Why Google Perspectives Provides Human Answers - Lifewire

  • Google's new Perspectives search offers results from real people.
  • Get results from Reddit, Quora, YouTube, forums, and message boards.
  • It's like Google's skipping all the SEO nonsense for you.
Internet search.

Manuel Breva Colmeiro / Getty Images

If you want a proper answer to a question, add "reddit" to the end of your search query to get a human answer. Google's new Perspectives is that, only without the Reddit part. 

The first few pages of Google search results are an SEO-clogged mess, a list of links to websites designed to rank high on Google, not to actually be useful to anybody. Search engine optimization has ruined search, and it seems like Google is admitting defeat by offering up answers from humans instead. 

"Search engines usually try to generalize their results to account for a variety of different related search terms. This is a great way to help people in the direction of useful general information, but it really breaks down in the face of a complex, context-specific question," Ben Michael, attorney at Michael and Associates, told Lifewire via email.

"If you want to, say, find an overview of how to use a piece of software, Google is great. If you want to know why that piece of software crashes when you perform X function on Y operating system, you'll either have to read the whole manual and become an expert or ask someone for help."

MESS-E-O

Most of Google's top search results are SEO garbage. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the dark art of gaming Google. The idea is to get onto that first page of results for a given search engine (in this case, Google), no matter what. Did you ever search for a recipe, click on a link, and have to pick through some absurdly-long blog-post musing about it before you get to the actual recipe? That's SEO. 

Let's look at an example of how self-serving SEO is. When I asked for comments on why human-powered results are better than SEO trash, I got—of course—plenty of answers from SEO people hoping to get their websites linked in this article (links from high-ranking sites are SEO gold). And many of those SEO folks are happy to throw their own industry under the bus just to get that link. Here's tech CEO Nikita Sherbina, who told me that he has "a passion for digital marketing and SEO."

"The results from real humans in forums and on Reddit are often perceived as better because they provide direct, unfiltered answers based on personal experiences and opinions. They prioritize usefulness over SEO optimization," Sherbina told Lifewire via email.

People Powered Perspectives

Perspectives, launching Friday, puts a new tab at the top of Google's search results. Behind that tab are results culled from social media, internet forums, Q&A sites, and discussion boards—videos, Quora posts, Reddit threads, and so on. In short, it's the stuff you already skip over the SEO-bloated nonsense to find, only now Google has filtered it for you. 

It's a welcome addition, especially as the previous-best way to get relevant results—appending "reddit" to the end of every search—is now broken thanks to the ongoing efforts of Reddit's CEO Steve Hoffman to ruin the site the way Elon Musk has ruined Twitter. 

So what makes these crowd-sourced results better? To answer that, let's think about it from the other direction. If you spend any time on internet forums, message boards, or places like Mastodon, you'll know that people discuss a lot of things, offer a lot of opinions, and ask and answer a lot of questions.

Google search engine page with search results displayed. Oleksiy Maksymenko / Getty Images

These venues are almost all very specialized. An internet forum dedicated to one brand of musical instruments, for example, or a subreddit devoted entirely to the art of extremely-tidy data center cables. When a member of a community like that takes the time to answer a question, you already know that it will have some substance. 

"When a human bothers to answer a query online, they are either hugely experienced to answer, or they are genuinely passionate about the subject (preferably both). For me, it comes down to trust,"Joshua Wood, CEO and founder of tech hospitality company and event listing site Bloc told Lifewire via email. 

As these SEO-first websites get even worse—they are now being generated by AI—the value of Perspectives will just increase. Until the SEO folks figure out how to game that, too. 

Was this page helpful?

Comments

Post a Comment

adsT

Popular posts from this blog

Using HashiCorp Vault & Spring Cloud Vault to handle Spring Boot App Key/Value Secrets - Medium

Image
Spring Cloud | Hashicorp Vault A step-by-step guide to managing Spring Boot App Key/Value Secrets with HashiCorp Vault and Spring Cloud Vault Photo by Sai De Silva on Unsplash In this article, we'll guide you through the implementation of a simple Spring Boot application named spring-boot-vault-kv-secret . This application will expose an endpoint that, upon receiving a secret key in a request, will provide the corresponding secret value. The secrets themselves will be securely stored in HashiCorp Vault . In order to communicate with Vault, we will use Spring Cloud Vault dependency. HashiCorp Vault is an open-source tool designed for secret management, data protection, and access control. It provides a secure way to store and access sensitive information such as passwords, API keys, and encryption keys. Vault supports various authentication methods and dynamic secrets, ensuring that applications can securely access secrets without directly exposing them. To leverage Vault, we...
Read more

What Is Voice Access in Windows 11 and How to Use It - Beebom

Image
When Microsoft announced Windows 11 earlier this year, the company called its latest desktop OS the most inclusive version of Windows. As part of this effort, the Redmond giant revamped the accessibility settings page and added high contrast themes, among other changes. And now, in the latest Windows 11 Insider preview build, Microsoft has introduced a new feature it calls Voice Access. It enables users to access their Windows 11 computers using just their voice. If that sounds helpful, we will teach you how to enable and use Voice Access in Windows 11 to improve accessibility. Enable and Use Voice Access in Windows 11 (2022) Table of Contents What is Voice Access in Windows 11? Voice access is a new Windows 11 accessibility feature that makes it easier to control your Windows 11 PC using only your voice . Developed keeping people with mobility disabilities in mind, Voice Acce...
Read more

10 Best AI Translation Software & Tools (July 2024) - Unite.AI

Image
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming nearly every industry, including translation services. At the same time, translation services are becoming more important than ever as we live in a deeply connected world with an incredible number of languages.  Translation tools are also important for professionals in the field who rely on the latest machine learning translation technologies to use in their everyday lives.  Before we dive into the best AI translation software and tools, it's important to define machine translation. The automated conversion of one language to another, machine translation works by converting text, images, or video from a source language and producing the equivalent in the target language.  Here are some of the best AI translation software and tools on the market:  Google Lens is a powerful image recognition technology developed by Google that excels in translating text in real-time across over 100 languages. This functi...
Read more