I think there is plenty of blame to go around. The FAANGs bear a lot of the blame for what Cory Doctorow calls "the en#*$!ification" of the internet". He did a good conference keynote recently that is on Youtube.

Google in particular by pioneering and promoting ad driven models, but the others too. I have switched to paid search because of this (as I said in another thread). The decline of Webmaster World is a good example - people leaving a well moderated forum for LinkedIn and Facebook - and a million other good forums have disappeared.

I am glad the issue is reaching more normal people, not just us people like us here (who have known things were going down the drain for a long time, right?). These are people who think the internet is the web, probably do not realise mobile apps use the internet, and do not understand what is going on at all. The article is probably as good as it can get. Important as politicians and regulators such as competition (anti-trust in USian) regulators are normal people.

Filling the net with junky stuff is most likely the result of people looking for junky stuff.

For instance .. the guy that wrote the piece is/was most likely being followed around by the likes of Google/Facebook/Others either via phone or PC. Results were then tailored to meet his queries (i.e. - you searched for this but we think you might like this result better because we've been following you around and we know you better than you know yourself).

"Who the hell are these people making money off of everyone else’s misery?"

The short answer here would be both Google/Microsoft/Social and the End User. It takes two to tangle so you can't blame just one side or the other ... both are involved. The misery is a rather shared experience don't you think?

I have a minimum of 4 separate boxes that can access the internet at any given time. The one box that has all of the ad-blockers with Firefox (no bookmarks) set to clear cache and cookies after every session does a much better job at giving me a unique search experience than the other box that has no ad-blockers with the edge browser installed (with tons of bookmarks).

Rubbish in - Rubbish out. Though we can't really weed out the junk 100%, we can do what we can to try and improve the experience.

You can SEO 'till the cows come home, but if who you're targeting is buried in the facebooks/googles/tiktok's/twitters of the world, then chances are greatly increased that your target audience is going to be too distracted to notice the target with the profile that was built for them through their casual use of the internet.

The guy that wrote the article cited above is very likely the victim of his own internet habits.

The internet of today isn't just about widgets vs. widgets -- It's more to do with widgets vs. profile vs. widgets -- with the profile being the largest obstacle to overcome in the mix.

SEO needs to do a better job of thwarting the profile.

I think most people way over-thought the article. It starts as a screed against Google. That's as far as most people read, and the general public will remember.

The web is so big now its practically impossible to rank everything so they should stop trying.
We should just go back to curated lists like in the early days of the internet. Paid editors should just list the 100 best sites for each subject - forget all the backlinks, social signals and SEO. that would be more useful than google.

What was the name of that directory site everyone used to submit to, and we didnt always get in? I cant remember

@londrum, you may be thinking of Open Directory Project (ODP). Otherwise, Yahoo was similar, but that quickly moved to a paid model.

Better known as DMOZ to some. R.I.P. (2017): [webmasterworld.com...]

Who the hell are these people making money off of everyone else’s misery?

Uh, isn't that the underlying premise of all businesses at all times under all circumstances? Someone who is currently unsatisfied in some way, in some facet of their existence, will become at least fractionally less unsatisfied once they pay for the service and/or product I am providing.

In my opinion, it is not SEO that spoils the Internet, it is the search engines themselves that spoil the Internet. And this is about penalizing websites - something Google is a master at. It's rather Google that spoils the Internet - because it requires SEO to the limits of reason.

It's Google, after all, that constantly requires new things and people do what they can according to their dictation. Ultimately, Google penalizes websites without even knowing what it is - and in my opinion, it deliberately manipulates the results for its own benefits.

In my country, they did a test - websites that bought ads on Google were also higher in organic search results. Google is not ra fer and there you can look for the reasons for spoiling the results as well as the healthy principles of running websites by many people.

The web has become noisy, commercialized, and bureaucratic. Not our fault. Decentralization and vertical search would theoretically fix it. Crypto will help if it's allowed to.

G seem to have favoured 'trusted' brands and recent content since 2010 or so. Basically you need to create some noise to be noticed.

It's a decent strategy when it comes to people questioning the quality of results in the main. Apparently people trust results more when wikipedia appears for example, a known name.

IMO SEOs can never be blamed, it's a cat and mouse game and G just suffers SEO attentions more because it's the Windows of search engines.