#search algorithms

[imarketer4udma-blog]

TOP SEO TRENDS TO RANK YOUR WEBSITE

In today’s digital age, having a website is essential for any business to establish an online presence. However, creating a website alone is not enough to attract potential customers to your site. Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial to improve your website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). As search algorithms and user behavior continue to evolve, staying updated with the latest SEO trends is vital to ensure that your website ranks well in search engines. In this article, we will discuss the top SEO trends that you need to know to improve your website’s ranking. By implementing these trends in your SEO strategy, you can enhance your website’s online visibility and drive more organic traffic to your site.

WHAT ARE SEO TRENDS AND WHY DO YOU NEED TO KNOW THEM?

SEO trends refer to the latest techniques and strategies that website owners, digital marketers, and SEO professionals follow to improve their website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). These trends are constantly evolving as search algorithms and user behavior changes, so it’s crucial to stay updated with the latest trends to ensure that your website remains relevant and visible to potential customers.

By following SEO trends, you can improve your website’s online visibility, attract more organic traffic to your site, and ultimately increase your business’s revenue. For example, if you implement multimedia content promotion, such as adding videos with transcripts to your website, it can significantly increase traffic to your site. This can result in more people discovering your brand and potentially becoming customers.

An example of how following SEO trends can affect website traffic is the Almco project we are currently working on. By adding a video with a transcript as a blog post, the page began to show up in Google Discovery, which significantly increased the website’s traffic.

This is an example of how following SEO trends, such as multimedia content promotion, can positively impact a website’s traffic and ultimately the success of the business.

HOW TO KEEP UP WITH SEO TRENDS?

Staying up-to-date with SEO trends is essential to ensure that your website remains visible and competitive in search engine results pages (SERPs). Here are some ways to keep up with SEO trends:

Hire an SEO specialist: an experienced SEO specialist can help you stay up-to-date with the latest trends and techniques in search engine optimization.

Communication among other specialists: network with other SEO professionals and attend industry events to stay informed about the latest trends.

Read industry sources: read blogs and websites such as Search Engine Journal, Moz, and Search Engine Land to keep up with the latest news and trends in SEO.

Subscribe to industry newsletters: subscribe to newsletters from industry experts and publications to receive the latest updates on SEO trends and techniques.

Monitor search algorithm updates: keep an eye on major search algorithm updates, such as Google’s MUM and Penguin updates, to understand how they may impact your website’s ranking.

By staying informed and implementing the latest SEO trends and techniques, you can improve your website’s visibility, attract more organic traffic to your site, and ultimately grow your business.

To learn more about our SEO services, visit the SEO Promotion Services page.

NEW SEO TRENDS IN 2023

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, new SEO trends are emerging in 2023 that businesses should be aware of. In the following paragraphs, we will explore some of these emerging trends and discuss how they are shaping the future of SEO.

AI becomes an important SEO tool

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an increasingly important tool for SEO specialists in recent years, as it offers many benefits for content creation and optimization. ChatGPT is just one example of an AI-powered tool that can write text, generate unique product descriptions, and develop effective link-building strategies, among other things. Other AI tools available for SEO include Bing from Microsoft, Jasper, Anyword, and Rytr.

Companies such as CNN and Ukrainian retailer Epicentr have already started using AI-generated content to improve their productivity and create unique content faster. However, it’s important to note that AI has its limitations and cannot yet fully replace human SEO specialists. While AI can improve productivity and make SEO optimization faster and easier, it still requires human oversight and editing to ensure quality and accuracy. Overall, AI is a valuable tool for SEO specialists, but it should be used in conjunction with human expertise for optimal results.

One example of how AI-generated content can be effective is a case in which we used ChatGPT to create an article for a website. The article was indexed immediately, within one day, and began to bring traffic to the site. What’s particularly interesting about this case is that when we used an OpenAI tool for detecting AI-written articles, it showed that the article was generated by a human, despite the fact that it was actually written by ChatGPT. This demonstrates the high quality and authenticity of the content generated by AI tools like ChatGPT, and how it can seamlessly integrate into a website’s SEO strategy.

You may be interested: The impact of ChatGPT on marketing, advertising, SMM, and SEO

Showing Experience to comply with new EEAT requirements

In 2022, Google updated its Quality Rater Guidelines to emphasize the importance of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EAT) in website content. They added an additional “E” to EAT, making it EEAT. This means that now, in addition to expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, Google also considers first-hand experience to be a crucial aspect of a website’s content. To comply with this new requirement, it’s important for websites to have reviews, author bios, an “about us” page, and a privacy policy page. These elements can help demonstrate a website’s expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, and first-hand experience. This is particularly important for sites in the YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) niche, but it’s important for all websites to take EEAT into consideration, as it can affect their traffic after a core update. To learn more about EEAT and how to demonstrate first-hand experience, check out the Google Search Central Blog and a very informative article from Search Engine Journal.

Importance of multimedia content

Adding multimedia content such as images to a website is crucial for a positive user experience and can also have a positive impact on SEO. It is important to use unique images and optimize them properly, including adding a title when saving the image, adding title and alt text in the admin panel, using images in the proper context, and saving metadata. This is especially important for local businesses to ensure that their images are properly indexed and appear in relevant local searches.

One option for creating unique images is to take your own photos, but there are also AI-powered tools available such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E. Out of these options, Midjourney we recommend as the best.

By incorporating video content on the website, you can also enhance the user experience and potentially improve SEO. Google has even included a separate tab for pages with video content, indicating its importance. It is recommended to create your own videos, even if they are simple, to make them unique. Tools such as Invideo, Synthesia, Elai, and Steve AI can help create and edit videos. Don’t forget to optimize videos by adding descriptions.

Voice search and the growing importance of low-frequency queries

Voice search is becoming increasingly popular and has changed the way people search for information. This means that SEO strategies should consider how people speak and formulate questions when using voice search, which may differ from how they would type the same query. As an instance, someone may use voice search to ask, “What are the latest SEO trends for 2022?” whereas typing in the words “2022 SEO trends.”

As for low-frequency queries, these are longer and more specific search terms that are not as commonly used but are highly relevant to the user’s search intent. SEO specialists should focus on these types of queries as they can have a higher conversion rate than generic, high-frequency keywords.

To optimize for voice search and long-tailed queries, SEO specialists should focus on creating high-quality content that directly answers the user’s question, using natural language that reflects how people speak in everyday conversations, and including structured data to help search engines better understand the content.

To learn more about our SEO services, visit the Free SEO Audit page.

Increasing the importance of your own research and publishing your own unique content

In today’s digital landscape, it is essential for companies to invest in conducting their own research, surveys, and experiments. Simply writing unique content is no longer enough to stand out from the competition. Rather, companies must provide their own unique information that cannot be found elsewhere on the internet. This means that articles should not only provide comprehensive information, but also offer insights and perspectives that are exclusive to the company. As a result, longer articles that go into greater depth are becoming increasingly valued in the industry.

In the case of Decks Toronto , we added an article with detailed information comparing two popular brands. The article contained a lot of unique criteria, technical information, and tables that were not readily available on the internet. This approach of conducting research and providing unique information in their content helped Decks Toronto stand out from their competitors and establish themselves as a credible source of information in their industry.

Learn more about SEO strategy for local e-commerce businesses in our article “SEO  case study: strategy to overcome seasonality, PPC competition and niche crisis for local ecommerce business”

Optimizing for user’s intent

Optimizing for user intent involves analyzing the target audience and understanding their needs, questions, and problems, rather than simply optimizing for one keyword. This approach ensures that the article provides valuable and relevant information that meets the user’s search intent. By understanding the user’s intent, content creators can optimize their articles by using relevant keywords, structuring the content to answer specific questions, and providing valuable insights that address the user’s needs. This approach not only improves the user experience but also increases the chances of the article ranking higher in search engine results pages.

Semantic SEO optimization: knowledge graphs & entities

Semantic SEO optimization focuses on using contextual information and understanding the relationships between different entities to improve the relevance of search results. This involves optimizing for knowledge graphs and entities, which are the building blocks of information that search engines use to understand the meaning behind queries and content. By structuring your content in a way that aligns with the way search engines interpret and present information, you can improve the visibility and relevance of your website in search results. For example, you can use schema markup to define the relationships between entities and provide additional context for search engines. This can help search engines understand the meaning behind queries and present more relevant results to users. Additionally, you can optimize your content for featured snippets and other rich snippets, which are designed to provide users with quick answers to their queries.

SEO TRENDS THAT ARE KEEPING THEIR IMPORTANCE IN 2023

While there are always new SEO trends emerging, it’s important to remember that the foundational elements of SEO are still critical to success. Further we will explore some of the common SEO trends that have been relevant in the past, are currently relevant, and are expected to continue to be relevant in the future.

Site loading speed and Core Web Vitals

In 2023, site loading speed and Core Web Vitals will continue to be important SEO trends. Core Web Vitals, which consist of three metrics – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – are used to measure the user experience of a website. Improving these metrics can lead to a better user experience, which can result in better search engine rankings. Additionally, site loading speed plays a crucial role in both user experience and search engine rankings. Slow loading times can lead to increased bounce rates and lower rankings. Tools like PageSpeed Insights can help website owners identify areas for improvement and optimize their site for faster loading times. By prioritizing site speed and Core Web Vitals, website owners can improve their SEO and provide a better user experience for their visitors.

Recently, on the 24th of April, Google announced that they will no longer support some ranking signals, including Page Speed Insights. However, this does not mean that site speed is no longer important for SEO. Google’s intention is to encourage a holistic approach to website optimization and not to focus solely on numbers. Instead of Page Speed Insights, developers can use Google Lighthouse to measure the speed and performance of their sites. Additionally, SEO professionals can continue to use GTmetrix, which provides website speed test results and detailed performance reports.

High-quality content

High-quality content is an essential element of SEO, as it ensures that users find what they are looking for when they land on a website. Google’s “helpful content update” emphasizes the importance of creating content that is genuinely useful to users, answering their queries and providing helpful information. To create high-quality content, it’s important to research your topic thoroughly and use reputable sources. A clear and engaging writing style is also essential, as well as incorporating multimedia elements such as images and videos. Google provides guidelines for creating helpful content, which include prioritizing the user’s needs, ensuring accuracy and expertise, and creating content that is easy to understand and access. By creating high-quality content, websites can improve their rankings in search results and attract more traffic.

Linkbuilding

Link building is an important part of any SEO strategy and involves acquiring links from other websites to your own site. One effective way to start link building is by analyzing your competitors’ pages and identifying the websites that are linking to them. You can use tools like Ahrefs to check your domain rating and the number of referring domains pointing to your site.

In a case where we invested in low-budget link building, the results might not be immediately noticeable. However, after a few months, we started seeing an increase in traffic. This is because links from high-quality, relevant websites can help improve your website’s authority and search engine rankings.

It’s important to note that link building should be done carefully and with a focus on quality over quantity. Low-quality or spammy links can actually harm your website’s rankings and reputation. Instead, aim to build relationships with other website owners in your industry and create valuable content that others will want to link to naturally.

Mobile friendliness

Mobile friendliness is a critical aspect of website optimization, as more and more users access the internet from their mobile devices. To ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool, which analyzes your website’s pages and reports if they are designed to be viewed on mobile devices. The tool evaluates factors such as the text size, page loading speed, and responsiveness of your website on different mobile devices. By making your website mobile-friendly, you can improve the user experience for your mobile audience, boost your search engine rankings, and drive more traffic to your site.

On the 24th of April, Google announced that it will retire its Mobile-Friendly test tool. This tool has been used by many SEO professionals to check if their website is mobile-friendly. However, this announcement does not mean that responsible design is not important. Developers from Google want SEO to focus on a more holistic approach rather than just numbers. They recommend using other tools, such as the Mobile Usability report in Search Console, to ensure your website is mobile-friendly. This change is in line with Google’s focus on improving user experience on the web.

Targeting the audience and its needs, not bots

In the world of SEO, it’s important to remember that we write for people, not just for search engine bots. In the past, there was a tendency to focus too much on keyword density and stuffing pages with exact-match keywords in order to rank higher. However, with Google’s implementation of the BERT algorithm, the focus has shifted to understanding the context of the content and providing value to the reader. This means that you can focus on creating high-quality content that addresses the needs of your target audience, rather than worrying about exact keyword matches. By crafting content that is relevant, engaging, and informative to your audience, you’ll be able to build trust and credibility, ultimately leading to higher rankings and better engagement.

IM4U DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY WILL HELP YOU TO STAY UP-DO-DATE ON SEO TRENDS

Don’t let your website fall behind in search engine rankings. Trust IM4U Digital Marketing Agency to keep you up-to-date with the latest SEO trends and strategies. Book our SEO website audit now and watch your website climb to the top of the search results. Contact us to learn more!

[iammannyj]

SearchGPT - Possibly The Next Big Disruption in Search, SEO and Advertising

SearchGPT - Possibly The Next Big Disruption in Search, SEO and Advertising

The digital landscape is on the brink of a massive upheaval with the introduction of SearchGPT. This isn’t just another search engine; it’s poised to redefine how we access information, threatening the dominance of Google and shaking up the advertising world. For advertisers, this means an urgent need to adapt or risk falling behind. SEO and SEM strategies will need to pivot dramatically to…

[librarianrafia]

"...it also revealed the emptiness of Google’s new approach to search. Without any knowledge base of its own, the company’s large language model simply summarizes and regurgitates what it finds on the web according to unknown criteria — an approach Today in Tabs’ Rusty Foster accurately calls automated plagiarism.

Google blamed all this on its users, Kylie Robison reported at The Verge:Google spokesperson Meghann Farnsworth said the mistakes came from “generally very uncommon queries, and aren’t representative of most people’s experiences.” The company has taken action against violations of its policies, she said, and are using these “isolated examples” to continue to refine the product.

… plenty of these queries were common enough. Asking about the race or religion of US presidents, or how to get cheese to stick to pizza, are straightforward uses of Google that the previous, non-AI-degraded version of the search engine handled just fine.

But even then, Foster’s criticism will still stand: those “overviews” really are just slightly reworded versions of journalists’ copy, designed to give people ever fewer reasons to step outside Google’s walled garden. This is what I mean when I say that the web has entered a state of managed decline: one company has outsized influence over when and how people visit any websites at all, and it has told us it plans to gradually ratchet those visits down by continuing to answer more questions on the search engine results page."

[4seohelp]

10 Key Ways in Which Google Utilizes Data Science

Google relies on data science as it underpins the company’s ability to innovate, optimize, and provide valuable services. With an immense amount of user-generated data at its disposal, data science enables Google to enhance its core products like search, advertising, and recommendations, delivering a more personalized and efficient experience. It’s crucial for staying competitive, improving user…

[sofiaruelle]

❄️☃️The SDV Girlies in their winter garb!☃️❄️

One side how i interpreted their lil avatars and then the other side is just me playing dress up lmao.

“Bois when?” Dunno. 🤷🏽‍♀️ I will if anyone donates screenshots.

[hadenclairee]

I think it's comical that our biggest tech companies, including one whose whole thing is being the #1 search engine, can't figure out how to handle special characters in a searched string. They just escape it and hope it wasn't important to what you're wanting to find.

This is YouTube Music, and those are the search suggestions based on what other users have searched. It seems like they escape the character before it even makes it into the log to be served up in suggestions.

It does return results for P!nk but it's not exactly elegant and it makes me wonder whether the special character is even considered on the other side of the search, or if the algorithms see "P!nk" in their database as "P nk" and go "yep, that's a match for the user who just searched `P nk`"

[axattech]

This blog will provide the latest insights to enhance your SEO strategy and maximize your online visibility. Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines in 2023: Latest Tips and Techniques Explore more here.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Even if you think AI search could be good, it won’t be good

TONIGHT (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

The big news in search this week is that Google is continuing its transition to "AI search" – instead of typing in search terms and getting links to websites, you'll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web:

https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/

Google bills this as "let Google do the googling for you." Rather than searching the web yourself, you'll delegate this task to Google. Hidden in this pitch is a tacit admission that Google is no longer a convenient or reliable way to retrieve information, drowning as it is in AI-generated spam, poorly labeled ads, and SEO garbage:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Googling used to be easy: type in a query, get back a screen of highly relevant results. Today, clicking the top links will take you to sites that paid for placement at the top of the screen (rather than the sites that best match your query). Clicking further down will get you scams, AI slop, or bulk-produced SEO nonsense.

AI-powered search promises to fix this, not by making Google search results better, but by having a bot sort through the search results and discard the nonsense that Google will continue to serve up, and summarize the high quality results.

Now, there are plenty of obvious objections to this plan. For starters, why wouldn't Google just make its search results better? Rather than building a LLM for the sole purpose of sorting through the garbage Google is either paid or tricked into serving up, why not just stop serving up garbage? We know that's possible, because other search engines serve really good results by paying for access to Google's back-end and then filtering the results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Another obvious objection: why would anyone write the web if the only purpose for doing so is to feed a bot that will summarize what you've written without sending anyone to your webpage? Whether you're a commercial publisher hoping to make money from advertising or subscriptions, or – like me – an open access publisher hoping to change people's minds, why would you invite Google to summarize your work without ever showing it to internet users? Nevermind how unfair that is, think about how implausible it is: if this is the way Google will work in the future, why wouldn't every publisher just block Google's crawler?

A third obvious objection: AI is bad. Not morally bad (though maybe morally bad, too!), but technically bad. It "hallucinates" nonsense answers, including dangerous nonsense. It's a supremely confident liar that can get you killed:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai

The promises of AI are grossly oversold, including the promises Google makes, like its claim that its AI had discovered millions of useful new materials. In reality, the number of useful new materials Deepmind had discovered was zero:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

This is true of all of AI's most impressive demos. Often, "AI" turns out to be low-waged human workers in a distant call-center pretending to be robots:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

Sometimes, the AI robot dancing on stage turns out to literally be just a person in a robot suit pretending to be a robot:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

The AI video demos that represent "an existential threat to Hollywood filmmaking" turn out to be so cumbersome as to be practically useless (and vastly inferior to existing production techniques):

https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/

But let's take Google at its word. Let's stipulate that:

a) It can't fix search, only add a slop-filtering AI layer on top of it; and

b) The rest of the world will continue to let Google index its pages even if they derive no benefit from doing so; and

c) Google will shortly fix its AI, and all the lies about AI capabilities will be revealed to be premature truths that are finally realized.

AI search is still a bad idea. Because beyond all the obvious reasons that AI search is a terrible idea, there's a subtle – and incurable – defect in this plan: AI search – even excellent AI search – makes it far too easy for Google to cheat us, and Google can't stop cheating us.

Remember: enshittification isn't the result of worse people running tech companies today than in the years when tech services were good and useful. Rather, enshittification is rooted in the collapse of constraints that used to prevent those same people from making their services worse in service to increasing their profit margins:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

These companies always had the capacity to siphon value away from business customers (like publishers) and end-users (like searchers). That comes with the territory: digital businesses can alter their "business logic" from instant to instant, and for each user, allowing them to change payouts, prices and ranking. I call this "twiddling": turning the knobs on the system's back-end to make sure the house always wins:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

What changed wasn't the character of the leaders of these businesses, nor their capacity to cheat us. What changed was the consequences for cheating. When the tech companies merged to monopoly, they ceased to fear losing your business to a competitor.

Google's 90% search market share was attained by bribing everyone who operates a service or platform where you might encounter a search box to connect that box to Google. Spending tens of billions of dollars every year to make sure no one ever encounters a non-Google search is a cheaper way to retain your business than making sure Google is the very best search engine:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Competition was once a threat to Google; for years, its mantra was "competition is a click away." Today, competition is all but nonexistent.

Then the surveillance business consolidated into a small number of firms. Two companies dominate the commercial surveillance industry: Google and Meta, and they collude to rig the market:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

That consolidation inevitably leads to regulatory capture: shorn of competitive pressure, the companies that dominate the sector can converge on a single message to policymakers and use their monopoly profits to turn that message into policy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

This is why Google doesn't have to worry about privacy laws. They've successfully prevented the passage of a US federal consumer privacy law. The last time the US passed a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988. It's a law that bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

In Europe, Google's vast profits lets it fly an Irish flag of convenience, thus taking advantage of Ireland's tolerance for tax evasion and violations of European privacy law:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

Google doesn't fear competition, it doesn't fear regulation, and it also doesn't fear rival technologies. Google and its fellow Big Tech cartel members have expanded IP law to allow it to prevent third parties from reverse-engineer, hacking, or scraping its services. Google doesn't have to worry about ad-blocking, tracker blocking, or scrapers that filter out Google's lucrative, low-quality results:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Google doesn't fear competition, it doesn't fear regulation, it doesn't fear rival technology and it doesn't fear its workers. Google's workforce once enjoyed enormous sway over the company's direction, thanks to their scarcity and market power. But Google has outgrown its dependence on its workers, and lays them off in vast numbers, even as it increases its profits and pisses away tens of billions on stock buybacks:

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

Google is fearless. It doesn't fear losing your business, or being punished by regulators, or being mired in guerrilla warfare with rival engineers. It certainly doesn't fear its workers.

Making search worse is good for Google. Reducing search quality increases the number of queries, and thus ads, that each user must make to find their answers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

If Google can make things worse for searchers without losing their business, it can make more money for itself. Without the discipline of markets, regulators, tech or workers, it has no impediment to transferring value from searchers and publishers to itself.

Which brings me back to AI search. When Google substitutes its own summaries for links to pages, it creates innumerable opportunities to charge publishers for preferential placement in those summaries.

This is true of any algorithmic feed: while such feeds are important – even vital – for making sense of huge amounts of information, they can also be used to play a high-speed shell-game that makes suckers out of the rest of us:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/11/for-you/#the-algorithm-tm

When you trust someone to summarize the truth for you, you become terribly vulnerable to their self-serving lies. In an ideal world, these intermediaries would be "fiduciaries," with a solemn (and legally binding) duty to put your interests ahead of their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

But Google is clear that its first duty is to its shareholders: not to publishers, not to searchers, not to "partners" or employees.

AI search makes cheating so easy, and Google cheats so much. Indeed, the defects in AI give Google a readymade excuse for any apparent self-dealing: "we didn't tell you a lie because someone paid us to (for example, to recommend a product, or a hotel room, or a political point of view). Sure, they did pay us, but that was just an AI 'hallucination.'"

The existence of well-known AI hallucinations creates a zone of plausible deniability for even more enshittification of Google search. As Madeleine Clare Elish writes, AI serves as a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

That's why, even if you're willing to believe that Google could make a great AI-based search, we can nevertheless be certain that they won't.

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/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/#ai-search

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

djhughman https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Modular_synthesizer_-_%22Control_Voltage%22_electronic_music_shop_in_Portland_OR_-_School_Photos_PCC_%282015-05-23_12.43.01_by_djhughman%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[thechekhov]

[severevoiddragon]

I wonder how the Haiku Bot happens to find posts with Haikus in?

[blaithnne]

Though it’s not hugely prominent, I think Lauren’s style still has that little bit of 80s grunge influence from her teen years.

[sergle]

FOREWARNING FOR GROSS-OUT SKIN CLOSEUP SHIT DON'T YELL AT ME FOR SHOWING YOU has anyone else gotten this really weird phenomenon on youtube. I swear every algorithm on every website is actively and purposely worse now. Where you'll be scrolling through vids after searching for something (I was looking at crochet stuff) and SANDWICHED IN THE MIDDLE OF ACTUAL SEARCH RESULTS... YOU KNOW. LIKE THINGS RELEVANT TO THE KEYWORDS I TYPED

are a couple of completely out of left field SHOCK VALUE VIDS. like to intentionally be alarming. drama vids and things you're enticed to click on bc they're upsetting, and deep deep closeups on zits. what the fuck is going on. Sandwiched between videos about GRANNY SQUARES. crack? is it crack we're smoking????

[tomwambsmilk]

fr tho @staff why are you trying to make tumblr more like other sites why are you destroying your niche in the market please there have got to be ways to make tumblr more accessible to new users without sacrificing the very things that your existing userbase loves

[fishoutoflovebeach]

[unforth]

Heyo Danmei Fans and Twitter Refugees!

Do you love danmei? Do you love fanart?

WELL HAVE I GOT THE SIDEBLOGS FOR YOU!

Hi, I'm unforth, and I also love danmei and fanart, and I wanted to just make a huge gorgeous pile of art and roll around in it so I've made and run for years eight, yes eight, side blogs of danmei art, all with the kind of organization and searchability that twitter can only dream of.

So, if you want to flood your dash with fanart (or if you're an artist and want a little assist getting more eyes on your work now that you're posting here - you can DM me or @/me), why not consider giving a follow to...

Mo Dao Zu Shi/Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation/The Untamed: @mdzsartreblogs

Tian Guan Ci Fu/Heaven Official's Blessing/Eternal Faith: @tgcfartreblogs

Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong/Scum Villain's Self-Saving System/Scumbag System: @svsssartreblogs

Erha he Ta de Bai Mao Shizun/The Husky and His White Cat Shizun/Hao Yi Xing and Yuwu/Stains of Filth: @erhaartreblogs

Daomu Biji/The Graverobber's Chronicles/The Lost Tomb/Too Many Other Names to List: @dmbjartreblogs

Zhenhun/Guardian: @zhenhunartreblogs

Tian Ya Ke/Faraway Wanderers/Word of Honor and Qiye/Lord Seventh: @tykartreblogs

Literally Everything Else I Can Find (especially works by Meng Xi Shi, works by Priest, manhua on Bilibili, books by Fei Tian Ye Xiang, books by Please Don't Laugh (so yes, baihe too!), and so much more): @cnovelartreblogs

All blogs run on a queue; I post at a "the queue will last for 7 days" rate that changes more-or-less every day and varies from 30 to 40 posts a day (mdzsartreblogs) down to 1 to 2 posts a day (zhenhunreblogs) and everything in between.

Note that these spaces are all ship and let ship, don't like don't interact, and pro-kink. (I won't reblog everything, but I do reblog almost everything, and even if I'm personally too uncomfortable with something to reblog it - I SUPPORT YOU.) I tag extensively - you can check the pinned post on each blog for currently used trigger warnings (they're consistent across all the blogs) and many of the other tags I use for characters, ships, etc., and I strongly encourage you to use the tags to find That Rare Thing You Love, and also to blacklist anything that's not your thing. Antis kindly fuck off challenge.

Welcome to Tumblr (or welcome back, as the case may be), don't be a stranger, like and reblog works to support artists, and have fun!

(help signal boosting much appreciated. <3 )

[viridescenttemple]

I SOMETIMES WONDER IF I SHOULD MAKE A TWITTER MAIN AGAIN TO POST MY ART IN, BUT EVERYTIME I THINK ABOUT IT A NEW UPDATE THAT FUCKS UP THE SITE HAPPENS AND MY DESIRE TO DO GOES BELOW 0 LMAO