> I suppose the lessons are: there's room for lots of improvement in search engines, or SEO really works and you better promote yourself no matter how good you are, or word of mouth (Hacker News in this case) is still the way to find the best stuff.
The way I look at it: SEO really works, and shit sources tend to spend a lot on it, while quality sources tend to not spend anything on it at all - therefore a lot of quality stuff is hard to find, unless you can hear the right words from the right mouths.
(IMO SEO, beyond making your website not look like shit, is user-hostile behaviour. It games search engines into serving users links to those who spend effort on gaming search engines instead of links to content the user was looking for.)
Indeed. SEO how it's referred to and done most of the time is almost an anti-pattern: People adjust their system (website) to implementation details of another service (search engines) instead of just fulfilling the "public contract" (exposing good, accessible content).
But that's dangerous, as search engines evolve, change behavior and occasionally penalize this kind of behavior. That's why I always tried to explain to customers they should just focus on good content for humans and not care about explicit SEO after they claimed someone had told them that Google had recently "changed their algorithm" and now did XY.
There are SEOs that cannot be detected and at the end you have quality articles after hundreds of pages. This is the case for maibstream subjects like recipes where you compete with ten of thousands of SEOers.
Google is really good for general information, but really bad for domain specific information. Piglet (in contrast) is really good at domain specific, but can be poor in the general case (although I haven't seen that yet). We track discussions around the articles, as opposed to linked pages. This typically provides more information. You can read about it on our about page.
For instance, this article appears right at the top of the search results: https://imgur.com/a/AkUTb
I recommend reaching out to me if you're interested - we are currently doing a private beta. Spcifically, the application is for investing (we are building an AI financial advisor), but I personally use it as a search engine as well.
Is there any way to use just the search engine bit? I don't care much about investing, but it'd be great if you could take the investment-specific information out of the free/public account and just returned the results for searches.
The way I look at it: SEO really works, and shit sources tend to spend a lot on it, while quality sources tend to not spend anything on it at all - therefore a lot of quality stuff is hard to find, unless you can hear the right words from the right mouths.
(IMO SEO, beyond making your website not look like shit, is user-hostile behaviour. It games search engines into serving users links to those who spend effort on gaming search engines instead of links to content the user was looking for.)