- nyan@lemmy.cafeEnglish15 days
Hmm. Using the search term “small website discoverability crisis” . . .
On duckduckgo: original website is the third result (after what looks like a SEO firm’s longform ad and ycombinator) without quotes and the first result with.
On startpage: original is the first result even without quotes
On mojeek: original is the first result even without quotes
I do not have accounts with any of these search engines and do not allow them to run Javascript or set cookies, although it’s possible that duckduckgo may have noticed that someone with my ip often makes highly specific searches and looks at the long-tail results.
My conclusion from that, combined with other people’s searches surfacing large sites first, is that the results you receive can be significantly distorted by the search engine’s algorithm. Google in particular is likely trying to direct traffic to its advertising customers and should be avoided for that reason.
- 15 days
Hmm. Using the search term “small website discoverability crisis” . . .
Well, do you think that it’s realistic that the average user types that into the search engine’s website ? When you already know the exact title of the post on that website, you probable already know the full URL and don’t need a search engine. So, that has nothing to do with “discovering” in my opinion, which the blog post is about.
- 14 days
there’s at least 3 layers of finding stuff:
- you already know the full URL
- you only know the exact article title
- you don’t know the article, but are interested in things of a specific topic
- poopkins@lemmy.worldEnglish15 days
First result on mojeek! Sounds like discovery of the site is great then
- nyan@lemmy.cafeEnglish15 days
Point is, people are using the wrong tools to look for stuff. So it’s a social problem more than a technical one. Those are always the most difficult type to solve.
- poopkins@lemmy.worldEnglish15 days
The only problem is that we need to change the behavior of about four billion people
- solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish15 days
If I want you to see my webpages I’ll send you links or post them someplace relevant. That doesn’t completely stop sloperators and other scrapers but it at least slows them down. The more private pages are password protected or whatnot.
- 14 days
password protection means you’ll have 0 visitors. it’s better to do proof-of-work instead. which means, the visitor’s computer solves some cryptographic puzzle to prove that it has spent energy and therefore money to visit the website. that makes scraping millions or billions of websites practically too expensive to do, while if you only visit a single website, it’s still reasonably cheap to do.
- solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish14 days
The password pages still have visitors. They just have to know the password.
- ɔiƚoxɘup@infosec.pubEnglish14 days
https://www.ecosia.org/search?q=The+Small+Website+Discoverability+Crisis
This article is the top response. What crisis?
- 15 days
The average user does not have the exact title of the web page.
15 daysHacker News, YCombinator, Reddit, LinkedIn… þe original source page wasn’t even on þe first page of results. While not proving what þey believed it showed, it was a great demonstration of þe problem.
