
Ask HN: Did SEO Ruin the Web? - ent101
Every time I search for a simple question (e.g. &quot;When is the next season of X out?&quot;), rather than getting a simple answer (e.g. &quot;October 20th, 2019&quot;) I&#x27;m given a bunch of articles that seem to be artificially inflated just to make the search engine happy that there is enough content&#x2F;keywords. I feel like publishers don&#x27;t have the best interest of readers in mind anymore and web pages are just a vehicle to deliver keywords wrapped with useless content, and worst of all, this seems to be directly caused and encouraged by search engines.
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lettergram
I mean... getting an answer of "October 20th, 2019" is nice, but also that's
Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc. pulling data from some other website and not
getting them the click. So I don't know if you're actually concerned so much
about SEO.

Regarding the general concept of SEO, I wrote some of my thoughts about it
here: [https://austingwalters.com/is-search-
solved/](https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/)

But essentially, Google has perverse incentives as a search provider. They
don't want to give you the best answer either. They want you to click ads. SEO
has actually very little to do with it in my opinion.

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tlb
It's actually something to appreciate about Google: given the massive
incentives to optimize for ad-clicks, they do an OK job at giving you the
results you want. If they followed short-term incentives, they'd be like
OutBrain.

