How are people feeling about the coming #searchapocalypse ? This "SEO is Dead" video does a good job of framing the issue. Solutions: 1) Take back control. 2) Build your own audience. 3) Get good at outbound marketing. 4) Spread your bets across channels/platforms (including your own.) 5) Own your relationships.
https://youtu.be/96KaqWOeCDc?si=RhKJDQ9OAweCVQrR&t=992
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@pauleveritt I like this comment "I've heard seo was gonna die every 6 months for the last 12 years" 😁. I've always thought SEO is bullshit. Do the work, create valueble content, be authentic, speak to your audience. This should be the only strategy you consider seriously.
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@rochecompaan Independent of SEO, I do worry search results having answers without links. Related: younger devs installing ChatGPT desktop app etc. as a search replacement.
We need to find ways, together, to build enough gravity as a counterweight.
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@pauleveritt
@rochecompaan
ChatGPT includes sources at the bottom sometimes. But it's a lot harder to figure out whether that's taken from a reliable place as it gets llmwashed
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@faassen @pauleveritt, liberating search will be incredibly challenging. Just thinking about what the solution should look like makes my head hurt. I would love for it to be federated, but that comes with a host of technical, UX, and privacy challenges.
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@rochecompaan
@pauleveritt
I have some ideas. A lot of things change if you give up the notion a search has to cover the whole internet. Topic centric human curated search indexes
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@faassen @rochecompaan Yes, this. The Python community produces content, has its own network effects. It's an asset.
Imagine a not-search something like Planet Python, with curation and value-add. Then imagine most folks in Python knew about it, pointed to it, used it, valued it.
We can "take back our audience.”
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@pauleveritt
@rochecompaan
Human curated links can be a network. Your links include my links. You add a bunch. Perhaps you leave out a few that have gone bad. While a system like that will be gamed it's a lot harder for SEO or LLM content to overwhelm it. Search is social.
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@faassen @rochecompaan Curation and gardening is the second most important part, IMO. It tackles what you've described.
The more important: we just need to make this thing the cultural norm. The "front page" for Python. In whatever form. We're big enough to make our own network effects.
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@pauleveritt
@rochecompaan
I have thought about this on a human scale. Human curators. But of course organizations can curate as well.
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@faassen @rochecompaan Yeh, there needs to be a role indie companies doing content. Talk Python, Real Python, etc.
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@pauleveritt @faassen If Nix packages can maintain not only the index of hundred thousand packages, but the package definitions themselves, this should be very doable for Python. But why stop at Python? Why not be more ambitious and create an ecosystem where we index more than just technical knowledge. Imagine creating a system with many index maintainers, similar to package maintainers.
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@rochecompaan @faassen The network comes from a social network. Python is a social place. I think this recipe could work in other networks, and a network-network could also happen.
But it all needs IMO to be grounded in humanity, which crawlers and LLMs can't replicate.
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@pauleveritt @faassen and owned by the community, and humanity.
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@rochecompaan
@pauleveritt
That's the happy search bubble idea I am playing with. Many index maintainers, many indexers, many index users.
Describing what to index can be as little as a mildly annotated web page with links, or an RSS feed, or activitypub. There is no central repository but people are free to maintain those.
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@faassen @rochecompaan IMO the lesson about BlueSky vs. Mastodon is that "a single place" appeals to normies.
I think there can be a synthesis that keeps federation. But normies would really value a Planet Python, one stop shop. But one with more human value-add on curation, highlighting, gardening, personality, etc.
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@pauleveritt
@rochecompaan
Yes having a single always up to date global state is easy to think about and therefore appealing. It's also how news media think, as I mentioned in my Quentell footnote.
If search indexes and search could be made to be local that single place might possibly be an app. The risk of a single place is a single point of control, it's going to tricky to manage.
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@pauleveritt @faassen "a single place" that is community maintained and transparent like Nix packages or AUR (Arch community repo). There are more examples of open source community maintained infrastructure that's been around for decades and will outlast the enshitification of current and future tech giants. Until now, we've never considered global search a problem that requires a community-driven solution. Or maybe some have, but we're not aware of it yet ...
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@pauleveritt
SEO and LLM combined makes it worse:
https://blog.startifact.com/posts/the-curious-case-of-quentell/
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@faassen There are a 100 things I loved about that blog post, all the way down to the numerous footnotes. I should have seen this part coming: “site X just created dummy websites to appear higher on the search index results.” Halluncination/confabulation in the hands of an SEO spammer, and you get truth.
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@pauleveritt
Thank you!
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@faassen @pauleveritt
Wow Martijn, fantastic digging!! This was such a pleasure to read!
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@jjmurre
@pauleveritt
Thank you!
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@pauleveritt Those bullets read like an online marketing primer from a decade ago. (That's not a criticism.)
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