News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:How SEO Ruined the Internet by DoubleGlazing on Monday April 06, 2020 @07:40AM (#22792809)
That's why I miss pre-Google search engines such as AltaVista and alltheweb. "If you searched for "some obscure string of words" you would only get results that matches that exact string. I really don't like how Google just chooses to vary the spelling of your query when a match isn't found. I often search for electronics components using their part number. I'll type in something like "P204PPX" (a random code I just made up) and despite there being no match Google still gives me pages of results that are nowhere near what I was looking for.

And the worst thing is that this is all done to keep those ad dollars flowing. Look at how many companies always have a paid advert associated with their name when a search is made. They are paranoid about losing rank due to Google fiddling their algorithm or someone else doing a better SEO job using their brand.

Re:How SEO Ruined the Internet by KMag on Monday April 06, 2020 @06:14PM (#22798413)
Google used to respect search operators, and dramatically tone down query optimization for queries that contained operators. As I've written elsewhere, I suspect learn-to-rank is to blame[0], by optimizing ranking for generic sloppy queries despite your query being very focused.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22747889

Re:How SEO Ruined the Internet by fingerlocks on Tuesday April 07, 2020 @07:09AM (#22802147)
If a match isn’t found with your verbatim query, then it falls back to something similar. At least that’s my experience.

Random string of text still matches exact in quotes: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%9CI%20really%20don%27...