The video can be summarised into three main points:
Advertisement offering Google a perverse incentive to make its search results worse, so the search ad results look comparatively better.
Search engine optimisation.
Generative AI integration with Google enshittifying the platform.
I’ll focus on #2. Federated search might alleviate the problem.
It’s counter-productive to optimise a page for multiple search engines, running different algorithms; it might perform better on [let’s say] Google, but worse on [let’s say] Bing, or vice versa, since they run different algos that prioritise different things. As such, almost all SEO is made for Google results.
And, in an environment where no search engine dominates the market, and the search engines use different algos, SEO goes away.
The problem with that is people don’t want to use multiple search engines - they want to use one, that they believe to bring the best results on. (That’s why we have a problem called Google on first place.) If only there was some way for those search engines to coexist, and to benefit from each other… well, that’s basically federation, right?
How I see it working:
each instance crawls the web separately, focusing on the pages that it wants to
each instance has its own ranking algorithm
each pair of instances may opt to federate with each other or not
each instance can relay search queries to each other, if they’re federated
as a user inputs a search query, based on keywords and/or user preferences, the instance might decide if it should service the user with local results (from that instance), with results from a federated instance, or a mix of both.
I believe that this system would make SEO really hard to do; in practice you’d be better focusing on good content. It would also lead to a situation where different search engines want to specialise, but still keep each other alive - as they benefit from their peers.
It needs to work and be reliable, else it becomes something like YaCy, that doesn’t work that well. Well, Mastodon and Lemmy work fine, so that’s a first step.
True that. And it needs to offer a better service than Google; “our services are federated so please use them!” is not enough to encourage the shift, I think.
The video can be summarised into three main points:
I’ll focus on #2. Federated search might alleviate the problem.
It’s counter-productive to optimise a page for multiple search engines, running different algorithms; it might perform better on [let’s say] Google, but worse on [let’s say] Bing, or vice versa, since they run different algos that prioritise different things. As such, almost all SEO is made for Google results.
And, in an environment where no search engine dominates the market, and the search engines use different algos, SEO goes away.
The problem with that is people don’t want to use multiple search engines - they want to use one, that they believe to bring the best results on. (That’s why we have a problem called Google on first place.) If only there was some way for those search engines to coexist, and to benefit from each other… well, that’s basically federation, right?
How I see it working:
I believe that this system would make SEO really hard to do; in practice you’d be better focusing on good content. It would also lead to a situation where different search engines want to specialise, but still keep each other alive - as they benefit from their peers.
It needs to work and be reliable, else it becomes something like YaCy, that doesn’t work that well. Well, Mastodon and Lemmy work fine, so that’s a first step.
True that. And it needs to offer a better service than Google; “our services are federated so please use them!” is not enough to encourage the shift, I think.