Just wow. My greatest respect! Also an incredible write up. I like the take-away that an essential ingredient to a search engine is curated and well filtered data (garbage in garbage out) I feel like this has been a big learning of the LLM training too, rather work with less much higher quality data. I'm curious how a search engine would perform where all content has been judged by an LLM.

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throwawaylaptop 8 days ago | parent [-]

I'm currently trying to get a friends small business website to rank. I have a decent understanding of SEO, doing more technically correct things and did a decent amount of hand written content specific to local areas and services provided.

Two months in, bing still hasn't crawled the fav icon. Google finally did after a month. I'm still getting outranked by tangentially related services, garbage national lead collection sites, yelp top 10 blog spam, and even exact service providers from 300 miles away that definitely don't serve the area.

Something is definitely wrong with pagerank and crawling in general.

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mv4 8 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sadly, that ship has sailed. The web is dead. SEO should be called SEM (Search Engine Manipulation).

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what 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>something is wrong with pagerank

Do you have any backlinks? If not, it’s working as intended?

	▲	throwawaylaptop 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I don't have backlinks really. But I have a website for a real addresses business serving that exact service local people are searching for, and instead they get useless results before finding me on list item #42.

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johnthescott 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

i recall from years ago a site index url could be submitted to google. creating that index took some work.