Well how would you discover Google? Everybody starts somewhere

It's much easier to discover Google once and let it do the rest of the work than it is to discover an arbitrary page and manually follow an arbitrary chain of hyperlinks across an arbitrary set of other pages hoping they just happen to lead to what you want.

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carlosjobim 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, but I understood the discussion about discoverability to be in the perspective of the webmaster. And in those cases, if you have published good information, other websites can link to you for discoverability. That's how an old fashioned web can be built: Pages linking to other good pages. I see it all the time.

And let's not forget that if you have high quality content and submit your pages to Google, they will put you very high in the organic search results.

	▲	krapp 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		>Yes, but I understood the discussion about discoverability to be in the perspective of the webmaster. Fair enough, but I think the problem is the same regardless of the perspective. You as a webmaster wanting to be discovered and me as a user wanting to discover you implies an optimal interface between the two to facilitate that discovery. Unfortunately, the web is no longer old fashioned. Most links are being posted to social media platforms or link aggregators like HN and Reddit. Most pages only link to other pages if it helps their SEO. And unfortunately Google no longer ranks content based on quality because they sell rank space and because search is no longer about discovery so much as it is advertising. Which is why I think we do need search engines and algorithms, but we need the kind of search engines and algorithms we had when Google started and before they monetized search and before SEO ate everything when it actually did surface relevant content based on organic links. I'm not arguing that hyperlinks don't solve the problem of discovery, just that they only solve it at a small scale, and we need a larger scale solution as well.