web and you can even personalize your search results by removing websites you don't like from the searches (for example I have a lot of big tech websites blocked)