Hmm, makes me wonder if a big factor is that it reads the first couple of results and summarizes it. Like if it was turned off, people wouldn’t bother clicking through and reading, so they just leave and and “fact” get saved in their brains. If they were really motivated, they would click through and read and come to the same incorrect conclusions but most don’t bother so the misinformation doesn’t propagate as easily
That used to be a direct result of how good the search was. In the aughts it was generally on page 1 or you had to rephrase your query; the remaining results were the era’s equivalent of ‘slop’, link trees and redirect rabbit holes and plaintext sites with random stolen content. I was met with genuine surprise any time I found what I was looking for on page 3 or 4
Hmm, makes me wonder if a big factor is that it reads the first couple of results and summarizes it. Like if it was turned off, people wouldn’t bother clicking through and reading, so they just leave and and “fact” get saved in their brains. If they were really motivated, they would click through and read and come to the same incorrect conclusions but most don’t bother so the misinformation doesn’t propagate as easily
This was always a thing. The results on page 1 had a much greater click rate than on page 2+
That used to be a direct result of how good the search was. In the aughts it was generally on page 1 or you had to rephrase your query; the remaining results were the era’s equivalent of ‘slop’, link trees and redirect rabbit holes and plaintext sites with random stolen content. I was met with genuine surprise any time I found what I was looking for on page 3 or 4
Yeah, old search was just better
I’m wondering if SEO just got better and search is harder.