politics on google is "forget it" territory. That's actively censored on all fronts. Google doesn't, or at least SHOULDN'T have interest in obfuscating technical information that nobody political gives a dick about. Aside from the deepest conspiracy theories, one would have to assume that's from pure incompetence.
I found a forum by accident several years ago, it was apparently focused on indie development because there was a game being discussed there, but even after trying every fucking thing I could imagine I couldn't find either the forum or the post itself. All I remember was that it was using Xenforo, so IDK maybe there's a registry on some website with all Xenforo instances ever available, that would be nifty.
How do people even find new websites these days? I have fleeting, dying memories of finding new stuff through affiliate links and webrings but nobody does that anymore. Web surfing was an actual pastime I could do, coasting along until I occasionally hit something cool that linked to something else, now everything is a dead end. The modern internet feels like a soulless city where the family stores have finally been choked out by all the big retail chains. But there is one silver lining - it's become such a corporate glorified adspace that I may finally choose to unplug and touch the grass outside. Fuck being online.
They don't.
Google actually fixed the previous iteration of this problem (link farms) by adjusting their PageRank algorithm and blacklisting offenders. But now they either can't or won't do the same with the next generation: spam wikis, blog mirrors, and forum aggregators.
I guess that's what corporations want. A centralized, corporate, sanitized, censored, dumbed down internet. With little alternatives that all suck - if there are any...
It's this vicious cycle of people metagaming every imperfect innovation to death. The problem now is manipulating the language processing search engines do to appear as a "credible source", meaning everything has to have this page long Wikipedia introduction bullshit even when the relevant content is 3 sentences. Can you combat that somehow? Maybe, but something else will take its place. Like posting blatantly false factoids as novel information not found anywhere else, for example.
It's so horrible. I was looking for specific function calls today in a programming language. Not a widely used library, so not a lot of results.
I wonder if part of the problem is how much of the internet has been captured by iFaceTwitstagram. The death of the Web means that a lot of the link structure that fed into algorithms like PageRank doesn't exist anymore. Everything's just a post in an app now, and linking out to actual content is a speed bump. "Do you really want to leave YouGoog for unsafe content?"
This is one of the few things I'm not sure can be blamed entirely on Google. The abuse of SEO is being taught in business on the regular and most of the reason you can't find shit on games is because of the tabloid article mills that pump their shit with tags to shove it to the top of every search. Think "GTA 6 REVEAL????" tier dumb asses.
