September 12, 2024 • 34 mins
Welcome to Human-First Digital, the new Lumar podcast on all things SEO and website optimization, hosted by Senior Technical SEO Chris Spann. In this episode, Chris sits down with Will Critchlow, CEO and founder of SearchPilot, to explore Will's journey in SEO, the challenges of search visibility in 2024, and the impact of platforms like Reddit on search results.
Discussed in this episode:
- Will’s early experiences in search engine optimization and the founding of SearchPilot, a platform focused on SEO A/B testing.
- The dynamic nature of SEO in 2024 and the importance of understanding Google's core intentions for long-term results.
- How SEO strategies can yield varying results depending on the type of website and industry or sector.
- The role of Reddit in search engine visibility today and the evolving landscape of SEO.
- The evolution of Google’s search ranking algorithms, challenges with deep learning, and bugs in search.
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Learn more about Lumar at: https://www.lumar.io/
Follow Lumar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lumarhq/
Follow Will on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willcritchlow/
Follow Chris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisspann/
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Episode Timestamps:
[00:00:07] Introduction to Human First Digital
[00:00:37] Will Critchlow’s SEO Journey
[00:03:05] The Complexity of SEO Testing
[00:06:35] The Role of Links in SEO
[00:11:00] Reddit’s Dominance in Search Results
[00:17:58] Search Quality Discussions
[00:22:30] Google and the Future of Search
[00:33:14] Closing Thoughts and Reflections
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Music.
(00:07):
Hello, and welcome to Human First Digital, a Lumar podcast.
My name's Chris Spann, and I'm here to present some one-on-one conversations
with some of the brightest minds in SEO.
Today, I'm talking to the CEO and founder of Searchpilot, Will Critchlow,
about a range of topics, including his history in SEO, the overwhelming presence
in search of Reddit, and the only result for a question you have being yourself
(00:28):
asking that same question years previous.
Music.
I've always wanted to introduce somebody by saying they don't need any introduction,
but I think in this case, that's probably the case.
So I'm sat here with Will Critchlow, who is the CEO of SearchPilot,
CEO and founder, or just CEO?
(00:49):
Founder, sure. Let's go with that. So yeah, most people probably know Will from
being around the industry forever.
But so first, let's get into that. How did you get into SEO?
Because obviously, when we were in school google didn't exist right so i
mean when i was in school the internet barely existed so uh
yeah get getting you say around the
(01:12):
industry for a long time just around everything for a long time yeah there's something
really funny that happens i had somebody say this the other day you go
very very quickly from being the youngest guy in
the room to being the oldest guy i've just feels
like it happens overnight i experienced it first playing sports
you know you're a kid on the team and then suddenly you're
the veteran i'm like it feels like there's nothing thing in between that's definitely
(01:32):
i'm on the other side of that hill as far as seo is concerned these days but
yeah so i remember getting the internet
for the first time at school one computer chemistry
lab chemistry teacher was a geek yeah
hooked it hooked up dial up modem and
whatever i must have been i was in
secondary school at some point and that didn't immediately.
(01:54):
Capture my my imagination but as soon as i got it at home
as soon as i could use it in a more unfettered way the internet
became part of i mean you know i don't have to probably evangelize the
internet to people listening to this podcast but that
was half the story the other half the story was business so
i would i've been like i have a couple of
i was going to say unhealthy obsessions they kind of worked out fairly well
(02:16):
for me one is the kind of geeky technology side right my fascination about robots
of text and the like and the other is how businesses work and i'm one of those
weirdos who sits down in a restaurant and goes right but there's this many covers
and like how they how How does this make money compared to the one down the
road? And my dad ran a small business from home.
So I was very exposed to the business side early on. I was allowed to answer
(02:38):
the phone when my voice broke.
You know, that kind of thing. So that was the accidental path into SEO.
Because first of all, it was building websites. Yes.
Combine those two things, especially kind of by necessity as well.
My co-founder, Duncan Morris, I'm sure he won't mind me saying,
not the world's greatest designer.
So when our roles were essentially, I was selling website design and he was
(02:59):
building websites, our differentiation was not our design skills.
It was the fact that they worked for the business. They were useful.
And early 2000s, that meant visible in search, especially for small businesses
is you couldn't really afford paid search yeah and so that's how we yeah the rest is history,
amazing cool so i meant to say at the start and we'll get into that now in one
(03:20):
sentence what do you do what do you do every day in one sentence so i run search pilot which is,
seo testing for very large websites so we're helping really big websites typically.
I'm getting more than one sentence that's fine we'll stop there
we help big websites figure out what google really wants yep and
i've been a client in the past i'm still
(03:42):
a big evangelist for the tool when i'm out and about i'm
speaking to uh two other businesses and that but the thing i
wanted to briefly touch on today thing that's always fascinated me about
seo so i used to work for a business that had more
than one website within there and we would frequently
do things where one website would make a change and
see incredible benefits in some way shape or form like
(04:04):
how scores and clicks whatever and then the other
websites would think and they were very similar code bases very
similar websites and we'd think brilliant let's we'll do that as well and
we'd make that change and see nothing no
no difference whatsoever i guess my first thing is how often do you see that
do you have do you have like like a go-to these tests always work well for a
(04:25):
client you know i mean the first one you show a client when you first get them
through the door i wish we had that well do i in many ways our job security
comes from the fact that that is true if there was a list of things that always worked,
maybe you wouldn't need to test them so in some senses I guess our job security
comes from the fact that our experience is like yours,
works great in one site, one industry one niche, one whatever it might be.
(04:45):
Does nothing somewhere else or even positive and negative we've seen like divergent outcomes,
that tends to be around things like content quality and positioning
of content those kind of things so that i think the reason this
happens is it's such a complex system and in
the in the intro bit we talked about the business and the tech my other
interest is the academic side of things which i
(05:07):
don't i don't get to kind of flex this muscle as much
these days but i i studied
people heard me talk about auction theory study game theory study complex
systems university and i i'm really
fascinated in trying to figure out
what's really going on and that isn't
like search pilots business mission because that's not the kind of what's what
(05:32):
we're trying to do we'd say a lot we're doing business not science we're helping
our customers figure out what makes them more money we don't need to be certain
that it's going to work be replicable it's got we don't need to know if it helps that competitor.
Me personally, as a human, I am fascinated in what works, what scales,
why it works, that kind of stuff.
So yeah, I think the short answer is we definitely see that.
(05:53):
And it's because it's such a complex system.
You've got all this, you've got all the variables, everything you mentioned
about the site itself, but also the competitors, the content quality is kind
of slightly more, less tangible variables, variables.
All that stuff going on is dynamic, but Google changing stuff,
all these things going on. I think we've benefited as an industry.
If you look back over, we've been doing it, look back over the history of SEO.
(06:18):
We, as an industry, unlocked such huge value and tapped into a tiny fraction
of the value that Google themselves were unlocking for the world, for businesses,
that it didn't, there was so much out there, so much value out there,
that it didn't matter that 80% of the stuff we did didn't work.
Yeah right the 20 paid for the 80 yeah yeah where i feel like right now and
(06:40):
this is partly why search pilot exists is that that whole ecosystem is so much
more mature it's so much more of a game of inches not yards and especially on
very large websites that have been doing seo for.
Decades at this point up against competitors who are doing the same it's not
enough you need some of that that kind of you need a bit of the science so i
(07:02):
guess an interesting so i'm fascinated
whenever there's a change whether it's an algo update or a
named one i guess it's always fascinating to
me to see a lot of big people in the industry going off and doing
analysis and doing all this stuff i'm always most interested in what black hat
guys say yeah and every single time they're just like it's links it is links
but i in black hat world not the website in the world of being a black hat i
(07:26):
imagine quite often it is links because you are the new domains right you
you've got to turn a site is old if it's
six if you're ever going to burn it you've got to do the churning exactly yeah
so i i guess my my point is obviously
all that tells us is that just seo is a completely different
beast right if you're working for forbes ebay is there a difference between
working with say a an sme sort of mid-size british business and then working
(07:50):
with a multinational say yes is the short answer yeah the slightly more interesting
answer is i so these These days, in my work at Searchpilot,
I really only see the top, the big end of that.
And because of the nature of what our product is, I kind of only see the on-site bit.
So we're kind of, unlike the agency that I used to run, we're trying to be really focused.
(08:15):
And I'm not a very naturally focused person, so this is hard for me.
But I believe it's good for the business. So we're staying very focused.
We're staying focused on those big websites.
We're staying focused on SEO testing and on-site stuff. within that
world it's amazing how powerful what
you put on your website is and that sounds like a stupid thing to
say but small tweaks can make massive differences
and that's huge amounts of money where i feel less qualified to comment these
(08:40):
days because i've been out of the agency game for a little while now and in
the agency world we did work with those smaller startups you know the b2b sass
or whatever and we definitely saw all those dynamics playing out.
Sometimes you change stuff on the website and nothing really moves until you
get some more links or whatever.
I'm probably not the right person to comment on that these days.
(09:03):
I see the same thing you see in terms of.
The black cat crew i think there's there is
one other dynamic of course which is which goes both ways and i can't
figure out which is more powerful which is
on you know that saying it's very hard to get a man to believe
something when his job depends on the opposite right okay yeah
yeah mangling that yeah but something along those lines
(09:24):
and i think the original quote does say man but obviously it
just means human yeah that the black cat guys
would want it to be links because that's what they know that's what they can
do that's what they can churn out the converse is
true as well there's a lot of people who really would like links not
to matter and it just to be about making massive websites
yeah you know making them work better because that's the
(09:44):
last issue and yeah like oh wouldn't it be amazing if we just
did that and you're going again going back to the history this whole thing needs
to be called competitive web mastering and i i've always quite liked that but
i'm quite competitive and partly i like the hands-on implications of that but
i think The fact is that it is competitive,
(10:06):
and so there's got to be something that you can do better than other people.
There's a limit to how fast your website can load.
Even if you are slightly faster, does your audience care? When we're talking
about five milliseconds or something, they can't even notice.
There's got to be something, and historically, that's been Lynx.
Lynx has been the only thing you could be radically better at,
(10:28):
because anybody can put the same words on their website and serve
them up just as technically well yeah as someone else and
i think we're we're edging out of that world but we can't have
left it because there's nothing truly replaces that i think user signals is
probably the only other metric that has that scalability that you can you can
love a brand or a site infinitely more yeah than a one you've never heard of
(10:51):
and so that has that scalability potential and yes i'm interested in that angle Yeah.
I'm going to meander slightly away from it now, but I think that this covers it. It's interesting.
Obviously, the entire industry is very annoyed at the fact that Reddit sits
at the top of basically every search you do at the moment.
But the more I think about it, it's not totally wrong, is it?
Briefly. I've got a friend who works in VPNs. And he was complaining the other
(11:16):
day that he spent all this money on content and da-da-da-da-da,
and Reddit ranks for what is the best VPN for torrenting.
And I kind of thought, yeah.
And I'm sure that all those people torrenting were just getting Linux distros and nothing else.
But if I want experience-based stuff,
especially on something that's maybe not quite kosher
(11:38):
reddit got to me because what's the
other answer 10 different vpn saying we're the best one the
challenge is that's not sustainable i
don't think in either direction because google can't
become dependent on reddit now for every answer but also
as soon as a reddit thread ranks for
that stuff it gets it gets descended upon it
(12:00):
gets spammed and so it's it's
true it's true that reddit's pages were some
of the best results for top queries until they became
those top results yeah and so
i think there's just some creative destruction going on here i think it's reddit
is the right answer right now will be again in year five years time 10 years
time probably not this is no consolation to the one site who's just whose niche
(12:24):
has just been taken out by reddit but i don't think this is a it's not It's
not a stable permanent answer here. Nothing ever is.
And I posted something about this.
I was fascinated at the timeline intersection,
again, this is back to my like tech plus business interest, you know the extreme
(12:45):
acceleration in Reddit visibility and search basically maps to their roadshow
before going public, right?
So Reddit's IPO happened at peak Reddit Google visibility.
Is that coincidence? Maybe it is
coincidence. Maybe that's why they IPO'd because they were doing so well.
Maybe they did things because they were going to IPO that turned them into good
(13:10):
results that led to Google giving them the visibility.
I couldn't speculate on anything more nefarious, but you can imagine inside
of trading conversations that could be happening.
There's the most interesting one. So there's a
set of people out there listening who might or might not be listening to this podcasts of
like five of them okay who share my exact weird intersection
of interests for those people my most the
(13:34):
theory i'd most like to debate about this anybody listen anybody
read matt levine but bloomberg columnist this
is way outside seo he writes about finance okay brilliant writer one of those
kind of writers who makes you believe that humans can do better than ai okay
he he has a trope that he returns to a lot that everything is inside of trading
right okay and people can If you're interested, go down the rabbit hole, read all this stuff.
(13:58):
The one thing that isn't insider trading under his model is trading on your own intentions.
So you can say, I plan to do something in the future that will benefit this
business and its stock price.
I can buy its shares first, do the thing I plan to do, as long as it's not illegal.
And there are some carve-outs of this. This is not legal advice.
(14:19):
Then that's okay. That's allowed.
So my conspiracy theory version is google somewhere
owns a lot of reddit stock and decided
well we're going to give them a massive boost of visibility they're going
to ipo we're going to make a lot of money i have no evidence for
that but the point is they could do that yeah now you
(14:40):
what wouldn't be allowed would be an individual
person at google saying i
personally hold a lot of reddit stock it would be really good for
my personal bank account yeah if reddit got a lot of visibility oh
look i have a button that gives reddit a lot of visibility that would not be allowed
and i know no reason to think that that's happening
but there is something interesting and i would have been very very
(15:00):
nervous if i were holding a
lot of reddit stock in the run-up to the ipo that google
was about to drop the hammer because that has certainly happened we
used to have a saying of don't make that google look bad right the i don't know
if you remember back to some of the the classic penalties right bmw i was about
to say being done and interflora was one to flora the there was um what was
(15:25):
the one that the the comparison site that they ended up buying anyway it doesn't matter yeah.
That basically any time you hit the headlines but in relation to google search quality.
You're about to have a bad day, week, month, quarter, whatever it might be.
Not necessarily year, right? Because remember, BMW came back in quite quickly
(15:46):
or whatever, but you're certainly about to have a bad moment in time.
And in Reddit's case, their time window was very short, right?
If Google had dropped the hammer the week before the IPO, bad things would have happened.
So I would have been very, very nervous, assuming there is no backroom deal.
I would be very very nervous in the in the reddit shoes that that run up in
(16:07):
search visibility and all of the stories that were getting written about it
were happening in that in that window.
In the right side yeah yeah the other thing as well that sort of occurs to me
while we were talking is that reddit is would would then become reliant on people
having the same conversation roughly once every six months in order to because
again if you if it comes down to what is the best i mean i'm not too worried
about that my experience of reddit is that well yeah fair point but you
(16:31):
sometimes reddit google will serve up a reddit thread from
seven years ago of course and that somebody's saying what's
the best x to do y someone recommends z and it turns
out z went bankrupt in 2019 and you then know better off
or the worst thing again as a somewhat developer
someone asking a question and then the only
response to that thread being never mind i fixed it how did
(16:52):
you fix it you know what's even worse than that is you google a problem and
you find your own stack overflow question from five
years ago when you asked the same question and didn't get any answers then either i've
definitely had that on the seo side of things like no i don't want to know what
i thought yeah i don't want to know what other people thought i want to know
literally anybody else on earth anybody else yeah exactly i just wanted to take
(17:15):
a little break here to say thanks for joining us on this episode of human first
digital brought to you by the team.
Some of you might be familiar with our old Dcrawl branding. Yeah,
we're the same business.
But since we rebranded to Luma a few years ago, we've been busy growing our
core tech SEO solution into an expanded suite of broader website optimization
tools, all of those powered by our super-fast proprietary website crawler.
(17:37):
On top of our much-loved technical SEO offering, we've now added website accessibility
and site speed, with much more to come that I can't talk about just yet.
But watch this space. you can learn more about lumar's always expanding optimization
tools by finding us at lumar.io now back to the show.
(17:58):
So i've been having a few uh off the record private conversations recently with folks who are,
having a lot of public who are talking about a lot of stuff in public but there
are certain things they don't want to or can't say in public around this whole
search quality question so i I would very,
very much like to know which situation we're in.
(18:22):
Are we in a search quality is actually fine, right?
Not worse than it has been in the past.
Getting more kind of sure. It's good in some areas, bad in some areas,
but it's such an immense long tail.
None of us are looking at the whole picture, right? So we're seeing this weird
little lens on different areas.
(18:43):
And in certain areas, it's got worse. So we got into this kind of doom loop,
but in truth, maybe such quality is fine.
That still could be a problem for Google because the vibes are bad,
right? And bad vibes lead them to do silly things, SG.
But that's one possibility. There's another possibility, which is search quality
(19:03):
has got worse, but only because the web has got worse, right?
So the search quality is as good relative to the quality of the web as it's ever been.
Again, there are not really value judgments on these things,
good or bad for users or Google,
or the catastrophic case that like genuinely search
quality has actually created and google is
(19:25):
threatened as a result now i want
to know a which is true yeah but also which does
google think truly honestly quietly in private
because all of the indications we've seen
publicly are that they they think some
combination of one and two right that they've talked
about their metrics show search quality is still fine
(19:47):
yeah users are as satisfied as they've ever been blah blah blah
maybe i actually could
believe this one of my contrarian perspectives is i
think maybe that might be true and this whole thing
is vibes could well be there's definitely things
that stand out but again i never know how much of it is me being an seo
but also we're looking through a microscope yeah we're looking
(20:07):
through a microscope at a landscape and like
we can't see what's outside of our field of
vision because we do things like so like if i'm
looking for a new phone and i google best android phone
and i go oh look there's a coincidence tech
radar have updated their their new post about it and they updated it three days
ago there's lucky i know straight away what's going on there would my mum would
(20:32):
she care would she get i mean would she get a phone that she's happy with probably
yeah and and that's also just thinking we have have this tendency to think about.
Obvious searches and the vast majority of searches
are not the obvious yes yeah and the and the
vast i mean vast vast vast majority of searches not the
obvious search the vast majority of searches are not even in the
(20:55):
you know in the cohort of searches that
stat looks at or yeah you see these big studies and
i love them and i'm a big fan of their work but they're
not looking at trillions of query and there are trillions of
queries so how the only people who
can do that at scale fail it are the
search engines themselves yeah so only they really know and that's
(21:16):
definitely that's a wall i would like to be a flight on yeah because
definitely i think i i certainly find myself once every week couple
of weeks typing something into google and thinking i'm fairly confident
no one's ever searched for this before you know because it is
the exact combination of weird words in the situation you are
in it's occurred to me actually the way
we talk about out search engines remind me about how my dad
(21:38):
talks about cars my dad will only drive pre-2008 vw
passats i think okay because they change because they changed
the engine in 2008 and the new ones are crap okay all we drive in our house
is vw group cars i have a lovely time driving our cars around neither of them's
ever broken down but my dad who's a mechanic and has been his entire life is
(22:00):
just like rubbish they are they are crap they'll and i'm like it's fine for me.
Takes me to Aldi, you know what I mean, and takes my daughters to ballet, I don't care.
I get what I need out of it. And it's that same thing again, isn't it?
It's when you've spent your entire life looking at one thing.
Everything now looks like, you've only got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
(22:20):
I actually can't work out if this is a bull case or a bear case for Google,
but even if everything was going in like the most...
Doomsayer direction it's a slow moving
thing right think about how many people are still doing aol dial-up
in 2010 you know the the thought
(22:41):
experiment i've been toying with recently i genuinely can't work
out where i sit on it is think about like i
mean big five tech right meta amazon apple
google microsoft stack rack
them by their 2050 revenue you i find
that it's really hard yeah i'm like i mean obviously it's hard but it's hard
(23:01):
to even come up with what i think yeah just a guess a theory that consistently
explains where they might all be yeah and that is you know terrifyingly as close
as when i started building websites.
Yes looking backwards yeah yeah and and of
course back then it would probably have been quite hard to pick those winners i
guess mark softwood big meta didn't even exist no
(23:24):
google was just literally just founded maybe
maybe the cutting edge techies had started using google amazon's
just being founded like the world changes the
world changes more than you think over 20 years
and less than you think yeah yeah two or three or five well that
yeah as you say apple will as an for instance
apple will be a monolith until the end of time but 10
(23:47):
years ago you wouldn't think that Apple would now have
a bit of a rep for not really invent reinventing they've
released the same iPhone however many times now etc etc you know
I again I can't figure out what's vibes and what's you know like you look at
the I mean are they still the most valuable company in the world or the second
most valuable I can't remember them and Microsoft tend to yeah they fluctuate
(24:07):
don't they try but yeah you know who who's the best CEO of the 21st century so far.
Tim Cook has a pretty good shot at that, I think. Satya is up there with him.
And as I was talking about yesterday, I think Sundar is in a very,
very difficult position where he might be doing an incredible job,
(24:29):
but he's losing the vibes game.
And I think you can run an enterprise business and lose the vibes game.
Nobody even cares who the CEO of Microsoft is if they're selling their enterprise
contracts. But I think Google is, yeah, it's probably feeling some of that pressure.
Yeah. They're certainly in a situation now where the state of Google has escaped SEO.
(24:53):
You get people like Ed Zitron talking about the state of Google a lot.
It's obviously The Verge do their once every two or three months,
all shot across the bow and SEO in general.
So question back for you. Do you think we see,
my guess is probably Sergey, but one of
the Google founders come come back visibly in
(25:14):
the near term i i've got a little
pet belief that nobody at google really knows
how the algorithm works anymore i mean very true yeah
you i mean i'm sure we all read the same stuff this week right
the you mentioned ed that article in
the hacker news comment at the top of the discussion of that
which was the turning point
(25:35):
unlike what ed said the the argument
made in this news comment from a recent google
search engineer was it was the departure
of amit departure amit single in 20 let
me get this wrong 14 something like that somewhere in that range and it was
the voice arguing for explainable ranking yeah algorithm not that they would
(25:59):
explain it to anyone no but internally but it could they could internally they
knew why things ranked where they did. They could fix rankings.
They could modify the algorithm. They knew what they were doing with that.
It was a set of levers connected to outputs.
And he was not the sole voice, but he was the protector of that,
the defender of the ranking algorithm from deep learning.
(26:24):
His departure heralded the entry of that. They were deep learning people.
I actually think even under Amit, it had got so complex, they didn't exactly know the answer.
I think they were having to run experiments just like we do on the outside to find out what happened.
Or rather, I think they should have done those things. I don't think they were.
(26:47):
I think that even if you go back, so So 2012 is Penguin, 2010, 2011 is Panda.
I think some of those era of updates, which involve machine learning, right?
I don't think they knew exactly what the impact was going to be until they rolled
(27:09):
out some of those things.
You can see that as they iterate, as they pull those levers back and forth and
they oscillate towards what they think is the right answer.
And in particular not because
they couldn't but because i don't know interested i don't think
they looked at the impact on individual websites individual publishers
individual webmasters they were
educated about that impact by the community who did that research after those
(27:32):
things rolled out now we're even further into that world where back then they
could have looked at that if they wanted to now i think the only way to tell
is turn it on c and where i so i think that the if I'm wrong about the search
quality, if search quality genuinely is down.
Can easily believe i'm just being a bit contrarian the part
(27:52):
of the reason is that they can't fix the edge cases they and
i don't just mean individual queries i mean classes of query yeah you know it's
very very the previous thing they could have gone oh look you know our algorithm
is screwing up over here and if it's all being spat out of this completely opaque
deep learning llm style i'm not LLM, obviously,
(28:15):
I'm not talking about SGE, I'm talking about like call ranking and stuff,
then you can't, not only can you not debug it, but you can't fix it,
even if you do spot the problem.
And somebody was, I saw a discussion about this, may have been the same thread, about translation.
So if you, when the first, there's a great story, it was either the New York Magazine, New Yorker,
(28:38):
one of those had a great article when the first deep learning version of Google
translate came out and it was a, it was like an O well as rare overnight,
switchovers where they were like previously they had all of this kind of hand tuned stuff.
And then a team of six beats everything. This team had been doing for decades
(28:59):
with a deep learning model.
Great except when that deep learning model says, you know, okay, I'm right.
Much more often than your old model, but I'm really embarrassingly wrong.
On this one translation, you can't do anything about that.
I mean, you can post-post, you can start adding all these human things back
(29:19):
in afterwards, but you can't fix it in the paradigm that you're working in.
There's no way of just going, dear deep learning model, can you do everything
you've just done, but also not make that one mistake?
It's all unintended consequences. It's all like squashing a balloon over here,
inflates a balloon over there.
And the very last line in that Hackenews comment on the discussion of Ed's post
(29:40):
was about, So this is the search engineer who worked there, I think it was 20...
2019-ish, said he referred to an internal document that people at Google could
still go and look up in their Google Drive or whatever,
that he'd written during his time there, which was basically a list of bugs
(30:01):
he knew about but hadn't had a chance to fix.
And some of them are just literal software bugs.
And you don't think of Google Search as being buggy in that respect.
Yeah, yeah. But like literal divide by zero. So one of the references is an off by one error.
There's literally some thing where they're like it should
be zero indexed and it's one indexed or whatever and apparently that's
(30:24):
messing up some search results on
some subset of queries because there's literally a bug in there and I gave a
presentation on this years ago but I'm surprised that we aren't seeing more
of those kinds of things so we're seeing this search quality argument around
Reddit ranking or whatever else but Just occasionally you see the glimpses, right?
(30:47):
So you see, oh, for a short period of time, Australian websites are ranking
in the UK or that kind of thing.
And I think it's just that sign of, it's just literal bugs. Yeah.
Funnily enough, we had an issue the other day where, I want to say this is via
Google Cash, but I don't know if you can still get into the cash.
I think you can still force it by using CashCole in the address bar.
(31:11):
Anyway, we had just a different website. site and you
went to site.com cash colon site.com blah
blah blah you got a different website and then there's a bit of google documentation
which basically says sometimes that happens because google just sort of gets
confused oh oh really okay just like yeah if the if the basically if the what
we were found finding is that if the url structure is the same or very very similar,
(31:36):
sometimes just gets confusing but it's a different website in the cache yeah
but no it's it's interesting what you're saying and we'll have to end on this
because we've gone way over time,
Yeah, 2014, I feel like Google would pop up less to tell you things,
but when they did, it would be like, this weird thing has happened because this.
Or, yes, you are right, that's because we did this, and it's gone a bit wrong.
(31:58):
Now, you get so much more out of Gary and John and people like that,
but the response is normally, oh, yeah.
That's weird, isn't it? Neither you nor I probably want
to get the DMs or emails that
will result in in poking that particular bear but yes
it's a short time i completely agree with you the the what
(32:22):
the whole industry's been talking about information content
in content recently and
i think the level of true information
content in the communication out of google has dropped
and it's also quite obvious that some
of that comes from teams that are not the teams in google
(32:43):
that would know the answer sometimes there isn't a
team in google yeah that would know the answer for all the reasons we've just been talking there
and i am i'm very very
interested in this is another flight yeah
the wall i'd like to be a fly on is all of all of those folks all the relations
team people in fact most of pr i'd love to know what their objectives are like
(33:07):
what does corporate what does sumba want them to do yeah and are they doing it is this the plan.
Yeah yeah you know what i mean without going too far into getting ourselves
some nasty grams yeah lovely well that's been fantastic i could do this for
another hour but we'll have to wrap it up there uh will critzer thank you very
much thank you it's been fun the human first digital podcast is brought to you
(33:29):
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Music.
(00:07):
Hello, and welcome to Human First Digital, a Lumar podcast.
My name's Chris Spann, and I'm here to present some one-on-one conversations
with some of the brightest minds in SEO.
Today, I'm talking to the CEO and founder of Searchpilot, Will Critchlow,
about a range of topics, including his history in SEO, the overwhelming presence
in search of Reddit, and the only result for a question you have being yourself
(00:28):
asking that same question years previous.
Music.
I've always wanted to introduce somebody by saying they don't need any introduction,
but I think in this case, that's probably the case.
So I'm sat here with Will Critchlow, who is the CEO of SearchPilot,
CEO and founder, or just CEO?
(00:49):
Founder, sure. Let's go with that. So yeah, most people probably know Will from
being around the industry forever.
But so first, let's get into that. How did you get into SEO?
Because obviously, when we were in school google didn't exist right so i
mean when i was in school the internet barely existed so uh
yeah get getting you say around the
(01:12):
industry for a long time just around everything for a long time yeah there's something
really funny that happens i had somebody say this the other day you go
very very quickly from being the youngest guy in
the room to being the oldest guy i've just feels
like it happens overnight i experienced it first playing sports
you know you're a kid on the team and then suddenly you're
the veteran i'm like it feels like there's nothing thing in between that's definitely
(01:32):
i'm on the other side of that hill as far as seo is concerned these days but
yeah so i remember getting the internet
for the first time at school one computer chemistry
lab chemistry teacher was a geek yeah
hooked it hooked up dial up modem and
whatever i must have been i was in
secondary school at some point and that didn't immediately.
(01:54):
Capture my my imagination but as soon as i got it at home
as soon as i could use it in a more unfettered way the internet
became part of i mean you know i don't have to probably evangelize the
internet to people listening to this podcast but that
was half the story the other half the story was business so
i would i've been like i have a couple of
i was going to say unhealthy obsessions they kind of worked out fairly well
(02:16):
for me one is the kind of geeky technology side right my fascination about robots
of text and the like and the other is how businesses work and i'm one of those
weirdos who sits down in a restaurant and goes right but there's this many covers
and like how they how How does this make money compared to the one down the
road? And my dad ran a small business from home.
So I was very exposed to the business side early on. I was allowed to answer
(02:38):
the phone when my voice broke.
You know, that kind of thing. So that was the accidental path into SEO.
Because first of all, it was building websites. Yes.
Combine those two things, especially kind of by necessity as well.
My co-founder, Duncan Morris, I'm sure he won't mind me saying,
not the world's greatest designer.
So when our roles were essentially, I was selling website design and he was
(02:59):
building websites, our differentiation was not our design skills.
It was the fact that they worked for the business. They were useful.
And early 2000s, that meant visible in search, especially for small businesses
is you couldn't really afford paid search yeah and so that's how we yeah the rest is history,
amazing cool so i meant to say at the start and we'll get into that now in one
(03:20):
sentence what do you do what do you do every day in one sentence so i run search pilot which is,
seo testing for very large websites so we're helping really big websites typically.
I'm getting more than one sentence that's fine we'll stop there
we help big websites figure out what google really wants yep and
i've been a client in the past i'm still
(03:42):
a big evangelist for the tool when i'm out and about i'm
speaking to uh two other businesses and that but the thing i
wanted to briefly touch on today thing that's always fascinated me about
seo so i used to work for a business that had more
than one website within there and we would frequently
do things where one website would make a change and
see incredible benefits in some way shape or form like
(04:04):
how scores and clicks whatever and then the other
websites would think and they were very similar code bases very
similar websites and we'd think brilliant let's we'll do that as well and
we'd make that change and see nothing no
no difference whatsoever i guess my first thing is how often do you see that
do you have do you have like like a go-to these tests always work well for a
(04:25):
client you know i mean the first one you show a client when you first get them
through the door i wish we had that well do i in many ways our job security
comes from the fact that that is true if there was a list of things that always worked,
maybe you wouldn't need to test them so in some senses I guess our job security
comes from the fact that our experience is like yours,
works great in one site, one industry one niche, one whatever it might be.
(04:45):
Does nothing somewhere else or even positive and negative we've seen like divergent outcomes,
that tends to be around things like content quality and positioning
of content those kind of things so that i think the reason this
happens is it's such a complex system and in
the in the intro bit we talked about the business and the tech my other
interest is the academic side of things which i
(05:07):
don't i don't get to kind of flex this muscle as much
these days but i i studied
people heard me talk about auction theory study game theory study complex
systems university and i i'm really
fascinated in trying to figure out
what's really going on and that isn't
like search pilots business mission because that's not the kind of what's what
(05:32):
we're trying to do we'd say a lot we're doing business not science we're helping
our customers figure out what makes them more money we don't need to be certain
that it's going to work be replicable it's got we don't need to know if it helps that competitor.
Me personally, as a human, I am fascinated in what works, what scales,
why it works, that kind of stuff.
So yeah, I think the short answer is we definitely see that.
(05:53):
And it's because it's such a complex system.
You've got all this, you've got all the variables, everything you mentioned
about the site itself, but also the competitors, the content quality is kind
of slightly more, less tangible variables, variables.
All that stuff going on is dynamic, but Google changing stuff,
all these things going on. I think we've benefited as an industry.
If you look back over, we've been doing it, look back over the history of SEO.
(06:18):
We, as an industry, unlocked such huge value and tapped into a tiny fraction
of the value that Google themselves were unlocking for the world, for businesses,
that it didn't, there was so much out there, so much value out there,
that it didn't matter that 80% of the stuff we did didn't work.
Yeah right the 20 paid for the 80 yeah yeah where i feel like right now and
(06:40):
this is partly why search pilot exists is that that whole ecosystem is so much
more mature it's so much more of a game of inches not yards and especially on
very large websites that have been doing seo for.
Decades at this point up against competitors who are doing the same it's not
enough you need some of that that kind of you need a bit of the science so i
(07:02):
guess an interesting so i'm fascinated
whenever there's a change whether it's an algo update or a
named one i guess it's always fascinating to
me to see a lot of big people in the industry going off and doing
analysis and doing all this stuff i'm always most interested in what black hat
guys say yeah and every single time they're just like it's links it is links
but i in black hat world not the website in the world of being a black hat i
(07:26):
imagine quite often it is links because you are the new domains right you
you've got to turn a site is old if it's
six if you're ever going to burn it you've got to do the churning exactly yeah
so i i guess my my point is obviously
all that tells us is that just seo is a completely different
beast right if you're working for forbes ebay is there a difference between
working with say a an sme sort of mid-size british business and then working
(07:50):
with a multinational say yes is the short answer yeah the slightly more interesting
answer is i so these These days, in my work at Searchpilot,
I really only see the top, the big end of that.
And because of the nature of what our product is, I kind of only see the on-site bit.
So we're kind of, unlike the agency that I used to run, we're trying to be really focused.
(08:15):
And I'm not a very naturally focused person, so this is hard for me.
But I believe it's good for the business. So we're staying very focused.
We're staying focused on those big websites.
We're staying focused on SEO testing and on-site stuff. within that
world it's amazing how powerful what
you put on your website is and that sounds like a stupid thing to
say but small tweaks can make massive differences
and that's huge amounts of money where i feel less qualified to comment these
(08:40):
days because i've been out of the agency game for a little while now and in
the agency world we did work with those smaller startups you know the b2b sass
or whatever and we definitely saw all those dynamics playing out.
Sometimes you change stuff on the website and nothing really moves until you
get some more links or whatever.
I'm probably not the right person to comment on that these days.
(09:03):
I see the same thing you see in terms of.
The black cat crew i think there's there is
one other dynamic of course which is which goes both ways and i can't
figure out which is more powerful which is
on you know that saying it's very hard to get a man to believe
something when his job depends on the opposite right okay yeah
yeah mangling that yeah but something along those lines
(09:24):
and i think the original quote does say man but obviously it
just means human yeah that the black cat guys
would want it to be links because that's what they know that's what they can
do that's what they can churn out the converse is
true as well there's a lot of people who really would like links not
to matter and it just to be about making massive websites
yeah you know making them work better because that's the
(09:44):
last issue and yeah like oh wouldn't it be amazing if we just
did that and you're going again going back to the history this whole thing needs
to be called competitive web mastering and i i've always quite liked that but
i'm quite competitive and partly i like the hands-on implications of that but
i think The fact is that it is competitive,
(10:06):
and so there's got to be something that you can do better than other people.
There's a limit to how fast your website can load.
Even if you are slightly faster, does your audience care? When we're talking
about five milliseconds or something, they can't even notice.
There's got to be something, and historically, that's been Lynx.
Lynx has been the only thing you could be radically better at,
(10:28):
because anybody can put the same words on their website and serve
them up just as technically well yeah as someone else and
i think we're we're edging out of that world but we can't have
left it because there's nothing truly replaces that i think user signals is
probably the only other metric that has that scalability that you can you can
love a brand or a site infinitely more yeah than a one you've never heard of
(10:51):
and so that has that scalability potential and yes i'm interested in that angle Yeah.
I'm going to meander slightly away from it now, but I think that this covers it. It's interesting.
Obviously, the entire industry is very annoyed at the fact that Reddit sits
at the top of basically every search you do at the moment.
But the more I think about it, it's not totally wrong, is it?
Briefly. I've got a friend who works in VPNs. And he was complaining the other
(11:16):
day that he spent all this money on content and da-da-da-da-da,
and Reddit ranks for what is the best VPN for torrenting.
And I kind of thought, yeah.
And I'm sure that all those people torrenting were just getting Linux distros and nothing else.
But if I want experience-based stuff,
especially on something that's maybe not quite kosher
(11:38):
reddit got to me because what's the
other answer 10 different vpn saying we're the best one the
challenge is that's not sustainable i
don't think in either direction because google can't
become dependent on reddit now for every answer but also
as soon as a reddit thread ranks for
that stuff it gets it gets descended upon it
(12:00):
gets spammed and so it's it's
true it's true that reddit's pages were some
of the best results for top queries until they became
those top results yeah and so
i think there's just some creative destruction going on here i think it's reddit
is the right answer right now will be again in year five years time 10 years
time probably not this is no consolation to the one site who's just whose niche
(12:24):
has just been taken out by reddit but i don't think this is a it's not It's
not a stable permanent answer here. Nothing ever is.
And I posted something about this.
I was fascinated at the timeline intersection,
again, this is back to my like tech plus business interest, you know the extreme
(12:45):
acceleration in Reddit visibility and search basically maps to their roadshow
before going public, right?
So Reddit's IPO happened at peak Reddit Google visibility.
Is that coincidence? Maybe it is
coincidence. Maybe that's why they IPO'd because they were doing so well.
Maybe they did things because they were going to IPO that turned them into good
(13:10):
results that led to Google giving them the visibility.
I couldn't speculate on anything more nefarious, but you can imagine inside
of trading conversations that could be happening.
There's the most interesting one. So there's a
set of people out there listening who might or might not be listening to this podcasts of
like five of them okay who share my exact weird intersection
of interests for those people my most the
(13:34):
theory i'd most like to debate about this anybody listen anybody
read matt levine but bloomberg columnist this
is way outside seo he writes about finance okay brilliant writer one of those
kind of writers who makes you believe that humans can do better than ai okay
he he has a trope that he returns to a lot that everything is inside of trading
right okay and people can If you're interested, go down the rabbit hole, read all this stuff.
(13:58):
The one thing that isn't insider trading under his model is trading on your own intentions.
So you can say, I plan to do something in the future that will benefit this
business and its stock price.
I can buy its shares first, do the thing I plan to do, as long as it's not illegal.
And there are some carve-outs of this. This is not legal advice.
(14:19):
Then that's okay. That's allowed.
So my conspiracy theory version is google somewhere
owns a lot of reddit stock and decided
well we're going to give them a massive boost of visibility they're going
to ipo we're going to make a lot of money i have no evidence for
that but the point is they could do that yeah now you
(14:40):
what wouldn't be allowed would be an individual
person at google saying i
personally hold a lot of reddit stock it would be really good for
my personal bank account yeah if reddit got a lot of visibility oh
look i have a button that gives reddit a lot of visibility that would not be allowed
and i know no reason to think that that's happening
but there is something interesting and i would have been very very
(15:00):
nervous if i were holding a
lot of reddit stock in the run-up to the ipo that google
was about to drop the hammer because that has certainly happened we
used to have a saying of don't make that google look bad right the i don't know
if you remember back to some of the the classic penalties right bmw i was about
to say being done and interflora was one to flora the there was um what was
(15:25):
the one that the the comparison site that they ended up buying anyway it doesn't matter yeah.
That basically any time you hit the headlines but in relation to google search quality.
You're about to have a bad day, week, month, quarter, whatever it might be.
Not necessarily year, right? Because remember, BMW came back in quite quickly
(15:46):
or whatever, but you're certainly about to have a bad moment in time.
And in Reddit's case, their time window was very short, right?
If Google had dropped the hammer the week before the IPO, bad things would have happened.
So I would have been very, very nervous, assuming there is no backroom deal.
I would be very very nervous in the in the reddit shoes that that run up in
(16:07):
search visibility and all of the stories that were getting written about it
were happening in that in that window.
In the right side yeah yeah the other thing as well that sort of occurs to me
while we were talking is that reddit is would would then become reliant on people
having the same conversation roughly once every six months in order to because
again if you if it comes down to what is the best i mean i'm not too worried
about that my experience of reddit is that well yeah fair point but you
(16:31):
sometimes reddit google will serve up a reddit thread from
seven years ago of course and that somebody's saying what's
the best x to do y someone recommends z and it turns
out z went bankrupt in 2019 and you then know better off
or the worst thing again as a somewhat developer
someone asking a question and then the only
response to that thread being never mind i fixed it how did
(16:52):
you fix it you know what's even worse than that is you google a problem and
you find your own stack overflow question from five
years ago when you asked the same question and didn't get any answers then either i've
definitely had that on the seo side of things like no i don't want to know what
i thought yeah i don't want to know what other people thought i want to know
literally anybody else on earth anybody else yeah exactly i just wanted to take
(17:15):
a little break here to say thanks for joining us on this episode of human first
digital brought to you by the team.
Some of you might be familiar with our old Dcrawl branding. Yeah,
we're the same business.
But since we rebranded to Luma a few years ago, we've been busy growing our
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(17:37):
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tools by finding us at lumar.io now back to the show.
(17:58):
So i've been having a few uh off the record private conversations recently with folks who are,
having a lot of public who are talking about a lot of stuff in public but there
are certain things they don't want to or can't say in public around this whole
search quality question so i I would very,
very much like to know which situation we're in.
(18:22):
Are we in a search quality is actually fine, right?
Not worse than it has been in the past.
Getting more kind of sure. It's good in some areas, bad in some areas,
but it's such an immense long tail.
None of us are looking at the whole picture, right? So we're seeing this weird
little lens on different areas.
(18:43):
And in certain areas, it's got worse. So we got into this kind of doom loop,
but in truth, maybe such quality is fine.
That still could be a problem for Google because the vibes are bad,
right? And bad vibes lead them to do silly things, SG.
But that's one possibility. There's another possibility, which is search quality
(19:03):
has got worse, but only because the web has got worse, right?
So the search quality is as good relative to the quality of the web as it's ever been.
Again, there are not really value judgments on these things,
good or bad for users or Google,
or the catastrophic case that like genuinely search
quality has actually created and google is
(19:25):
threatened as a result now i want
to know a which is true yeah but also which does
google think truly honestly quietly in private
because all of the indications we've seen
publicly are that they they think some
combination of one and two right that they've talked
about their metrics show search quality is still fine
(19:47):
yeah users are as satisfied as they've ever been blah blah blah
maybe i actually could
believe this one of my contrarian perspectives is i
think maybe that might be true and this whole thing
is vibes could well be there's definitely things
that stand out but again i never know how much of it is me being an seo
but also we're looking through a microscope yeah we're looking
(20:07):
through a microscope at a landscape and like
we can't see what's outside of our field of
vision because we do things like so like if i'm
looking for a new phone and i google best android phone
and i go oh look there's a coincidence tech
radar have updated their their new post about it and they updated it three days
ago there's lucky i know straight away what's going on there would my mum would
(20:32):
she care would she get i mean would she get a phone that she's happy with probably
yeah and and that's also just thinking we have have this tendency to think about.
Obvious searches and the vast majority of searches
are not the obvious yes yeah and the and the
vast i mean vast vast vast majority of searches not the
obvious search the vast majority of searches are not even in the
(20:55):
you know in the cohort of searches that
stat looks at or yeah you see these big studies and
i love them and i'm a big fan of their work but they're
not looking at trillions of query and there are trillions of
queries so how the only people who
can do that at scale fail it are the
search engines themselves yeah so only they really know and that's
(21:16):
definitely that's a wall i would like to be a flight on yeah because
definitely i think i i certainly find myself once every week couple
of weeks typing something into google and thinking i'm fairly confident
no one's ever searched for this before you know because it is
the exact combination of weird words in the situation you are
in it's occurred to me actually the way
we talk about out search engines remind me about how my dad
(21:38):
talks about cars my dad will only drive pre-2008 vw
passats i think okay because they change because they changed
the engine in 2008 and the new ones are crap okay all we drive in our house
is vw group cars i have a lovely time driving our cars around neither of them's
ever broken down but my dad who's a mechanic and has been his entire life is
(22:00):
just like rubbish they are they are crap they'll and i'm like it's fine for me.
Takes me to Aldi, you know what I mean, and takes my daughters to ballet, I don't care.
I get what I need out of it. And it's that same thing again, isn't it?
It's when you've spent your entire life looking at one thing.
Everything now looks like, you've only got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
(22:20):
I actually can't work out if this is a bull case or a bear case for Google,
but even if everything was going in like the most...
Doomsayer direction it's a slow moving
thing right think about how many people are still doing aol dial-up
in 2010 you know the the thought
(22:41):
experiment i've been toying with recently i genuinely can't work
out where i sit on it is think about like i
mean big five tech right meta amazon apple
google microsoft stack rack
them by their 2050 revenue you i find
that it's really hard yeah i'm like i mean obviously it's hard but it's hard
(23:01):
to even come up with what i think yeah just a guess a theory that consistently
explains where they might all be yeah and that is you know terrifyingly as close
as when i started building websites.
Yes looking backwards yeah yeah and and of
course back then it would probably have been quite hard to pick those winners i
guess mark softwood big meta didn't even exist no
(23:24):
google was just literally just founded maybe
maybe the cutting edge techies had started using google amazon's
just being founded like the world changes the
world changes more than you think over 20 years
and less than you think yeah yeah two or three or five well that
yeah as you say apple will as an for instance
apple will be a monolith until the end of time but 10
(23:47):
years ago you wouldn't think that Apple would now have
a bit of a rep for not really invent reinventing they've
released the same iPhone however many times now etc etc you know
I again I can't figure out what's vibes and what's you know like you look at
the I mean are they still the most valuable company in the world or the second
most valuable I can't remember them and Microsoft tend to yeah they fluctuate
(24:07):
don't they try but yeah you know who who's the best CEO of the 21st century so far.
Tim Cook has a pretty good shot at that, I think. Satya is up there with him.
And as I was talking about yesterday, I think Sundar is in a very,
very difficult position where he might be doing an incredible job,
(24:29):
but he's losing the vibes game.
And I think you can run an enterprise business and lose the vibes game.
Nobody even cares who the CEO of Microsoft is if they're selling their enterprise
contracts. But I think Google is, yeah, it's probably feeling some of that pressure.
Yeah. They're certainly in a situation now where the state of Google has escaped SEO.
(24:53):
You get people like Ed Zitron talking about the state of Google a lot.
It's obviously The Verge do their once every two or three months,
all shot across the bow and SEO in general.
So question back for you. Do you think we see,
my guess is probably Sergey, but one of
the Google founders come come back visibly in
(25:14):
the near term i i've got a little
pet belief that nobody at google really knows
how the algorithm works anymore i mean very true yeah
you i mean i'm sure we all read the same stuff this week right
the you mentioned ed that article in
the hacker news comment at the top of the discussion of that
which was the turning point
(25:35):
unlike what ed said the the argument
made in this news comment from a recent google
search engineer was it was the departure
of amit departure amit single in 20 let
me get this wrong 14 something like that somewhere in that range and it was
the voice arguing for explainable ranking yeah algorithm not that they would
(25:59):
explain it to anyone no but internally but it could they could internally they
knew why things ranked where they did. They could fix rankings.
They could modify the algorithm. They knew what they were doing with that.
It was a set of levers connected to outputs.
And he was not the sole voice, but he was the protector of that,
the defender of the ranking algorithm from deep learning.
(26:24):
His departure heralded the entry of that. They were deep learning people.
I actually think even under Amit, it had got so complex, they didn't exactly know the answer.
I think they were having to run experiments just like we do on the outside to find out what happened.
Or rather, I think they should have done those things. I don't think they were.
(26:47):
I think that even if you go back, so So 2012 is Penguin, 2010, 2011 is Panda.
I think some of those era of updates, which involve machine learning, right?
I don't think they knew exactly what the impact was going to be until they rolled
(27:09):
out some of those things.
You can see that as they iterate, as they pull those levers back and forth and
they oscillate towards what they think is the right answer.
And in particular not because
they couldn't but because i don't know interested i don't think
they looked at the impact on individual websites individual publishers
individual webmasters they were
educated about that impact by the community who did that research after those
(27:32):
things rolled out now we're even further into that world where back then they
could have looked at that if they wanted to now i think the only way to tell
is turn it on c and where i so i think that the if I'm wrong about the search
quality, if search quality genuinely is down.
Can easily believe i'm just being a bit contrarian the part
(27:52):
of the reason is that they can't fix the edge cases they and
i don't just mean individual queries i mean classes of query yeah you know it's
very very the previous thing they could have gone oh look you know our algorithm
is screwing up over here and if it's all being spat out of this completely opaque
deep learning llm style i'm not LLM, obviously,
(28:15):
I'm not talking about SGE, I'm talking about like call ranking and stuff,
then you can't, not only can you not debug it, but you can't fix it,
even if you do spot the problem.
And somebody was, I saw a discussion about this, may have been the same thread, about translation.
So if you, when the first, there's a great story, it was either the New York Magazine, New Yorker,
(28:38):
one of those had a great article when the first deep learning version of Google
translate came out and it was a, it was like an O well as rare overnight,
switchovers where they were like previously they had all of this kind of hand tuned stuff.
And then a team of six beats everything. This team had been doing for decades
(28:59):
with a deep learning model.
Great except when that deep learning model says, you know, okay, I'm right.
Much more often than your old model, but I'm really embarrassingly wrong.
On this one translation, you can't do anything about that.
I mean, you can post-post, you can start adding all these human things back
(29:19):
in afterwards, but you can't fix it in the paradigm that you're working in.
There's no way of just going, dear deep learning model, can you do everything
you've just done, but also not make that one mistake?
It's all unintended consequences. It's all like squashing a balloon over here,
inflates a balloon over there.
And the very last line in that Hackenews comment on the discussion of Ed's post
(29:40):
was about, So this is the search engineer who worked there, I think it was 20...
2019-ish, said he referred to an internal document that people at Google could
still go and look up in their Google Drive or whatever,
that he'd written during his time there, which was basically a list of bugs
(30:01):
he knew about but hadn't had a chance to fix.
And some of them are just literal software bugs.
And you don't think of Google Search as being buggy in that respect.
Yeah, yeah. But like literal divide by zero. So one of the references is an off by one error.
There's literally some thing where they're like it should
be zero indexed and it's one indexed or whatever and apparently that's
(30:24):
messing up some search results on
some subset of queries because there's literally a bug in there and I gave a
presentation on this years ago but I'm surprised that we aren't seeing more
of those kinds of things so we're seeing this search quality argument around
Reddit ranking or whatever else but Just occasionally you see the glimpses, right?
(30:47):
So you see, oh, for a short period of time, Australian websites are ranking
in the UK or that kind of thing.
And I think it's just that sign of, it's just literal bugs. Yeah.
Funnily enough, we had an issue the other day where, I want to say this is via
Google Cash, but I don't know if you can still get into the cash.
I think you can still force it by using CashCole in the address bar.
(31:11):
Anyway, we had just a different website. site and you
went to site.com cash colon site.com blah
blah blah you got a different website and then there's a bit of google documentation
which basically says sometimes that happens because google just sort of gets
confused oh oh really okay just like yeah if the if the basically if the what
we were found finding is that if the url structure is the same or very very similar,
(31:36):
sometimes just gets confusing but it's a different website in the cache yeah
but no it's it's interesting what you're saying and we'll have to end on this
because we've gone way over time,
Yeah, 2014, I feel like Google would pop up less to tell you things,
but when they did, it would be like, this weird thing has happened because this.
Or, yes, you are right, that's because we did this, and it's gone a bit wrong.
(31:58):
Now, you get so much more out of Gary and John and people like that,
but the response is normally, oh, yeah.
That's weird, isn't it? Neither you nor I probably want
to get the DMs or emails that
will result in in poking that particular bear but yes
it's a short time i completely agree with you the the what
(32:22):
the whole industry's been talking about information content
in content recently and
i think the level of true information
content in the communication out of google has dropped
and it's also quite obvious that some
of that comes from teams that are not the teams in google
(32:43):
that would know the answer sometimes there isn't a
team in google yeah that would know the answer for all the reasons we've just been talking there
and i am i'm very very
interested in this is another flight yeah
the wall i'd like to be a fly on is all of all of those folks all the relations
team people in fact most of pr i'd love to know what their objectives are like
(33:07):
what does corporate what does sumba want them to do yeah and are they doing it is this the plan.
Yeah yeah you know what i mean without going too far into getting ourselves
some nasty grams yeah lovely well that's been fantastic i could do this for
another hour but we'll have to wrap it up there uh will critzer thank you very
much thank you it's been fun the human first digital podcast is brought to you
(33:29):
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