The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam

SEO is so broken, it's not about website content or website quality. It's about how much money you pay to some punks - "SEO experts" who are hacking a system. I'm so sick of that.

Fix the system? People who comment online seem to think the concept of the "search engine" cannot be improved, except by Google. The list of inactive search engines at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine is depressing. The problem for us is that the supposed innovator Google has little financial incentive to improve the system regarding "content" or "quality". As long as the traffic keeps coming, the ad revenue keeps coming. Their best bet is promote what's "popular" ("top-ranking"). Because the traffic keeps coming no matter what Google does, "content" and "quality" are not really their major concerns. There are no true alternatives for users. Bing is basically a Google clone. No new ideas. Other search engines, like DDG, just piggyback off Google or Bing crawlers. Not sure about Baidu, Yandex or others but I suspect they are more or less Google clones as well. In every case, advertising dictates design. No new ideas.

I'm trying alternative search engines from time to time and and they are much weaker than Google. So yeah, I'd bet on them to improve stage. The others first need to catch up.

Long time ago (~2005) my French Telco employer had a search engine (Voila), and they were worried by Google's influence so they try a test campaign to see how Google's results were different from their own search engine.

The result was astonishing: In the first page most results were similar, except for the order. Specifically a first result in Google was only second in the first page in the company's search engine. But in overall the difference was mostly in the presentation, not in the results.

There was something Spartan in Google's page UI that made it more credible and informative. At the time for most people including academics, they were the good guys and us (Telcos) the bad boys.

I guess academics advices were very influential on young adults who will shape the world the next years.

I guess also the erratic management by France Telecom was for something in the demise of Voila.fr