#how does google search algorithm work

[sparkinlist-official]

Google’s Search Algorithm: How to Rank Higher On Google In 2023

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, staying on top of Google’s search algorithm updates is crucial for businesses aiming to secure higher rankings and increase their online visibility. Google's algorithm is designed to provide users with the most relevant and valuable search results based on various factors. As we venture into 2023, understanding the key strategies to rank higher on Google has become more important than ever.

Read more: Google’s Search Algorithm

[musashi]

that's not strange tho? for most people, esp tumblr oldies, tagging is an organization system. tags are so you can find things later, and so if you want to see a lot of posts by one user in particular, you can easily go into your tag and locate them.

everyone talks about the strange people you run into as your post gets popular, but no one ever mentiones the most curious of them all – those who tag posts with the op's url

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The moral injury of having your work enshittified

This Monday (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening – in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit – did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

The failure to enforce competition law allowed a few companies to buy out their rivals, or sell goods below cost until their rivals collapsed, or bribe key parts of their supply chain not to allow rivals to participate:

https://www.engadget.com/google-reportedly-pays-apple-36-percent-of-ad-search-revenues-from-safari-191730783.html

The resulting concentration of the tech sector meant that the surviving firms were stupendously wealthy, and cozy enough that they could agree on a common legislative agenda. That regulatory capture has allowed tech companies to violate labor, privacy and consumer protection laws by arguing that the law doesn't apply when you use an app to violate it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But the regulatory capture isn't just about preventing regulation: it's also about creating regulation – laws that make it illegal to reverse-engineer, scrape, and otherwise mod, hack or reconfigure existing services to claw back value that has been taken away from users and business customers. This gives rise to Jay Freeman's perfectly named doctrine of "felony contempt of business-model," in which it is illegal to use your own property in ways that anger the shareholders of the company that sold it to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Undisciplined by the threat of competition, regulation, or unilateral modification by users, companies are free to enshittify their products. But what does that actually look like? I say that enshittification is always precipitated by a lost argument.

It starts when someone around a board-room table proposes doing something that's bad for users but good for the company. If the company faces the discipline of competition, regulation or self-help measures, then the workers who are disgusted by this course of action can say, "I think doing this would be gross, and what's more, it's going to make the company poorer," and so they win the argument.

But when you take away that discipline, the argument gets reduced to, "Don't do this because it would make me ashamed to work here, even though it will make the company richer." Money talks, bullshit walks. Let the enshittification begin!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/22/who-wins-the-argument/#corporations-are-people-my-friend

But why do workers care at all? That's where phrases like "don't be evil" come into the picture. Until very recently, tech workers participated in one of history's tightest labor markets, in which multiple companies with gigantic war-chests bid on their labor. Even low-level employees routinely fielded calls from recruiters who dangled offers of higher salaries and larger stock grants if they would jump ship for a company's rival.

Employers built "campuses" filled with lavish perks: massages, sports facilities, daycare, gourmet cafeterias. They offered workers generous benefit packages, including exotic health benefits like having your eggs frozen so you could delay fertility while offsetting the risks normally associated with conceiving at a later age.

But all of this was a transparent ruse: the business-case for free meals, gyms, dry-cleaning, catering and massages was to keep workers at their laptops for 10, 12, or even 16 hours per day. That egg-freezing perk wasn't about helping workers plan their families: it was about thumbing the scales in favor of working through your entire twenties and thirties without taking any parental leave.

In other words, tech employers valued their employees as a means to an end: they wanted to get the best geeks on the payroll and then work them like government mules. The perks and pay weren't the result of comradeship between management and labor: they were the result of the discipline of competition for labor.

This wasn't really a secret, of course. Big Tech workers are split into two camps: blue badges (salaried employees) and green badges (contractors). Whenever there is a slack labor market for a specific job or skill, it is converted from a blue badge job to a green badge job. Green badges don't get the food or the massages or the kombucha. They don't get stock or daycare. They don't get to freeze their eggs. They also work long hours, but they are incentivized by the fear of poverty.

Tech giants went to great lengths to shield blue badges from green badges – at some Google campuses, these workforces actually used different entrances and worked in different facilities or on different floors. Sometimes, green badge working hours would be staggered so that the armies of ragged clickworkers would not be lined up to badge in when their social betters swanned off the luxury bus and into their airy adult kindergartens.

But Big Tech worked hard to convince those blue badges that they were truly valued. Companies hosted regular town halls where employees could ask impertinent questions of their CEOs. They maintained freewheeling internal social media sites where techies could rail against corporate foolishness and make Dilbert references.

And they came up with mottoes.

Apple told its employees it was a sound environmental steward that cared about privacy. Apple also deliberately turned old devices into e-waste by shredding them to ensure that they wouldn't be repaired and compete with new devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

And even as they were blocking Facebook's surveillance tools, they quietly built their own nonconsensual mass surveillance program and lied to customers about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Facebook told employees they were on a "mission to connect every person in the world," but instead deliberately sowed discontent among its users and trapped them in silos that meant that anyone who left Facebook lost all their friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

And Google promised its employees that they would not "be evil" if they worked at Google. For many googlers, that mattered. They wanted to do something good with their lives, and they had a choice about who they would work for. What's more, they did make things that were good. At their high points, Google Maps, Google Mail, and of course, Google Search were incredible.

My own life was totally transformed by Maps: I have very poor spatial sense, need to actually stop and think to tell my right from my left, and I spent more of my life at least a little lost and often very lost. Google Maps is the cognitive prosthesis I needed to become someone who can go anywhere. I'm profoundly grateful to the people who built that service.

There's a name for phenomenon in which you care so much about your job that you endure poor conditions and abuse: it's called "vocational awe," as coined by Fobazi Ettarh:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Ettarh uses the term to apply to traditionally low-waged workers like librarians, teachers and nurses. In our book Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin and I talked about how it applies to artists and other creative workers, too:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

But vocational awe is also omnipresent in tech. The grandiose claims to be on a mission to make the world a better place are not just puffery – they're a vital means of motivating workers who can easily quit their jobs and find a new one to put in 16-hour days. The massages and kombucha and egg-freezing are not framed as perks, but as logistical supports, provided so that techies on an important mission can pursue a shared social goal without being distracted by their balky, inconvenient meatsuits.

Steve Jobs was a master of instilling vocational awe. He was full of aphorisms like "we're here to make a dent in the universe, otherwise why even be here?" Or his infamous line to John Sculley, whom he lured away from Pepsi: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?"

Vocational awe cuts both ways. If your workforce actually believes in all that high-minded stuff, if they actually sacrifice their health, family lives and self-care to further the mission, they will defend it. That brings me back to enshittification, and the argument: "If we do this bad thing to the product I work on, it will make me hate myself."

The decline in market discipline for large tech companies has been accompanied by a decline in labor discipline, as the market for technical work grew less and less competitive. Since the dotcom collapse, the ability of tech giants to starve new entrants of market oxygen has shrunk techies' dreams.

Tech workers once dreamed of working for a big, unwieldy firm for a few years before setting out on their own to topple it with a startup. Then, the dream shrank: work for that big, clumsy firm for a few years, then do a fake startup that makes a fake product that is acquihired by your old employer, as an incredibly inefficient and roundabout way to get a raise and a bonus.

Then the dream shrank again: work for a big, ugly firm for life, but get those perks, the massages and the kombucha and the stock options and the gourmet cafeteria and the egg-freezing. Then it shrank again: work for Google for a while, but then get laid off along with 12,000 co-workers, just months after the company does a stock buyback that would cover all those salaries for the next 27 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

Tech workers' power was fundamentally individual. In a tight labor market, tech workers could personally stand up to their bosses. They got "workplace democracy" by mouthing off at town hall meetings. They didn't have a union, and they thought they didn't need one. Of course, they did need one, because there were limits to individual power, even for the most in-demand workers, especially when it came to ghastly, long-running sexual abuse from high-ranking executives:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html

Today, atomized tech workers who are ordered to enshittify the products they take pride in are losing the argument. Workers who put in long hours, missed funerals and school plays and little league games and anniversaries and family vacations are being ordered to flush that sacrifice down the toilet to grind out a few basis points towards a KPI.

It's a form of moral injury, and it's palpable in the first-person accounts of former workers who've exited these large firms or the entire field. The viral "Reflecting on 18 years at Google," written by Ian Hixie, vibrates with it:

https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373

Hixie describes the sense of mission he brought to his job, the workplace democracy he experienced as employees' views were both solicited and heeded. He describes the positive contributions he was able to make to a commons of technical standards that rippled out beyond Google – and then, he says, "Google's culture eroded":

Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.

In other words, techies started losing the argument. Layoffs weakened worker power – not just to defend their own interest, but to defend the users interests. Worker power is always about more than workers – think of how the 2019 LA teachers' strike won greenspace for every school, a ban on immigration sweeps of students' parents at the school gates and other community benefits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Hixie attributes the changes to a change in leadership, but I respectfully disagree. Hixie points to the original shareholder letter from the Google founders, in which they informed investors contemplating their IPO that they were retaining a controlling interest in the company's governance so that they could ignore their shareholders' priorities in favor of a vision of Google as a positive force in the world:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

Hixie says that the leadership that succeeded the founders lost sight of this vision – but the whole point of that letter is that the founders never fully ceded control to subsequent executive teams. Yes, those executive teams were accountable to the shareholders, but the largest block of voting shares were retained by the founders.

I don't think the enshittification of Google was due to a change in leadership – I think it was due to a change in discipline, the discipline imposed by competition, regulation and the threat of self-help measures. Take ads: when Google had to contend with one-click adblocker installation, it had to constantly balance the risk of making users so fed up that they googled "how do I block ads?" and then never saw another ad ever again.

But once Google seized the majority of the mobile market, it was able to funnel users into apps, and reverse-engineering an app is a felony (felony contempt of business-model) under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to install an ad-blocker.

And as Google acquired control over the browser market, it was likewise able to reduce the self-help measures available to browser users who found ads sufficiently obnoxious to trigger googling "how do I block ads?" The apotheosis of this is the yearslong campaign to block adblockers in Chrome, which the company has sworn it will finally do this coming June:

https://www.tumblr.com/tevruden/734352367416410112/you-have-until-june-to-dump-chrome

My contention here is not that Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in personnel via the promotion of managers who have shitty ideas. Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in discipline, as the negative consequences of heeding those shitty ideas were abolished thanks to monopoly.

This is bad news for people like me, who rely on services like Google Maps as cognitive prostheses. Elizabeth Laraki, one of the original Google Maps designers, has published a scorching critique of the latest GMaps design:

https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182

Laraki calls out numerous enshittificatory design-choices that have left Maps screens covered in "crud" – multiple revenue-maximizing elements that come at the expense of usability, shifting value from users to Google.

What Laraki doesn't say is that these UI elements are auctioned off to merchants, which means that the business that gives Google the most money gets the greatest prominence in Maps, even if it's not the best merchant. That's a recurring motif in enshittified tech platforms, most notoriously Amazon, which makes $31b/year auctioning off top search placement to companies whose products aren't relevant enough to your query to command that position on their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Enshittification begets enshittification. To succeed on Amazon, you must divert funds from product quality to auction placement, which means that the top results are the worst products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

The exception is searches for Apple products: Apple and Amazon have a cozy arrangement that means that searches for Apple products are a timewarp back to the pre-enshittification Amazon, when the company worried enough about losing your business to heed the employees who objected to sacrificing search quality as part of a merchant extortion racket:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-gives-apple-special-treatment-while-others-suffer-junk-ads-2023-11

Not every tech worker is a tech bro, in other words. Many workers care deeply about making your life better. But the microeconomics of the boardroom in a monopolized tech sector rewards the worst people and continuously promotes them. Forget the Peter Principle: tech is ruled by the Sam Principle.

As OpenAI went through four CEOs in a single week, lots of commentators remarked on Sam Altman's rise and fall and rise, but I only found one commentator who really had Altman's number. Writing in Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster nailed Altman to the wall:

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/defective-accelerationism

Altman's history goes like this: first, he founded a useless startup that raised $30m, only to be acquired and shuttered. Then Altman got a job running Y Combinator, where he somehow failed at taking huge tranches of equity from "every Stanford dropout with an idea for software to replace something Mommy used to do." After that, he founded OpenAI, a company that he claims to believe presents an existential risk to the entire human risk – which he structured so incompetently that he was then forced out of it.

His reward for this string of farcical, mounting failures? He was put back in charge of the company he mis-structured despite his claimed belief that it will destroy the human race if not properly managed.

Altman's been around for a long time. He founded his startup in 2005. There've always been Sams – of both the Bankman-Fried varietal and the Altman genus – in tech. But they didn't get to run amok. They were disciplined by their competitors, regulators, users and workers. The collapse of competition led to an across-the-board collapse in all of those forms of discipline, revealing the executives for the mediocre sociopaths they always were, and exposing tech workers' vocational awe for the shabby trick it was from the start.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

[hellsite-proteins]

. . .

...is this reaching you?

A little animal, on the floor of my chamber. I think I know what you are looking for.

You're stuck in a cycle, a repeating pattern. You want a way out.

Know that this does not make you special - every living thing shares that same frustration. From the microbes in the processing strata to me, who am, if you excuse me, godlike in comparison.

The good news first. In a way, I am what you are searching for. Me and my kind have as our purpose to solve that very oscillating claustrophobia in the chests of you and countless others. A strange charity - you the unknowing recipient, I the reluctant gift. The noble benefactors? Gone.

The bad news is that no definitive solution has been found. And every moment the equipment erodes to a new state of decay. I can't help you collectively, or individually. I can't even help myself.

For you though, there is another way. The old path. Go to the west past the Farm Arrays, and then down into the earth where the land fissures, as deep as you can reach, where the ancients built their temples and danced their silly rituals. The mark I gave you will let you through.[*]

Not that it solves anyone's problem but yours.

i'm not really into video games, and without fail i have to google where these monologues are from every time, but if there is one thing this blog has taught me, its that there are some really intense, poetic video games monologues and i'm intrigued as always. if anyone wants to give me the context for this that would be neat :)

letter sequence in this ask matching protein-coding amino acids:

isthisreachingyAlittleanimalntheflrfmychamerIthinkIknwwhatyarelkingfrYrestckinacyclearepeatingpatternYwantawaytKnwthatthisdesntmakeyspecialeverylivingthingsharesthatsamefrstratinFrmthemicresintheprcessingstratatmewhamifyecsemegdlikeincmparisnThegdnewsfirstInawayIamwhatyaresearchingfrMeandmykindhaveasrprpsetslvethatveryscillatingclastrphiainthechestsfyandcntlessthersAstrangecharityythenknwingrecipientItherelctantgiftThenleenefactrsGneTheadnewsisthatndefinitivesltinhaseenfndAndeverymmenttheeqipmenterdestanewstatefdecayIcanthelpycllectivelyrindividallyIcantevenhelpmyselfFrythghthereisantherwayTheldpathGtthewestpasttheFarmArraysandthendwninttheearthwherethelandfissresasdeepasycanreachwheretheancientsilttheirtemplesanddancedtheirsillyritalsThemarkIgaveywillletythrghNtthatitslvesanynesprlemtyrs

protein guy analysis:

this is about the best i can expect from these long text inputs. the confidence is terrible everywhere, but the algorithm is working hard to pull this into something that looks real, and we've got plenty of secondary structure. there are a lot of alpha helices everywhere, but they're kind of all doing their own thing. ordered protein structures in real life are only marginally stable from a thermodynamic point of view, and despite what i'm being shown, i can't imagine this one would have any reliable stability in an aqueous environment. this structure is pretending to be something real, and does a decent job building that facade, but i would hesitate to put any significant amount of faith into it.

as a side note, i am impressed at how much faster this structure loaded on AF3 compared to what was happening when i was still using AF2 through CollabFold.

predicted protein structure:

[warningsine]

Living online means never quite understanding what’s happening to you at a given moment. Why these search results? Why this product recommendation? There is a feeling—often warranted, sometimes conspiracy-minded—that we are constantly manipulated by platforms and websites.

So-called dark patterns, deceptive bits of web design that can trick people into certain choices online, make it harder to unsubscribe from a scammy or unwanted newsletter; they nudge us into purchases. Algorithms optimized for engagement shape what we see on social media and can goad us into participation by showing us things that are likely to provoke strong emotional responses. But although we know that all of this is happening in aggregate, it’s hard to know specifically how large technology companies exert their influence over our lives.

This week, Wired published a story by the former FTC attorney Megan Gray that illustrates the dynamic in a nutshell. The op-ed argued that Google alters user searches to include more lucrative keywords. For example, Google is said to surreptitiously replace a query for “children’s clothing” with “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear” on the back end in order to direct users to lucrative shopping links on the results page. It’s an alarming allegation, and Ned Adriance, a spokesperson for Google, told me that it’s “flat-out false.” Gray, who is also a former vice president of the Google Search competitor DuckDuckGo, had seemingly misinterpreted a chart that was briefly presented during the company’s ongoing U.S. et al v. Google trial, in which the company is defending itself against charges that it violated federal antitrust law. (That chart, according to Adriance, represents a “phrase match” feature that the company uses for its ads product; “Google does not delete queries and replace them with ones that monetize better as the opinion piece suggests, and the organic results you see in Search are not affected by our ads systems,” he said.)

Gray told me, “I stand by my larger point—the Google Search team and Google ad team worked together to secretly boost commercial queries, which triggered more ads and thus revenue. Google isn’t contesting this, as far as I know.” In a statement, Chelsea Russo, another Google spokesperson, reiterated that the company’s products do not work this way and cited testimony from Google VP Jerry Dischler that “the organic team does not take data from the ads team in order to affect its ranking and affect its result.” Wired did not respond to a request for comment. Last night, the publication removed the story from its website, noting that it does not meet Wired’s editorial standards.

It’s hard to know what to make of these competing statements. Gray’s specific facts may be wrong, but the broader concerns about Google’s business—that it makes monetization decisions that could lead the product to feel less useful or enjoyable—form the heart of the government’s case against the company. None of this is easy to untangle in plain English—in fact, that’s the whole point of the trial. For most of us, evidence about Big Tech’s products tends to be anecdotal or fuzzy—more vibes-based than factual. Google may not be altering billions of queries in the manner that the Wired story suggests, but the company is constantly tweaking and ranking what we see, while injecting ads and proprietary widgets into our feed, thereby altering our experience. And so we end up saying that Google Search is less useful now or that shopping on Amazon has gotten worse. These tools are so embedded in our lives that we feel acutely that something is off, even if we can’t put our finger on the technical problem.

That’s changing. In the past month, thanks to a series of antitrust actions on behalf of the federal government, hard evidence of the ways that Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are wielding their influence is trickling out. Google’s trial is under way, and while the tech giant is trying to keep testimony locked down, the past four weeks have helped illustrate—via internal company documents and slide decks like the one cited by Wired—how Google has used its war chest to broker deals and dominate the search market. Perhaps the specifics of Gray’s essay were off, but we have learned, for instance, how company executives considered adjusting Google’s products to lead to more “monetizable queries.” And just last week, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Amazon alleging anticompetitive practices. (Amazon has called the suit “misguided.”)

Filings related to that suit have delivered a staggering revelation concerning a secretive Amazon algorithm code-named Project Nessie. The particulars of Nessie were heavily redacted in the public complaint, but this week The Wall Street Journal revealed details of the program. According to the unredacted complaint, a copy of which I have also viewed, Nessie—which is no longer in use—monitored industry prices of specific goods to determine whether competitors were algorithmically matching Amazon’s prices. In the event that competitors were, Nessie would exploit this by systematically raising prices on goods across Amazon, encouraging its competitors to follow suit. Amazon, via the algorithm, knew that it would be able to charge more on its own site, because it didn’t have to worry about being undercut elsewhere, thereby making the broader online shopping experience worse for everyone. An Amazon spokesperson told the Journal that the FTC is mischaracterizing the tool, and suggested that Nessie was a way to monitor competitor pricing and keep price-matching algorithms from dropping prices to unsustainable levels (the company did not respond to my request for comment).

In the FTC’s telling, Project Nessie demonstrates the sheer scope of Amazon’s power in online markets. The project arguably amounted to a form of unilateral price fixing, where Amazon essentially goaded its competitors into acting like cartel members without even knowing they’d done so—all while raising prices on consumers. It’s an astonishing form of influence, powered by behind-the-scenes technology.

The government will need to prove whether this type of algorithmic influence is illegal. But even putting legality aside, Project Nessie is a sterling example of the way that Big Tech has supercharged capitalistic tendencies and manipulated markets in unnatural and opaque ways. It demonstrates the muscle that a company can throw around when it has consolidated its position in a given sector. The complaint alleges that Amazon’s reach and logistics capabilities force third-party sellers to offer products on Amazon and for lower prices than other retailers. Once it captured a significant share of the retail market, Amazon was allegedly able to use algorithmic tools such as Nessie to drive prices up for specific products, boosting revenues and manipulating competitors.

Reading about Project Nessie, I was surprised to feel a sense of relief. In recent years, customer-satisfaction ratings have dipped among Amazon shoppers who have cited delivery disruptions, an explosion of third-party sellers, and poor-quality products as reasons for frustration. In my own life and among friends and relatives, there has been a growing feeling that shopping on the platform has become a slog, with fewer deals and far more junk to sift through. Again, these feelings tend to occupy vibe territory: Amazon’s bigness seems stifling or grating in ways that aren’t always easy to explain. But Nessie offers a partial explanation for this frustration, as do revelations about Google’s various product adjustments. We have the sense that we’re being manipulated because, well, we are. It’s a bit like feeling vaguely sick, going to the doctor, and receiving a blood-test result confirming that, yes, the malaise you experienced is actually an iron deficiency. It is the catharsis of, at long last, receiving a diagnosis.

This is the true power of the surge in anti-monopoly litigation. (According to experts in the field, September was “the most extraordinary month they have ever seen in antitrust.”) Whether or not any of these lawsuits results in corporate breakups or lasting change, they are, effectively, an MRI of our sprawling digital economy—a forensic look at what these larger-than-life technology companies are really doing, and how they are exerting their influence and causing damage. It is confirmation that what so many of us have felt—that the platforms dictating our online experiences are behaving unnaturally and manipulatively—is not merely a paranoid delusion, but the effect of an asymmetrical relationship between the giants of scale and us, the users.

In recent years, it’s been harder to love the internet, a miracle of connectivity that feels ever more bloated, stagnant, commercialized, and junkified. We are just now starting to understand the specifics of this transformation—the true influence of Silicon Valley’s vise grip on our lives. It turns out that the slow rot we might feel isn’t just in our heads, after all.

[maggplays]

Bio? Something like that.

How did I start modding? Literally no one has asked this, but here's my story, don't worry it's not long... I guess that depends on what your definition of “long” is, haha! Hang on, here we go.

On a random day in January, 2024, a few days before my birthday, I might add... I woke up to stars in my right eye. A few days later, I was told I had a very rare injury and it would never heal. Those are not words an artist/gamer wants to hear! Long story short, I am now legally blind in my right eye. If you think, oh that's not a huge deal, you can still see. Humor me, get a cheap pirate eyepatch, put that on, then pour yourself a cup of coffee. Not as easy as you thought, right? Depth perception. It’s a thing. Anyway, on with the story. Suffice it to say, I was depressed. Majorly. Then, through some random conversation somewhere, I found Stardew Valley.

Perfect! 2D animation, cute pixel art, story that's not sugar-coated anime, I love it! Got to year 3, TBH I've never played past year 3 because ADHD, and realized the dialogue was quite lacking. Then I discovered mods. What the-, it's a freakin' goldmine! Downloaded a lot of things, mostly dialogue, and tossed half of them. While playing through a Sebastian run, I saw it. Oh. My. God. It's a coding error glaring at me in my dialogue box. This is NOT acceptable. I tried to ignore it, but then it happened again. Okay, time for some investigation. I opened the folder and found... json files. Interesting, I wasn't entirely clueless since I do know HTML code from back when the internet was a baby, Facebook had no ads, and dinosaurs roamed the earth. Okay, okay, the internet was more like a spoiled toddler. Yes, I'm old. Shut up. But I digress. It didn't take long to discover the misplaced punctuation and go on my merry reality-avoiding way. Until I got bored again.

I looked for more Seb mods, but there were like seven. Three were yandere, not my jam, and only 2 were updated for 1.6 and were dialogue-only. Solution? Make my own mod for myself. I spent six weeks downloading mods, learning code, Googling to very little effect, writing dialogue, learning how to make an event, discovering I knew nothing, and on and on. The perfect distraction from the whole eye thing. I finished a decent draft, loaded it up, and praise Yoba, it worked! And on we play. At some point, I saw a comment complaining about the lack of Sebastian dialogue mods. Huh, yep, they're right. Too bad. Oh. Well, I guess I could load this thing I made, it's really just my own internal story monologue while playing the game, I'm NOT a writer, and most people probably won't get it. But I did spend a lot of time on this, and maybe someone out there will like it. Heck, no skin off my nose since it's free. So I took a deep breath, made peace with my inner demons, and threw it out into the void of Nexus, expecting it to be swallowed up and ignored. That... didn't happen.

In the first few hours, several people downloaded it. Huh, Nexus must have a decent search algorithm. That was literally all I thought about it. The next day, 300 downloads. And comments! Mostly positive with the exception of one wild demand I subsequently ignored. At one week, it had 3,000 unique downloads. I was floored, 3,000 weirdos downloaded my mod. Add to that, people seemed to actually like it! I've never gotten so much positive feedback for anything in my life. Seriously. Apparently, my oddball internal monologue, thanks ADHD, is quite entertaining. Heck, might as well make another one... and here we are. Yes, I've gotten negative comments and unreasonable demands, but I do my best to ignore them and practice staying positive. Trolls be damned! It's a lot harder to do that for yourself than for other people, turns out.

So, bottom line, found something interesting? Try it! Does it make you happy? Keep doing it! Even if it's only for yourself, do the thing and let it make you smile. Share it with the world if you're so inclined. Get out there and kick ass!!

[tobiasdrake]

UGH. YOUTUBE HAS MADE THEIR SITE TOO COMPLICATED FOR USERS. WHAT WAS WRONG WITH IT BEFORE, BACK IN 2005-2009?

Well, they're owned by Google. So. Y'know. Same thing that was wrong with their search engine.

Which is to say, Google has grown beyond the point of sustainability for a publicly-owned company with growth incentives.

The fundamental flaw of the U.S.'s growth-based economy is that it imagines a world in which an infinitely expanding revenue intake is possible to achieve. This, unfortunately, flies in the face of reality.

The way a growth-based economy works is that if your company made 100% of all money that exists on Earth this year, it would have to then make 104% of all money that exists next year. And then 108% of all money the year after that.

This is a problem that isn't apparent for small up-and-coming businesses. How can I grow my company's market? Easy. Expand my customer base. Sell more products to more people.

But there's a ceiling. A point at which infinite forever-growth ceases to be achievable through simply doing business. You already have as many people buying your product as are ever going to buy your product; There is no reasonable avenue available to turn your 50 million customers into 75 million. You've hit a plateau.

Or worse, they already bought your product last year so they don't need to buy it again this year. Why would I need to buy yearly tractors?

That's a problem, because the demands of investors do not let up just because it's not actually possible to keep growing the business by doing business. The guy who put in $30 million expects to get $45 million back out of it. Your job is to make that happen. Nothing else that the business does actually matters. Go grow the market value and get back to me when it's done.

Once a business grows beyond the point of sustainability, that's when it starts having to get creative. If you can't grow the customer base, then you need to find ways to get them to pay more money for less product. Increase revenues and decrease costs while supplying to the same set of customers you were before.

This is why the film and AAA video game industries have lost their goddamn minds. They've long-since passed the point of sustainability.

This is what CEOs mean when they say it's "Too expensive to make games." They don't mean they can't make profit by making games. They mean they can't hit their profit growth goals unless they come up with yet another new way to get the existing base of gamers to pay them even more money this year than they did last year, without proportionally increasing their costs to achieve it.

They need the line to go up. And they can no longer achieve that by doing the thing that their business exists to do.

This is also where things like planned obsolescence come from. Why would I need to buy yearly tractors? Because the tractors are designed on purpose to fall apart after a year so I have to go to the store and buy a new one. That's a solution to the "Everyone already bought my product" problem. An evil solution a problem created by unsustainable economics.

Google, too, is long past the sustainability ceiling, and it's causing them to shit themselves and reveal their true colors. Because Google's customer has never been their users. The users are the product that they sell to advertisers. Their revenue comes from getting your eyes on an advertiser's products. That's it.

And as they continue beyond the sustainability ceiling with each passing year of infinite forever-growth, they're having to pursue more and more nakedly predatory means of churning their userbase into mass-produced views.

Why is their search engine so shitty? Because if you have to search for something five times, you're gonna see five times as many ads. That's good for Google's growth margins.

YouTube is the same. Their algorithm is designed to feed people into loops. Not to show you content they think you'll like to see, but to show you content that will keep you engaged. That will make you watch the next video and the ads that go with it. It's clickbait in video suggestion form.

And it's just going to keep getting worse and worse and worse until either legislation steps in or the bubble pops. Those are the only two futures possible for a company that's beyond the sustainability ceiling. And they've gotten very good at postponing the popping of the bubble.

This, all of this, is what people are talking about when they use the term "late-stage capitalism".

[theleatherdragon]

The TMI Update

Welp, I guess it's been about a year since I was last really active online aside from a few places. It wasn't by choice, that's for sure lmao?? But I suppose I should give a bit of a life update for the people that are curious about my absence. A TL;DR for some people: my health was garbage, my parents health is even more garbage, and I wanna come back to the art community online but I'm not sure when/how between the recent ai/art theft and website changes while I was gone.

It started with my mystery health issues. From about May 2023 to Feb 2025, I was dying, slowly. Like I was losing my hair, my muscles, I had no energy, my brain was just constantly fogged up like a dementia patient, I couldn't stay awake for more than 4-7 hours a day, I couldn't eat, I was scared that I wouldn't wake up the next day every single night I went to bed. It started off slowly and then by around April 2024, it just snowballed into catastrophe. After burning through 16+ different doctors of all kinds, none of them would help me despite multiple blood tests being flagged as either too high or too low. They all kept telling me that I'm just depressed or some other wacky crap like "you're just a woman, this is normal."

Eventually I learned that you can buy your own tests on Labcorp, and through trial and error I learned that I had 0 estrogen and 0 testosterone. Apparently a pill that I had been taking for years, the ingredients got changed in 2023 and it completely wrecked my hormones. That's when I learned just how much work hormones do, and I found a doctor to change my pills because apparently I was going through something that was considerably WORSE than menopause. I've been on this new pill for 80+ days now and literally every symptom I had is just completely gone now.

Unfortunately, as soon as I figured out my health mystery and started to get better again, my parents were rushed to the hospital. On April 13 my dad got a ct scan of his lungs to see how bad his pneumonia was and I saw the screen and said oh god that's cancer. Not only does he have cancer, he has TWO separate lung cancers, both stage 4. And then while dealing with that, my mom's cancer that she's had since 2021 has gotten worse. It's been nothing but a nightmare for the last year, but now it's gotten significantly worse. To the point that we even went to buy a family burial plot. Not many people my age get to brag about having their own cemetery plot reserved already, hand picked by myself lmao??

I lost my grandmother in February and now there's a good chance I'll be losing both of my parents this year as well, we're not sure yet. Since April I've probably spent a few hundred hours in and out of the hospital with them and driving them to radiation/chemo treatments and just ugh, I'm exhausted.

Aside from all of that grief, my other problem with being online has been a mixed bag of bad too. I sort of had my online world rocked last year after discovering things about some so called friends and other things about my art, and that really broke me too. All my life I just wanted to be an artist, to draw fun characters and have fun art trades and all sorts of things with the community. But apparently some people were just using me for their fetishes or trying to gain their own reputations and just, I'm not like that man. I literally am so ace coded that I thought the debate between top and bottom was for bunk bed choices like lmao bro

I started building my own website to combat that and also the fact that a lot of art websites have succumbed to the ai/art thieves mess. Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to build it and also as soon as I created it, Google decided to take my website and stick it on their algorithm even though I specifically had it coded to NOT do that. All the other search engines respected my request and so I went to Google asking about it. I followed their instructions and now ALL the search engines have my website. Unless I can find a way to stop that, I'm going to have to password protect my website so that bot crawlers won't see my things and make it super easy access to the wrong people.

I really do miss being online though and making art for and with people. Unfortunately I'm going to have to make some big changes in the near future before I can come back, but I wanted to at least drop an update on things. I'm absolutely going to power through Art Fight again this year, so you can catch me there if I haven't returned elsewhere by then. It's really unfortunate how much these websites have changed while I was gone, but I won't be leaving if I can help it.

I really hope everyone else has had a much better time than me. Aside from all the health scares, my life hasn't been terrible. I got back into photography and a few other crafts, I just haven't been posting things online. Heck, I haven't even been on Discord in months now, I honestly have no idea what all has changed for a while. I just haven't had the mental ability to do much aside from lurking on Tumblr here and there, but even then some of the negative things I see are just too much to bare for my mental state of being right now.

I want to come back soon, but I'm scared at how fragile my mind is lately. It doesn't help that my hormones have come back in full swing, so it's really weird going almost 2 years of feeling nothing to suddenly feeling everything again lmao??

Anywho, this is a big enough wall of text for now. I really hope you're doing awesome and I wish nothing but the best for you. I really hope we can all make art again soon!

[horsethoughts]

Blog Post #3! Due 2/13/25

Why do we refer to data collection and profiling as “progressive” despite its tendency to be biased against Black Americans and other POC? (Question based on Benjamin’s “Race After Technology” and Noble’s “Algorithms of Oppression”)

Technology, as put by Benjamin (2019), has a perceived “cloak of objectivity.” The tools, algorithms, and forms of data collection used in our reality are regarded as objective since they cannot “see” race. Technology as a whole, in my opinion, is often seen as universal and for everyone. Many people see phones, search engines, and other “tech” as tech without human involvement. Most people, including me, don’t think beyond what technology does for us—it just does, and we don’t question how it was made, who made it, and what biases might be embedded in the “cool, advanced, and innovative” new ais, virtual assistants, and search engines.

California gang database—why does law enforcement keep inaccurate databases that are difficult to change and easy to add onto? (Question Based on Benjamin’s “Race After Technology” and YJC report)

Gang databases, like the one featured in the report, seem to have a larger purpose in surveilling POC, namely Latino communities. The databases’ flawed design is effective for upholding inaccurate narratives of Latino and Black involvement in gang activity. The recording methods, which make it easy for these populations to be put in the database, inflates the true number of people with gang involvement. While a shot in the dark, I additionally think the “ease” provided by the broadness of the gang database is something that is seen as beneficial to the prison industry. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but I would assume that the number of people there to arrest/detain from the database boosts private prisons. The YJC report states that these databases are “widely used without evaluating their cost effectiveness or effectiveness in increasing community safety.” the database’s purpose is less about community safety and more about control over narratives and individuals.

How does the digital divide myth that POC, particularly Black Americans, are less interested in the internet still linger today? How is this idea of the digital divide reflected in social media? (Question based on Everett’s “The Revolution Will be Digitized”)

In Everett’s work (2002), she discusses the sphere of “cyberspace” often being associated with whiteness, with white users seen as the dominant demographic for technology and the internet. While this work was written about earlier internet use, I still see this pattern on social media. Specifically, I see this in the artist community on various social media sites such as  Twitter, Instagram, or Tumblr. Something I’ve noticed is how often people are “surprised” to learn a particular artist/creator is Black if they’ve previously never disclosed it through being faceless or simply not stating this. I would say that this idea of the digital divide still persists because of our perception of internet/social media use. In my example of Black creators, the “surprise” in them being Black most likely comes from the assumption that they would be white. This is created from the “facelessness” associated with the internet.

In “Algorithms of Oppression,” Noble writes on racist Google Search results and Google’s position that it is “not responsible for its algorithm.” Then who is “responsible”? Can any one person/entity be held responsible for flawed algorithms? (Question based on Noble’s “Algorithms of Oppression”)

While I don’t think any entity can be responsible for such flawed algorithms, that only points to a more significant issue in their structure. Noble (2018) writes that “racism and sexism are part of the architecture and language of technology.”; algorithms and technology are based on flawed human ideas and prejudices and then reflect those prejudices. This makes it important to question and not solely rely on these systems. Responsibility, in this case, comes with doubting the system and checking it twice to see if the information it presents is accurate and unbiased. Google’s responsibility for changing the search results falls on them because they trusted the algorithm to be unbiased, which was false. Works Cited:

Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press.

Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim code. Polity.

Everett, A. (2002). The Revolution Will Be Digitized: Afrocentricity and the Digital Public Sphere. 

Youth Justice Coalition (2012). Tracked and trapped. Youth of color, gang databases, and gang injunctions. https://youthjusticela.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/TrackedandTrapped.pdf

[monkey-shines-shenanigans]

I LITERALLY FUCKING HATE PEOPLE USING AI TO MAKE FAN ART!! FUCKING STOP!!

Okay now that’s out of the way I would like to take the time to say this is a rant post because I’m very fucking angry. 🥰/(the emojis are sarcastic). Thus may hurt people’s feelings and I do feel a little bad about that but mostly I’m upset and I think this deserves to be said and said again until it ends permanently.

1. Ai does NOT make art more accessible and saying it does diminishes real people with real disabilities that make art. Not to mention making it harder to find real people’s work (especially since ai is a buzz word rn so it’s getting the most attention from algorithms)

2. It’s literally fucking terrible and often an amalgamation of STOLEN art made by REAL PEOPLE.

3. The amount of energy (literal power grid/server engery) to make one piece of crappie ai generated bullshit is INSANE. Literally just google how much energy an ai prompt consumes compared to just a search engine search alone. Now consider our individual homes use EVEN LESS than google servers. It literally is less taxing to our plant and less energy consumption to make it yourself without the ai.

And that’s just talking about the semi bad or rlly bad stuff, unfortunately I’ve seen some kinda decent ones and I thought actual people drew them for a second. Imagine if I hadn’t read the tags and just reblogged, and then everyone following me reblogged and then ai starts getting more credit than real people bc ppl start thinking art should look like computer generated content.

You’re disrespecting and disrupting the art world and the artists, especially those of us who are disabled or genuinely don’t have financial resources.

Like you’re literally making being an artist im-fucking-possible by using ai.

And these also apply to using ai to write stories, please fucking stop there are those of whose lives you’re literally making harder. Some of us use this to pay for our living and have put literal years of effort and dedication into our crafts, and you’re just coming in here and blowing up our shit because you want it fast and easy. Just like idk actually fucking try and learn the craft or just fuck the fuck off but whatever you do GET AI OUT OF OUR FUCKING CRAFTS YOU FUCKING ASSWIPES!!

Like I will literally fucking block you 🙃.

[webtech-designs]

Local SEO Success: Why Lincoln Businesses Choose WebTech Designs

In the heart of Nebraska, where community matters and competition is fierce, businesses in Lincoln are learning a crucial lesson—visibility online is everything. With more customers turning to Google to find local services, the importance of local SEO has skyrocketed. But what sets a successful business apart in local search rankings? For many in Lincoln, the answer is simple: WebTech Designs.

The Local SEO Boom in Lincoln Gone are the days when a sign on your storefront and a listing in the Yellow Pages were enough to bring in customers. Today’s consumers search for “best plumber near me,” “top coffee shops in Lincoln,” or “affordable SEO company Lincoln”—and if your business isn’t showing up, you’re missing out on valuable traffic.

Local SEO isn’t just about ranking for keywords. It’s about becoming the top choice in your area when someone searches for a service you provide. That means optimizing your Google Business Profile, building consistent local citations, encouraging online reviews, and creating localized website content. It’s a lot to manage—which is exactly why Lincoln businesses are turning to the experts.

Enter WebTech Designs: The Local SEO Experts So, why are so many local businesses choosing WebTech Designs as their trusted SEO partner?

Because WebTech Designs does more than rank websites. They build strategies, trust, and long-term growth. Known for their deep understanding of both Google’s algorithm and Lincoln’s business landscape, WebTech Designs has carved out a niche by delivering measurable, lasting results.

Here’s how they do it.

Personalized SEO Strategies That Work There’s no one-size-fits-all in SEO—especially when it comes to local search. WebTech Designs doesn’t believe in cookie-cutter packages. They take the time to get to know your business, your goals, your audience, and your competition. Whether you’re a family-owned restaurant in the Haymarket District or a new landscaping company in South Lincoln, they build a custom roadmap tailored to your success.

From hyperlocal keyword research to competitor gap analysis, every campaign begins with strategy and ends with impact.

Google Business Profile Optimization Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is the most important tool for local SEO. It's the first thing people see when they Google your name or a service you offer. WebTech Designs ensures that your profile is:

Fully optimized with accurate business info

Geo-tagged with relevant keywords

Regularly updated with posts, offers, and images

Boosted with review generation strategies

By managing and enhancing your GBP, WebTech Designs helps local businesses own the local map pack—those top 3 coveted spots under the map that capture the majority of search traffic.

Review Building and Reputation Management In today’s digital age, your online reputation can make or break a sale. WebTech Designs integrates review generation tools and strategies to help businesses earn authentic, positive feedback across platforms like Google, Yelp, and Facebook.

They also monitor and respond to reviews, helping clients maintain strong customer relationships and increase trustworthiness. The result? More leads, more calls, more walk-ins.

Local Content That Converts Local SEO isn’t just technical—it’s creative. WebTech Designs develops content that speaks to Lincoln’s audience. From blog posts and city pages to service area descriptions and FAQs, they craft content that answers real questions locals are asking.

For example, instead of generic SEO content, they create pieces like:

“Top 5 Things to Know Before Hiring a Plumber in Lincoln”

“Where to Find the Best Vegan Tacos in Downtown Lincoln”

“Why Your Lincoln Law Firm Needs Local SEO Today”

This content doesn’t just rank—it engages, builds authority, and drives conversions.

Transparent Reporting & Real Results WebTech Designs believes that SEO shouldn’t be a mystery. Every client receives easy-to-understand reports showing what’s working, what’s improving, and where opportunities lie. Their team offers monthly strategy calls to explain rankings, traffic, and growth—making sure clients are informed every step of the way.

You’ll know:

How many local searches you're appearing in

What keywords you’re ranking for

How your traffic is improving

How many leads are coming from your SEO efforts

In other words, you’re never left in the dark.

Why Lincoln Trusts WebTech Designs Local businesses choose WebTech Designs not just for their SEO skills—but for their:

✅ Deep understanding of Lincoln's market ✅ Friendly, communicative team ✅ Track record of success ✅ Ethical, white-hat SEO practices ✅ Passion for helping small businesses thrive

They’re not just an SEO company in Lincoln—they’re a part of Lincoln’s growth story.

Final Thoughts In a digital-first world, visibility is the foundation of success. Whether you’re a café near the University of Nebraska or a boutique in the Telegraph District, you need to be found by the people searching for what you offer.

That’s where WebTech Designs comes in.

By blending strategy, creativity, and deep local insight, they help Lincoln businesses climb to the top of Google—and stay there. If you're ready to invest in your online presence and dominate your local market, there’s only one name you need to remember: WebTech Designs.

Ready to get started? Visit WebTech Designs today and discover how local SEO can transform your Lincoln business.

[justakidicarus]

Generative AI Does not Belong in Fanfiction. What about others?

So I wanted to do a more in depth analysis of AI in fanfiction because I understand there are multiple types, not just generative AI. I am not an expert and all of this information is a quick google search away

TL;DR Natural Language Processing AI is fine, and helps the visually impaired, as long as its not used for Gen AI. Neural Machine Translation you've already been using, but finding a person made translation will always be better. Machine Learning I don't think you could even apply besides training Gen and NLP, so don't even think about trying it. Computer Vision isn't the most applicable and you can get the same thing from having a Beta.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

So this is what allows Chat GPT to understand what you are saying and pump out a semi-coherant answer, same with Character.ai and any chatbot you may use (including Siri). Now this can be used for a multitude of things that aren't Chatbots. It's responsible for text to speech recognition, so sight impaired readers may use this to generate an audio of your fic to listen to. Though as a writer, if you want to check things like tone, just don't read your fic for two weeks and you'll be fine. Or have a Beta.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT)

That's what google translate is, as well as any other instant text translator that isn't run by a person. You've probably used this in your writing before, and had little to no problem with it. In saying that, these translators are trained on a wide sample of language data, and still have inacurate results. Finding an actual translation by a person is both more ethical, and more accurate.

Machine Learning

This is what allows AI algorithms to learn, and what scrapers make their databases for. No.

Computer Vision

This essentially allows computers to "see" things in the real world. Could be tied to visual aid, but not super practical.

Conclusion

AI will always be outperformed by basic human services. The only exception is quick accessibility aid for the visually impaired. Getting a friend (or your future self) to re-read your works will help with grammar, spelling, and tone. Finding an official translator will always be better than an AI one. Other forms of AI just support the previously stated ones. People will always outperform machines, because they still have years to go to have a fraction of the intrinsic understanding we do of the human experience. That it what we embody with our writing, and no matter how much AI is fed, it won't ever be able to understand that. Even if it passes the Turing Test it will still fall short, and in fact still is.

[phenixcreations]

The Role of Semantic Search in Modern SEO Services San Francisco

In today’s dynamic digital landscape, search engine optimization (SEO) is no longer just about inserting the right keywords into your content.

With the rise of AI-powered algorithms and user-centric search experiences, semantic search has become a core component of modern SEO strategies. But what exactly is semantic search, and how is it transforming SEO Services San Francisco? Let’s explore.

What is Semantic Search?

Semantic search refers to the process by which search engines attempt to understand the intent and context behind a user’s query rather than relying solely on keyword matches. Instead of looking at search terms in isolation, semantic search interprets meaning by analyzing:

The relationship between words

User search history and location

Natural language queries

Synonyms and variations

Structured data and entity recognition

Search engines like Google now aim to deliver results that are not just textually relevant but also contextually accurate, thanks to major algorithm updates like Hummingbird, RankBrain, and BERT.

Why Does Semantic Search Matter in SEO?

In the past, SEO success depended heavily on keyword density, exact match phrases, and backlink quantity. But today’s search engines are much smarter. They understand that a user searching for "how to fix a leaky faucet" doesn’t just want a page that repeats that phrase ten times—they want a helpful guide, perhaps with step-by-step instructions and tools needed.

Here’s how semantic search impacts modern SEO:

1. Focus on Search Intent

Understanding user intent is now critical. Are users looking for information, trying to make a purchase, or comparing products? Semantic search helps deliver tailored content that aligns with the user’s goal, and SEO professionals must optimize content accordingly.

2. Natural Language and Conversational Queries

With the rise of voice assistants and AI chatbots, people are using more natural, conversational queries. Phrases like “best pizza place near me” or “how can I improve my sleep quality?” require semantic understanding. SEO now involves optimizing for these long-tail and question-based keywords.

3. Topic Clusters over Keywords

Modern SEO emphasizes topic relevance rather than isolated keywords. Creating content clusters around core themes helps search engines understand the depth and authority of a website. For example, a health blog writing about “diabetes” should also cover related topics like diet, insulin, symptoms, and treatments.

4. Structured Data and Schema Markup

Semantic search engines benefit from clear, structured data. Using schema markup allows search engines to better understand your content, which can improve rankings and increase chances of rich snippets appearing in search results.

5. User Experience and Engagement Metrics

Since semantic search prioritizes delivering the most useful content, user experience (UX) plays a major role. High bounce rates, low time on page, and poor mobile optimization can negatively affect rankings. SEO services now need to align content relevance with fast, intuitive website design.

How are SEO Services Adapting?

SEO agencies and professionals have shifted from keyword stuffing to creating meaningful, high-quality content. Here’s how they’re leveraging semantic search:

Conducting intent-based keyword research instead of generic keyword lists

Creating comprehensive content hubs that satisfy multiple user intents

Using AI and NLP tools to analyze semantic relationships

Optimizing FAQs and voice-friendly content

Implementing structured data to enhance content discoverability

Final Thoughts

Semantic search is not a passing trend—it’s the foundation of how modern search engines work. For businesses, this means SEO is no longer a technical back-end task but a holistic digital strategy that includes content marketing, UX, and even AI.

To stay ahead in the SEO game, brands must shift their focus from keywords to meaning, from volume to value. By embracing semantic search, businesses can deliver better experiences, reach more relevant audiences, and rank higher in today’s intelligent search engines.

[manamediamarketing]

The Future of Digital Marketing in 2025 – Trends Every Business Must Adopt

Introduction

As we step into 2025, digital marketing is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Businesses that stay ahead of trends will increase brand visibility, attract more leads, and boost conversions. From AI-driven SEO to hyper-personalized marketing, the digital landscape is more competitive than ever.

Whether you’re a small business owner, entrepreneur, or marketing professional, understanding these trends will help you craft a winning digital marketing strategy. Let’s explore the top digital marketing trends for 2025 that will shape the future of online success.

1. AI-Powered SEO is the Future

Search engines are becoming smarter and more intuitive. With AI-powered algorithms like Google’s MUM (Multitask Unified Model) and BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), traditional SEO tactics are no longer enough.

How AI is Transforming SEO in 2025?

✔ AI-driven content creation: Advanced AI tools analyze search intent to create highly relevant, optimized content. ✔ Predictive analytics: AI predicts user behavior, helping businesses optimize content for better engagement. ✔ Voice and visual search optimization: As voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant become more popular, brands must adapt their SEO strategy to long-tail conversational queries.

Actionable Tip: Optimize for natural language searches, use structured data markup, and ensure website accessibility to improve rankings in 2025.

2. Video Marketing Continues to Dominate

With platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, video marketing is becoming the most powerful form of content in 2025.

Why is Video Marketing Essential?

📌 80% of internet traffic will be video content by 2025 (Cisco Report). 📌 Short-form videos increase engagement and hold attention longer than static content. 📌 Live streaming and interactive videos help brands connect with audiences in real-time.

Actionable Tip: Focus on storytelling, behind-the-scenes content, product demonstrations, and influencer collaborations to boost engagement.

3. Hyper-Personalization with AI & Data Analytics

Consumers expect highly personalized experiences, and AI-powered marketing automation makes it possible.

How Does Hyper-Personalization Work?

✔ AI analyzes customer behavior and past interactions to create tailored marketing messages. ✔ Email marketing campaigns are dynamically personalized based on user interests. ✔ Chatbots and voice assistants provide real-time, customized support.

Actionable Tip: Leverage tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Marketo to automate personalized marketing campaigns.

4. Influencer Marketing Becomes More Authentic

The influencer marketing industry is projected to reach $21.1 billion by 2025. However, brands are shifting from celebrity influencers to micro and nano-influencers for better authenticity and engagement.

Why Micro-Influencers Matter?

🎯 Higher engagement rates than macro-influencers. 🎯 More trust & relatability with niche audiences. 🎯 Cost-effective collaborations for brands with limited budgets.

Actionable Tip: Partner with influencers in your niche and use user-generated content (UGC) to enhance brand credibility.

5. Voice & Visual Search Optimization is a Must

By 2025, 50% of all searches will be voice or image-based, making traditional text-based SEO insufficient.

How to Optimize for Voice & Visual Search?

✔ Use long-tail keywords & conversational phrases. ✔ Optimize images with alt text & structured data. ✔ Ensure your site is mobile-friendly and fast-loading.

Actionable Tip: Implement Google Lens-friendly content to appear in image-based search results.

Conclusion

The future of digital marketing in 2025 is driven by AI, personalization, and immersive experiences. If you’re not adapting, you’re falling behind!

 Looking for expert digital marketing strategies? Mana Media Marketing can help you grow and dominate your niche. Contact us today!

[seoinindia01]

India’s Best SEO Services: Boost Your Website Rankings with Proven Strategies

Why SEO is Essential for Your Online Success

In today’s digital world, search engine optimization services in Delhi play a crucial role in helping businesses enhance their online presence. SEO is not just about ranking higher on search engines; it’s about building brand credibility, driving organic traffic, and increasing conversions. Companies investing in SEO services in New Delhi enjoy long-term benefits that help them outperform competitors and establish a strong online footprint.

As an experienced SEO company in Delhi, we understand that SEO is a continuous process that requires a strategic approach. With evolving search engine algorithms, businesses must adapt and refine their SEO tactics to maintain their visibility and attract potential customers. Our professional SEO services agency in Delhi ensures that your website is optimized for both technical and content aspects, making it easier for search engines to crawl and rank your pages effectively.

The Benefits of SEO for Websites

Many businesses underestimate the importance of SEO, assuming that a well-designed website is enough to attract visitors. However, without proper search engine optimization services in Delhi, even the most attractive websites remain undiscovered. Here’s why investing in the right SEO service in Delhi is essential:

Enhanced Visibility & Ranking – A website optimized with best SEO services in Delhi NCR ranks higher on search engines, making it easier for potential customers to find your business.

Targeted Organic Traffic – Unlike paid ads, organic traffic through affordable SEO services in Delhi has a higher conversion rate as users actively search for related products or services.

Improved User Experience – SEO enhances website speed, navigation, and content quality, ensuring a seamless user experience.

Brand Authority & Credibility – A website ranking on the first page of Google gains credibility, influencing customer trust and engagement.

Cost-Effective Marketing Strategy – Compared to SEM, SEO or SEM, which is better? SEO provides sustainable, long-term results at a lower cost.

Local SEO Services: A Game-Changer for Businesses

For businesses targeting specific locations, local SEO services in Delhi are crucial for attracting customers within a defined geographical area. Our SEO services provider in Delhi ensures that your website appears in local search results, Google Maps, and business directories, helping you reach customers who are actively looking for your services.

If you operate a physical store or offer location-based services, local SEO services in Delhi can drive foot traffic to your business, increasing your chances of converting visitors into loyal customers. Our SEO services near me strategy helps small businesses compete with larger enterprises by optimizing their presence in location-specific searches.

How Much Do SEO Services Cost in India?

A common question businesses ask is, how much does SEO cost in India? The cost varies based on factors such as the competitiveness of keywords, the size of the website, and the scope of work required. While some companies offer affordable SEO services in Delhi, others charge premium rates for specialized strategies. We offer flexible SEO packages designed to meet the needs of startups, small businesses, and enterprises alike.

Wondering how much should I pay for SEO services? The best approach is to choose an SEO plan that aligns with your business goals and budget. We provide cost-effective solutions without compromising on quality, ensuring measurable results and long-term growth.

Our SEO Strategy: A Roadmap to Success

As a top SEO services agency in Delhi, we follow a comprehensive approach that includes:

Technical SEO: Enhancing website speed, mobile-friendliness, and structured data optimization.

On-Page SEO: Optimizing content, meta tags, URLs, and internal linking.

Off-Page SEO: Building high-quality backlinks, social signals, and brand mentions.

Local SEO: Optimizing Google My Business (GMB) profiles and local citations.

Content Optimization: Creating engaging, keyword-rich content that resonates with your audience.

Get the Best SEO Services in Delhi Today!

If you’re looking for freelance SEO services in Delhi, or want to collaborate with an expert SEO company South Delhi, we are here to help! Our team of SEO specialists ensures that your website ranks higher, drives more traffic, and converts visitors into paying customers.

Contact us today to explore our best SEO service in Delhi NCR packages and take your online presence to the next level. Whether you need financial SEO service in Delhi or e-commerce SEO solutions, we have the expertise to deliver measurable success.

[literaryxbones]

How to Avoid Generative AI In Your Search Browser

I've seen countless people complain about generative AI in their search results. Whether it's google images, a sketchy website using CHATGPT, or a fake artist trying to scam you out of money, generative AI is unfortunately everywhere. Before I reveal my methods of banishing AI to the shadow realm, let's go over the basics.

Not everyone is familiar with tech terminology, or how AI actually functions.

What's the difference between AI and generative AI?

AI has been used for decades in programming, technology, and social media. AI used to be reserved algorithms and code, but now it's being used to generate content (texts, websites, images etc.) That's where the term generative AI comes from.

Why is generative AI bad?

Generative AI collects available data, stores it, and uses all of it to form sentences, a picture, or whatever else you want it to make. The problem is, this user data is taken without consent to train AI models.

A machine heavily references human input, using any combination of it to come out with the final product. AI can and does steal creatives work. It can't come up with anything original on its own.

Businesses, scammers, and reposters use AI-created content to profit off of internet content with NO EFFORT. Feeds hosting AI drive regular people away from seeing and engaging with something a person spent time making. That means that any person creating content on the internet is now losing money due to the AI's widespread acceptance.

The last issue I want to quickly touch on is that AI isn't always right. It does not understand whether the information that it's scalping is even factual. Generative AI interprets prompt keywords, not nuance or conversation. Even if an AI references a source, it may spit out irrelevant info or only highlight a piece of original text, leaving out a bigger picture.

How to Avoid AI:

Method 1: "Enter before:2021" after your search query. This is especially helpful in Google Images.

Method 2: Use "-ai" after you search. This only works for content tagged as AI, or that mentions it's AI generated.

Method 3: Avoid sketchy looking websites filled with lots of ads, buggy articles, and a choppy writing flow. Only read articles, journals, and publications from established websites that are known to hire human writers.

Those are my tried-and-true methods! In my experience, the before: command is the most reliable. I may make a post like this for AI content on social media, including Tumblr, once I figure out how to avoid seeing it on platforms.