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A web search tip to avoid AI generated SEO junk (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 236 points 2 years ago (30 children)

I feel like Google’s crap results predate the AI tech by at least five years. It has been garbage SEO stuff for a while.

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  • [–] 212 points 2 years ago* (12 children)

    I feel so bad for the younger folks these days.

    Way back when, if Google couldn't find it and we did some good Google Fu, it probably wasn't readily available online.

    Now, you know it probably is there, just buried in nonsense generated purely by layer after layer of people's selfishness. And they never even knew it could be any other way.

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  • [–] [S] 126 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    It's a sick joke that we've celebrated being in the "information age" for the last 20-25 years, and now that information is being obfuscated by various means again.

    SEO, censorship, paywalls.

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  • [–] 68 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    it's not the information age, it's the data age.

    Information implies usefulness. Data is just data. Could be right, could be wrong, who knows.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Google has also disabled some of the search operators that made refining results more useful.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Like I don't think the minus operator to exclude a search term works anymore.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    It does.

    Straight out of college in 2015 I did some SEO sidehustling. We'd get blogs writing for cheap by fiverr people, adjusted it a bit, and they ranked high very easily based on certain keywords for the industry. Those blogs were just random bullshit (AI does a better job for a short story), jargon was on point but the content was just snakeoil. Business went thriving.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago* (9 children)

    This unironically is what I/my peers do with resume/cover letters for job/internship applications nowadays. My friend actually has a decent beer moneymaker for building optimized resumes for other people on campus.

    The whole system we're playing in is so fucked.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    My buddy needs help doing this with his resume. He works in IT. Think you could help him out? He'd pay, of course.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Sorry, it's my friend who does it, not me, and I can tell you right now his clients are dumb finance/business bros, not tech.

    All he does is throw the job description into some version of chatGPT to generate a cover letter, and edit it around to make it relevant to the person's skills and sound like a human wrote it. Then he reduces the resume down to one page. Usually this is enough to get them into the group interview (according to him).

    Basic stuff to tech oriented people but this shit is still a mystery to so many college kids/recent grads.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Roger, thanks for the insight! It seems that the job market is difficult at the moment for experienced tech folks. My friend has been talking about paying several hundred to a company who does similar resume editing, and they guarantee an interview in 30 days. IT has never been this rough in the 13-ish years I've been in the field.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    I don't know where you live and how bad it is there, but I just got my new job (software architecture) and I specifically asked in my interviews how to improve my resume. The final version was the culmination of all this feedback and got me the perfect job for me, as it makes use of every skill and strength I have.

    The two most important points for my resume:

    • As some companies use AI for filtering out candidates, don't do anything fancy, no double columns or star ratings, just write text separated by headers.
    • the first page was more like a profile page from a website, where I present relevant general technical and social skills, specific domain knowledge and examples from previous jobs that are relevant for this position. And just from page 2 onward is the usual stuff like education, internships, languages, etc.

    It was a lot of work to tailor the cover letter and resume to every posting, but I had much more interviews than when I started and sent out the generic version to a multitude of postings. So in the end it was roughly the same time I invested, with less applications, but more interviews, tailored to my interests and skills.

    For reference, this is the style I used for my resume. Hope that helps your friend!

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I really like the format of this. Thanks for sharing, and you look like a really solid candidate.

    I couldn’t help but notice this at the bottom, “References and other document's available”.
    When it should read: “References and other documents available “

    The apostrophe in “document’s” suggests that the documents are in possession or have ownership of something.

    I see you speak Hindi as well as English, so for the record, I could not draft such a great resume myself in Hindi.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    I have hope that it just has to get this bad to get better. In comparison to 5-10 years ago you now have many new search alternatives, starting from US based wrappers like duckduckgo, EU based engines like qwant and metager to paid services like kagi. Right now I am testing kagi and the search results are really good, but considering how often I use GPT4 to answer more specific questions, I may just switch to free alternatives like qwant or metager or some other new search engine.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    It has been garbage SEO stuff for a while.

    garbabe SEO has been there since almost the beginning. More recently google started to promote sites base on their profitableness.

    Remember when you could suppress sites from Google search results? Due to "unknowable reasons", they got rid of that feature. Enshittification is real.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah I was looking the other day to block certain sites because every time I google shit I can't get an answer or it's just really an add. Along with fucking Qora or whatever it is.

    Unfortunately the option is gone

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    Yes, but the SEO methods and Google's ranking methods have been evolving together over time. Meaning SEO used in content from some time ago may have less impact on the results you see today. Of course, this is just a hypothesis based on a thing I read a few months ago that I can't even tell you the name of lol

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