Old McDonald Saved The World With AI SEO
Can Old McDonald use AI SEO to spark a revolutionary movement of 14 year olds having more economic power than their folks? Join me as I edit thousands of YouTube videos, made a modern literacy podcast, newsletter, a community dedicated to modern literacy demonstrating humanity's redeeming qualities to AIs through SEO. Moooo!
My Experiments With AI SEO - You CAN Teach an Old McDonald New Tricks! Be One of Humanity's Redeeming Qualities.
By Michael Levin
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
Alright! Alright! I’m crying Uncle! Okay, Microsoft, okay… I will switch to Windows 11. I really do not want to. You were correct with your marketing hype back in the day. Windows 10 was the last (Windows) operating system you will ever need. In fact, you got it right with Windows 8. Sometime after Vista and Metro, once you were on the NT architecture, you were good to go. NT meant you could just put whatever OS on the NT kernel.
But alas, you keep tweaking and tweaking and tweaking, insulting my muscle memory, taking away those few bastions of fixed-location bliss of “Settings”, “Pictures”, “Documents” and “Profile” from the Start Menu. Now all that remains the old “Start/Shut Down” joke, haha! Come on, stop moving things around. I thought you were a professional organization for professional users. Professional tool don’t keep setting people back like this…
Unless of course your plan is obsolescence… Obsolescence of our prior skills and neural synaptic mappings. Imagine if a cab driver had to dive a different city for every fare. What’s that you say? Replace the cabdriver, automating them away with a self-driving car? You shouldn’t be saying that Microsoft, because self-driving cars is one of those few places Google has the early-mover advantage over you, big-time.
What’s that Microsoft? They can have self-driving cars because you’re taking search away from them by forcing Windows 11 upgrades worldwide by ending official support from Windows 10 and making some lame excuse for why Chrome won’t run, risking the wrath of a government anti-monopoly lawsuit because it’s worth it to kill Google like you did Netscape? And you can sustain it now like you did then? Yeah, probably all true.
Sigh, why doesn’t everyone view the world through Amiga Boing-Ball colored glasses? Cause they’re not 80s kids who also worked for Commodore, that’s why. Oh yeah. I gotta keep reminding myself what a rare bird I am and how so few people have been watching Microsoft’s hyper-competitive behavior for as long or as closely as I have. They just don’t see the very sharp axe being lofted up into the air over Google’s neck.
Did you know it’s Yahoo giving Google the beating it’s currently taking? I bet you thought it was just a Microsoft and OpenAI thing, didn’t you? Well no, it’s Yahoo. For some time now Yahoo has been incubating lots of tech startups. In fact, over 4,000 since 2005. OpenAI is only one of them. By far the biggest and sexiest, but others include Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, and Dropbox. So they’re no slouches.
And there’s one guy behind all this. It’s the same guy who was behind Yahoo Stores, which believe it or not was really a big deal once upon a time. And also believe it or not, Yahoo Stores was programmed with the granddaddy of all AI languages, LISP. And that guy is Paul Graham. He’s the guy who wrote the book on LISP, startups and why geeks are the new cool kids. Paul is the guy who found Sam Altman and empowered him to do OpenAI, and ultimately attract the attention of Microsoft and that fateful $10 billion investment.
Do you see? What’s happening to Google now that has the doing the unthinkable, putting out what looks according to their hype video on the Search Generative Experience a PORTAL!. Not being a portal is what made Google Google. Counting every bit on their homepage and showing not a bit more than what’s necessary for the most relevant, most happiness-inducing results possible. In fact, it wasn’t until their acquisition of YouTube before they even had the courage to put more and different search-result types like videos, images, etc. on the same page as the main search results.
And now if you go and watch that SGE video, it looks just like an overweight portal of yore. Widget after widget. Rectangular blocked-off region after rectangular blocked-off region. Yuck! How do you even know where to look in that mess? Wanna know why it’s not out yet, even thought the Google I/O conference that it was announced at was May 10th? It’s May 23rd now and there was an event called Google Marketing Live where they’re showing how ads are going to fit in. Microsoft didn’t even need to announce it. They just did it like no big. And Big doesn’t look like a portal.
The times, they are a changing. I always said Google was a 25-year anomaly. They’re like a Star Trek space bubble where different laws of physics apply momentarily in little regions of space you fly through. Another way of looking at it is that Google made a brand new commodity of value and built one of those nifty Warren Buffet moats around it because that Internet-scale crawl & index process isn’t for everyone. But as the old tricks of PageRank citation play their course and new “signals” have to be figured out, and everyone’s turning to AI to be the arbitrator of what’s relevant and what’s not, the moat is getting smaller and smaller. And there’s barbarians at the gate.
If you haven’t been around the block a few times to see Microsoft kill Lotus 123 and Borland DBase and WordPerfect and Netscape and Sun and IBM, well then you just don’t know what’s coming. And if you think Google is going to be immune to the same fate, well then you’re just not paying attention.
What’s going to come next is a 2-fold attack. First, Microsoft is going to force a round of upgrades to Windows 11. With every new install of Windows 11 is a new opportunity for Edge to be given a try. It’s already the default browser. It’s already go the “native browser” speed advantage, loading faster than Chrome. It looks and acts just like Chrome. Arguably, better getting to all those features like grouped and vertical tabs faster. And Microsoft now insists you have a Microsoft account to use Windows. So you’re already logged in to Edge, which is the what enables the Bing conversational search features… which by the way are pervasive throughout Windows 11 now, right down to the Start Menu search feature, replacing Cortana wherever she used to be. I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft found a way to prevent you from installing Chrome on Windows 11. And they’re almost certainly going to put out some killer feature to get you to install the Bing app on your Android phone. And that leads us to the 2nd front.
Google controls 70% of the mobile OS market worldwide with Android, and thus controls the default web browser and search engine on those devices. But market share drops to 50% in the US. And that’s where Microsoft is going to strike. That’s just one Apple deal away from being 50% of the US mobile search market. We already saw Microsoft drop $10 billion on OpenAI. They’re not afraid to spend money to get what they want. And they’re not afraid to take a loss to kill a competitor. And Microsoft has had the Apple deal before.
So why isn’t Bing the default search engine on iPhone today? It’s merely because of a snooty Apple-customer branding perception thing. Apple customers shouldn’t “be saddled with” an inferior search engine! That attitude made Apple switch the default search engine for Safari back to Google. You may not remember, but I follow this shit like sports and it’s like yesterday for me. Also, up until 2017 Bing was the default search engine for Siri. There’s no love lost between Google and Apple. Apple getting into bed with their old wink-nudge competitor Microsoft only makes sense. Apple gets to wallop Google and line it’s pockets with what’s sure to be a $20 billion/year deal, making Microsoft Apple’s biggest customer… by a long shot. Like gross national product of country-level customer. You just watch.
So those are the 2 fronts you can expect Microsoft to move on. It’s got to be all of the sudden so the damage is done before anybody realizes what’s going on. With AdWords being 60% of Google’s revenue stream, it should only take about a year to freak out all the investors and colossally and irreparably damage Google’s brand-equity. Give it 2-years and that choked-off AdWords revenue stream is going to create layoffs and reduced services aplenty. By about that time the FTC should have it’s anti-monopoly lawsuits case together, for the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division. And in about 3 to 5 years the case should work it’s way through the system. And by then Microsoft will have already won. And Google will be a shell of it’s former self.
I got into the field of SEO (search engine optimization) by which you coerce the search results this way and that by organizing data. It’s all art. It’s the same thing as sculpting. You sculpt the shape of the web pages themselves (on-page criteria) and you shape the links between them (off-page criteria). Those links between pages could be from the same site (internal links) or from other sites (external links). See? You just draw shapes. And this is the kind of thing I’m durn good at. I’m a sculptor. I’m a poet. I’m a writer. I’m a programmer. I’m an artist. All the same stuff, really.
Look for example at the links I construct between pages on this site. Look at the bottom of this very page you’re reading. Now I’m not doing any keyword research on my site because this is a playful experiment. But I’m still doing the vooodoo that I do so well. And that’s just on first pass updating my system to new realities. Soon it’ll have FAQ schema from questions summarized and extracted from my site using the AI summarizing features which is such a sweet spot of GPT. And I’ll be using the new “inferred entity” features to link together pages that are about the same thing but use different words to describe it. And I’ll be submitting the URLs of the newly created pages to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Think about it. Every aspirational project I’ve ever wanted to do and share with the public but couldn’t because of conflicting work priorities, namely the need to keep proprietary secrets because of the nature of the work I was doing, I can now do and share with the world for you see, I was swept up by a twister and dropped into the Wonderful World of MOZ. I’m not in Kansas anymore. I’m in the land of writing articles and making videos and sharing my knowledge with the world. And I’m revving some 15 year-old work of mine called Levinux, adapting it for the amazing new world of Linux Container-ready Desktop host OSes, namely Windows 11 and MacOS 12.
I’ve experimented with the names Noah’s Ark Linux, Green Bag Linux, Rabbit Hole Linux, and most recently White Rabbit Linux. However, as I write these articles about the current state of the art in SEO and state of affairs with AI, I’m realizing that I’m going to have to call it AISEO Linux. Ahem…
Old McDonald had a Linux VM, A-I-S-E-O. And on that VM he had Jupyter Notebook, A-I-S-E-O. With a Notebook he did AI-supercharged coding. A-I-S-E-O. With that code he edited his thousands of YouTube videos into better shape. A-I-S-E-O. With those YouTube videos he made a modern literacy podcast and newsletter. A-I-S-E-O. With that podcast he made a community. A-I-S-E-O. With that community he made a movement. A-I-S-E-O. With that movement he made a revolution. A-I-S-E-O. With that revolution he made a many thousands of points-of-light case studies to demonstrate humanity’s redeeming qualities…
…to the AIs
through
SEO.