(no subject)

[unicornduke]

 google has gotten much less helpful lately and I can't figure out why. I was trying to figure out ways to keep a pipe from twisting/turning like with my laser scarecrow but all I got results from was how to keep pipes from freezing. It's almost as if using the words "how to" and "pipe" will just bring up those results, instead of looking at all the words used. 

This isn't the first time it's happened lately, maybe in the past year or so it's gotten very unhelpful. 

Comments

[dragonlady7]

In Days of Yore I was an SEO specialist and knew a ton about how Google worked, but those were Yore Days and the Earth's crust hadn't cooled yet. At that point it was well-known that their algorithm was refined and then updated every month, and they called it the "Google Dance", because sites that had previously ranked high for competitive search terms would all swap around into different positions.
But while I was doing this work, in 2002, they changed it, and the adjustments to the algorithm became ongoing, and ever since then, we have lived in a perpetual state of Google Dance.

I have no advice, I just suddenly felt like the world needed my dozen-year-old wisdom on that.

[graydon]

A lot of terms -- like HOWTO -- are now hopelessly polluted.

You can stick the search in quotes, to get exactly that; if there is an exactly that, it might be helpful.

I tend to wind up chaining things together -- preventing pipe twist -drain -- until I feel like I'm getting in the vicinity. The minus removes a term; it's very helpful if you're getting a haze of pinterest links or the first six pages are otherwise amazon and alibaba. It feels a bit like search artillery; that one's over, that's one's left, under, ok, that's on target -- but it still mostly gets there.