Agree with the premise, but seems to me that the article does not justify this. I can understand ads, but ads do not affect search results. If you move past ads now (which most users do as they habitually ignore the space where ads would be) even then you should expect good results.
SEO seems to be a big problem. Just saying Google is big and they should fix it ignores the nuance and the whole cat and mouse game that goes on. Eg: I am based in India, and am looking for which cable channel/streaming service is broadcasting a game of my favorite soccer team. The first 10 results would not have the answer, but as a user you would only know that after opening the link and reading through 500 or so words introducing teams, opposition, competition, form etc. but not what I am looking for. Most of these are news websites, who would make a loud noise if their results do not come on top. For a search engine relying on signals (even with AI), it's an incredibly hard problem to know if those 500 words would have the exact answer. [1]
Reddit is good for searches where things are in flux, or when it's a user centric thing. Because they have done the SEO well. Similarly the results leading to Stack Overflow for developers are equally important. Yet, when you want to research on some topic, or learn more, you would inevitably start with Google.
If I were to predict, Google would start identifying trends and slowly start ranking reddit higher for user centric queries. In my limited dev experience, that is already happening for Stack overflow. I love how the results are clubbed together under the first result.
[1] The result which surfaces often include the direct question: "How to watch team A v team B game in India?". How do you design algos to combat that and yet include legitimate results. Have a lot of text on the page is often the most given advice on SEO.
> If I were to predict, Google would start identifying trends and slowly start ranking reddit higher for user centric queries. In my limited dev experience, that is already happening for Stack overflow. I love how the results are clubbed together under the first result.
Weird, I'm having the opposite experience with stackoverflow pages. Often I get pages from random websites that copy and paste stackoverflow content with some jammed-in SEO ABOVE the actual stackoverflow results.
SEO seems to be a big problem. Just saying Google is big and they should fix it ignores the nuance and the whole cat and mouse game that goes on. Eg: I am based in India, and am looking for which cable channel/streaming service is broadcasting a game of my favorite soccer team. The first 10 results would not have the answer, but as a user you would only know that after opening the link and reading through 500 or so words introducing teams, opposition, competition, form etc. but not what I am looking for. Most of these are news websites, who would make a loud noise if their results do not come on top. For a search engine relying on signals (even with AI), it's an incredibly hard problem to know if those 500 words would have the exact answer. [1]
Reddit is good for searches where things are in flux, or when it's a user centric thing. Because they have done the SEO well. Similarly the results leading to Stack Overflow for developers are equally important. Yet, when you want to research on some topic, or learn more, you would inevitably start with Google.
If I were to predict, Google would start identifying trends and slowly start ranking reddit higher for user centric queries. In my limited dev experience, that is already happening for Stack overflow. I love how the results are clubbed together under the first result.
[1] The result which surfaces often include the direct question: "How to watch team A v team B game in India?". How do you design algos to combat that and yet include legitimate results. Have a lot of text on the page is often the most given advice on SEO.