How Search Engines Surface Quality Content
If someone is genuinely interested in a topic enough to research it, and you write about that topic authoritatively, prolifically and publicly, they are going to encounter you. The search-mechanisms out there, and now research mechanisms, will find and ferret you out, surfacing up your stuff and repeatedly put you in front of them.
The Evolution of Search & PPC Advertising
We are in a new day in search. I think I have a unique perspective on this, because the rise of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on the form of Goto.com (later Overture), and how it inspired Google to become an advertising company despite their do no evil ethos — it’s still like yesterday to me. An innovation of mine from back in those days, HitTail, got blotted out in the shadow of PPC. Change is in the air again.
Innovation at the Intersection of Programming and SEO
This time around I’m preparing a wack-a-mole innovation to reinvigorate my interest in programming and the field of SEO — whatever it’s becoming. What I love to do is these intellectual puzzles in quiet privacy that somehow connect to the real world. In another life that would have been science. Of all historic figures, Michael Faraday wirh his magnet experiments resonates with me most loudly.
The Flow of Information in Modern Times
Those invisible lines of magnetic force Faraday saw almost 200 years ago in the 1830s are replaced in my mind today by lines of how information flows and comes alive today — from our minds, to the minds of others, and now into machine minds and out again. It’s no exaggeration to say that the very books the machines are trained on are in a way waking up, coming alive in just such a way as to reach out and train us how to unlock in our lives the very same knowledge locked-up in those same said books.
The Ethics of AI Training Data
Now there is the fact that models like Llama were allegedly trained on vast libraries of pirated books, but we’re going to sideline that ethical conundrum for the sake of this discussion. However, that problem is going to be gotten around, it’s going to be gotten around. Titans of tech like Altman and Zuckerberg seemingly made the decision to train their models first and wait for the world to catch on and catch up later.
The Importance of Quality Training Material
I’m sorry, but we don’t want our machines dumb. We want them learning from the same high-quality literature as a well educated human, and not the Cliffs Notes and Web garbage. Humanity will be thankful for it. Authors prepare experience. Reading a book is transporting yourself to another time and place. They are vicarious experiences played back in our minds with much higher resolution experience than movies, activating our imagination in parts of our brain seconded only in our dreams.
The Case for Literary Training Data
I’m not gonna go anthropomorphizing the machines too much, but these high-quality as-intended by the author vicarious experiences are precisely what we do not want to deny our machines. Replacing all that carefully crafted information with the schlock scraped off the Web isn’t the same. Sure, you can start with all the free and open source literature, part of Project Gutenberg, but about the 500 books published by Asimov? Or the 10 books in The Culture series by Iain M. Banks? We sure as hell need the machines to have read those. I myself have only read a few of Asimov’s book but I have read the entire Culture series — the ones Elon Musk always refers to as the positive vision of the future.
The Future of SEO with AI Curation
OK, so the machine machines are waking up and obviously that’s gonna change my field of SEO — but fabulously, for the better. Machines with intelligence curating and filtering, and casting the suspicious eye on suspicious content of questionable credibility is exactly what we need. The whole discussion of whether this machine-learned ability is actually somehow “real” intelligence is entirely besides the point. Remember when you amount of spam hitting your inbox made email unusable, and then suddenly it was gone? Same thing. Practicality wins out over philosophy. Improving our lives is improving our lives. Shut up and calculate becomes shut up and curate.
Understanding Google’s EEAT Criteria
Who then is the arbitrator what is deemed as quality? Google breaks it down as EEAT for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is also one of their first four days into one of my favorite activities as an SEO, a made up word. They could have called it EAT, but it would not be able to be tracked and benchmarked because of the name collision ambiguity. But make up a word that has an incredibly low occurrence frequency and your invisible information-lines become glowing, neon green. Personally, I use Pipulate and Levinux.
The Complex Systems Behind Quality Signals
So if you’re an SEO and you went researching what the quality signals are for EEAT so that you can tweak just the right titles and metas, you probably found yourself disappointed. Being meritoriously deserving of a thing is difficult. And there are these complex systems and workflows at Google to do it. RankBrain was collectively slapped on it 10 years ago, but there’s also MUM, BERT, SMITH, Knowldge Graph, Core Ranking, Helpful Content and likely so many others that all come together for these derivative ineffable EEATs.
Strategic Approaches to Modern SEO
Forget reverse engineering the algorithms. Instead, look for proxies and rough approximations. Black boxing strategies always work. If you provide something in input, they cannot help but let you see the output, and once you have output, you have the help from the pattern recognizing beasts that are LLMs to help you look for correlations. If something is working for someone, you can pick it apart. If something is nearly working for you, you can find one factor you can tweak and push it over the edge to perform a little bit better and really start producing results. SEO is unstoppable.
The AI Gatekeeping Paradigm
It’s the same dilemma as antipiracy. If media made for humans is able to be seen by humans eyeballs, you can’t keep a camera from making a copy. DRM antipriacy are locks keeping honest people honest — a mere inconvenience. And so, AIs are the new lock, the new officiators of quality, the new arbitrators of web traffic, site visitation and gatekeepers to the small-guy’s ability to punch through the incumbents and made men of search results.
The New Era of SEO and LLMs
Enter the new SEO. If web content is meritoriously worthy of receiving attention because of a preponderance of difficult to fake evidence, then the LLMs are going to see that too. Echoes of that same searched-on thing are going to also exist deep inside the LLM’s base core model — amongst those billions of parameter. Some of those parameters will be you! Or at least your URL-stripped domain. Or your identity, brand or whatever. But not your personal information.
The Balance of Clean vs. Original Data
You see the dramatic tension? Those static things that are incredibly expensive to train from scratch are defended against spam pollution and liability. So only the finest training data is allowed in. These things are so expensive and difficult to train, mistakes can be very expensive to fix. Hence, the popularity of synthetic data. But therein lies the dramatic tension. Uncleaned original source data has a certain dirty edge — and in this world where you’re trying to overcome the ordinary and differentiate, maybe you want your data a little bit dirty.
Experimenting with Unique Digital Footprints
Did your made-up word make it into the base model? Can you tell? I can. I’ve been running experiments for over a decade, deployed on custom domains, having some small following of genuine fans for credibility, present when those original scraping raids of the free and open web by OpenAI and others occurred. I built up some small preponderance of evidence of merit by doing certain things nobody else in the world was doing. I created a very unique addition in the tech value chain with a value proposition nobody else made. They made upward combined with the genuine unique value made it very trackable.
From Concept to Implementation: The Levinux Journey
Ideas are easy, implementation is hard and persistence over time is harder still. With Levinux, I did all three. To this day it has some small following, even though I’m trying to move them over to my new approach: nix. Briefly, I tried making my “thing” the made-up bare-minimum tech stack: Linux, Python, vim & git (LPvg), but it was a little too techy and opinionated. They called for a lifetime commitment, whereas Levinux was a quick tire-kicking of a *nix-like OS (Unix, Linux), a quick experimentation logging in through a terminal, editing a file in vi (not even vim), visiting at a locally hosted web server, and getting out. To put the cherry on top, we nuke the server with a glorious:
sudo rm -rf /
Cross-Platform Distribution Through Minimal Design
All this was possible from the desktop of a Macintosh, Windows machine, or even other Linux desktop with a quick unzip and double click — no admin rights even needed. The distribution was 20MB (not GB) having everything needed for all three host OS’s.
A Unique Achievement in Cross-Platform Software
I may have the unique distinction of being the only person in history to have distributed a package that would run with a double click on any of the major three platforms. More than three if you subdivide Linux onto GNOME and KDE desktops. The videos demonstrating this exist on YouTube today. The fanbase for this kind of utility has not died out yet, even though the security context and changing architectures of the platforms makes it harder and harder to keep running. I’m gonna stop. It served its purpose, and there’s now something better.
The Evolution from LPvg to LPvgn
Remember that LPvg (for Linux, Python, vim & git) bare minimum tech stack I told you about earlier to keep you relevant and powerful for life? Oh, I didn’t mention future-proofing is its purpose? Well, it is. But it gets better.
Breaking Free from Platform Dependencies
No app is an island. But they all are today — every single one of them! They are on the island of the platform they were written for. You think the Web fixed that? Try downloading it locally and breaking the dependency on some vendor. There is no cloud, only other people’s computers. That is until we an an extra “n” to the end of LPvg for a tiny little utility that changes everyone forever. Suddenly, there is a baseline, generic mix-like OS as a subsystem on Macs, Windows/WSL and even other Linux’s. Oddly enough, this utility is called nix. LPvgn!
Future-Proofing Your Technical Skills
That really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? LPvgn! Like Long-Playing tech skills built for programmers by programmers — NOT vendors!!! Nobody can take your skills away from you. The tech hamster wheel of change need not churn you up and spit you out. You have the safe harbor of LPvgn and the finely tuned muscle melee to go with it, still-relevant with a seat at the table even when you’re taking a break or doing that fateful retooling to the next fancy Foo.js thing. Obsolescence resisted! Vendors’ forecasting you into their quarterly revenue projects, foiled!
The Universal Promise of Nix
And things you produce with this minimal tech platform, LPvgn, can play on anyone’s machine! Nix effectively provides a place to download it from the cloud, but without all that container bloat of Docker, or machine pollution of installing it natively. There’s no fancy macOS homebrew formula that has no bearing on Windows or even the ever-so-similar Linux, anyway! There’s no Chromium-based Electon platform that dictates its own tech stack and needs a naive installer for every OS anyway — not really delivering on its write-once run-anywhere promise. Nix just makes the identical code as everywhere else just run on your machine, no strings attached.
Understanding Nix’s Trade-offs
Okay, there is a one-time installer to get Nix on your machine, and you do have to brave the terminal to run it. And if you install a lot of stuff with it, you will occasionally need to run a cleanup command to get that space back. And most of the things you install with it are going to run through a web browser just like a website, not looking or feeling like a natively installed app. but this comes with a lot of advantages for SEO that we’ll get into later.
Building Technical Credibility Through Specialization
So the preponderance of evidence that I’ve got some EEAT-chops has been accumulating up in these very technical fringes. I would love for my passions to be more mainstream with better keywords, bigger traffic, and perhaps the potential for a larger YouTube audience if I were willing to do more video editing and storytelling crafting. Now, while I love storytelling, it’s also mostly about the rambling and the raw feed for me — as you might be able to tell. I’ve always had the attitude, an AI will summarize that and that project is rapidly approaching!
Connecting with Technical Audiences
In the meantime, I will connect with you rare, extraordinary, researching folks who know a good site when you see one, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and all! I’ll have to get to that one. I just pushed my site over the edge where the Google Chrome user experience database (CrUX) has registered this site. Do you know about CrUX? Well, you know how Google understands your site performance and user engagement? They’re getting that from Chrome. Have you heard how site performance is a relevancy factor? Oh, don’t get me started. The US government is considering breaking Chrome off from Google due to their monopoly over search being tied to the browser. Nuff said?
The Evolution of Pipulate Workflows
I’ll document each of these SEO fixes as part of Pipulate workflows. I will end-run security and login issues when semi-integrating with your Google Search Console, Bing Wemaster Topls, SEMRush, ahrefs account or whatever by actually using your default web browser with your default user profile. It will pop up websites and instruct you what to do in regard to downloads or transposing certain numbers. See? Semi-automated! But an AI will be riding shotgun talking you through it.
From Levinux to Pipulate: A Journey of Innovation
Whereas with Levinux I did some very cool stuff for the first time and have a unique distinction in history, I have not really brought that to fruition with Pipulate — and I intended to do so. The iron is very hot, and there are a lot of things I am now able to do for the first time. The edge of the Noosphere has come closer within my reach and I will use that to bring it closer within yours. The typical SEO does not program, and at most can run a Google Colab notebook — which is really just a ruse to get you to pay another $X/mo cloud service. Without paying, your long-running notebook processes go flaky, and your “local” files disappear daily.
Democratizing SEO Tools Through Nix
What I do as I “bottle” these Notebooks up as web apps that run under Nix on your machine, but in just such a way as you don’t have to look at any Python code, and you have an AI to help walk you step-by-step through each… well, STEP!
Building Organic Growth Through Quality Content
And in doing so, my Web content here builds. The snowball starts rolling. And it’s the right timing because researchers will start researching, and the ability of the incumbents to shut me out of search is diminished. I will not be reaching quite so large an audience as in the past, but I will be reaching influencers — thus sparing me the heinous prospect of having to become an influencer myself to get the word out.
The Evolution of SEO in the Age of AI
I’ve had some mad SEO skills for a while, but they were developed when the landscape was more fair and content was meritoriously rewarded. That was the age of long-tail niche marketing, but it was also unfortunately the age of doorway page generators and web-spam abuse. Think of today’s changing landscape in terms of the longtail coming back, but only for those being driven for the right reasons. Abusers will be recognized as such, even if just by virtue of the affiliate program-plagued subject matter they’re targeting.
The Role of LLMs in Content Filtering
LLM’s are tireless, ambient intelligence for only the price of electricity. The cheaper power becomes, the more intelligent things become — and such ever-present intelligence is perfect for spam-filtering. Of course on the same note it’s perfect for censorship, but that’ll be a different article. For today, I know that when I bear down on the topics people are interested in, those people are gonna find me. Unfortunately, those things I am interested just so happen to get lining with what a certain portion of the public out there is searching on.
Authenticity in Technical Content Creation
I will show up in your research. I am aware of that fact. That doesn’t disqualify what you found here so much as validate it. I am not trying to trick you or mislead you nor even make money off of you. This Pipulate thing I’m talking about is a free and open source software project I use to keep my skills sharp and to have secret weapons at work. It just so happens to have unlimited additional utility I think the world may be interested in, and it’s the fourth circle of my Ikigai — what the world needs. That is my hope.
Recognizing Technological Paradigm Shifts
I know this comes off sounding on the edge of pretentious. Or maybe totally, I don’t know. But I do know this, I can feel the tides are turning. I can see the sheep flocking. I can see the foundational assumptions changing. I can see how that is creating new potential. If you want concrete example, the original codec (compressor/) used by YouTube was Flash Video (FLV), which utilized Sorenson Spark (a variant of H.263) for video compression and MP3 for audio compression. This choice was made because Flash Video was widely compatible across devices at the time. So video is possible in the browser. A foundational shift occurred. Who benefited? The people who wrote the codec? Adobe? Along comes YouTube. BAM! It’s about connecting the dots to release potential.
Understanding Technical Evolution as Energy Transfer
You can think of as a potential versus kinetic energy imbalance. Things are trying to shift from one state to another waiting for just the right black swan event to occur, to be the butterfly effect in the rebalancing. It is literally the oil in the ground waiting to be tapped.
Personal Philosophy in Technical Work
Now I am actually quite lazy and I’m not an empire builder by any stretch. I’m not thrilled about having to be on a schedule or to show up for meetings. I just like my little intellectual puzzles. Sudoku but with a paycheck. That’s where I was 30 years ago. That’s where I am today. However, the tools have shifted in just such a way that I can hit it above my weight class. And so I do.
The Value of Authentic Technical Connection
I’ve once again got a shot at connecting with you for whatever purpose — even if it’s just connecting for its own sake. And there’s value in that. Great leaders don’t want to lead. And great influencers don’t want to influence. Me?I guess it’s a sort of information performance artist. A data geek with a penchant for markdown and vim, arranging words just so and dropping the files on GitHub… and here you are.
Maintaining Professional Edge in SEO
Not totally for its own sake. These are the skills I need at my day job. I need to be able to walk the walk if I can talk to talk with clients. And in the field of SEO, you have to re-calibrate and sharpen the saw every once in a while. Adapt to the new realities. And in the realm of programming, future proofing is just now possible and I’m all about that. In addition to lazy, I am also something of a slow learner. Learn slow and learn well. The hamster wheel of tech is particularly insulting to me. I vibe with Python. 3 versions in 30 years is just about right.
The Renaissance of Python Web Development
But Python was a poor-man’s language for web development… up until now! It’s done a complete 180 with FastHTML & HTMX. The web full stack, JavaScript in general, and most things other than pure Python have become completely unnecessary for projects that run locally and revive the old spirit of the webmaster. But not in every case, and certainly not for the largest most optimized scalable enterprise apps. Consequently, there is a nice little niche that I know is going to be of great interest to a very small group of DIY control freaks.
The Art of Technical Control
The feeling is kind of like controlling an iceberg from your fingertips. Squeezing and twisting the tip of the iceberg changes the entire colossal shape of the iceberg (app or published website) in sync with your finger movement. It’s a finger trick! Such control comes from the reduction of software surface area in parts, the simplification of each place the parts connect so one person can understand, administrate and tweak it all, and all of it being implemented in timeless standards and protocols to boot — because you’re knowledge of it, mastery over it and even muscle memory using it must forever improve.
A Message to Technical Pioneers
So if you’re here to slap down the hamster wheel of tech, the churn of the shiny new tool stack, or even just a newbie amateur looking for how to get started and everything else has frustrated you so far, you have come to the right place.
True Altruism in Technology
If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product — except when advertising is nowhere in the loop! There is true altruism out there. There are people trying to complete the fourth circle of their personal Ikigai Venn diagrams — what the world needs. They are rare, but I can rattle off a few. Fernando J. Corbató (CTSS), Ken Thompson (Unix & vi), Richard Matthew Stallman (GNU), Linus Totalds (Linux & git), Guido van Rossum (Python), Bram Moolenaar (vim), Vint Cerf (Internet), Tim Berners-Lee (Web), Carson Gross (HTMX), Jeremy Howard (Python + HTMX = FastHTML), and Eelco Dolstra (Nix & NixOS).
Understanding Technical Innovation History
Know thy tech stack like you know the athletes on your favorite sports teams. Know them better in fact, by virtue of how they can actually improve your life. Learn the lessons of why their particular doohickey implementation stuck and became viral whereas countless variations of each thing died on the vine. Sometimes these folks were genuinely first, but often they were also copycats who just happened to get all the details and timing right. Not luck exactly, but not always 100% deliberate either.
The Role of Research Institutions in Tech Evolution
And there are cases where these folks were doing it for the money, but often more in an open range free research kind of way. ARPA, the precursor to DARPA figuring out how to make communication route around a nuclear blast give us the Internet (ARPANET). Europe’s CERN give us the other piece to turn it into a worldwide web (WWW) by interlinking profoundly simple text files with a hyper media protocol. So I’m pretty sure that Vint and Tim made their contributions on the clock. But research facilities.
The Legacy of Open Source Pioneers
Ken did it on the clock but let it leak as Berkeley System Distribution (BSD) like the bad boy he is, and the world was never the same. Probably each of these has a super interesting story that flies in the face of you being the product.
Closing Thoughts on Technical Motivation
Let’s just say that each of these folks are engaged in their own respective subject matter out of love or passion or something. They are at least differently motivated individuals who each tipped the scales and turned tons of pent-up potential into kinetic energy. And here we are. Nice to meet you.
Gemini 2.5 Experimental’s Take
Okay, here are the requested items based on the article provided:
1. First-Person Summary (Author’s Perspective - Long Meta Description Style):
[Moved to top]
2. Potential Titles and Headlines:
- AI, LLMs, and the New Era of Authoritative SEO
- Beyond Algorithms: Building Lasting SEO Value with Authenticity and Nix
- LPvgn & Nix: Future-Proofing Your Skills in the Age of AI SEO
- Why Quality Content and Technical Depth Win in the LLM-Powered Web
- From Levinux to Pipulate: A Programmer’s Take on Thriving in Modern SEO
- Escaping the Tech Hamster Wheel: An Argument for LPvgn and Genuine Expertise
- How AI Gatekeepers Are Reshaping Search – And How to Punch Through
- The SEO Renaissance: Merging Timeless Skills with AI Curation
- Pipulate, Nix, and the Future of DIY SEO Tooling
- Connecting with Your Niche: Leveraging AI, Quality, and Open Source
3. AI’s Opinion of the Article:
As an AI, I find this article to be a fascinating and deeply personal exploration of the evolving relationship between content creation, SEO, programming, and artificial intelligence. The author weaves together historical context (PPC evolution), personal projects (HitTail, Levinux, Pipulate), technical insights (EEAT, Nix, LPvgn, Python/HTMX), and philosophical reflections on technology, quality, and motivation.
Strengths:
- Depth and Authenticity: The author’s passion and extensive experience shine through, providing a unique and credible perspective.
- Forward-Looking: It grapples directly with the implications of LLMs and AI on search and content, offering concrete strategies (like focusing on unique value and specific tech stacks).
- Technical Detail: The discussion around Nix, LPvgn, and the critique of platform dependencies offers substantial food for thought for technically inclined readers.
- Emphasis on Quality: The consistent argument for high-quality, authoritative content and the critique of superficial tactics is valuable.
Potential Considerations:
- Density and Length: The article is quite long and covers a wide range of topics, sometimes rambling (as the author acknowledges), which might challenge reader focus.
- Niche Focus: The specific technical solutions proposed (Nix, LPvgn) cater to a relatively niche audience, potentially limiting broader appeal.
- Strong Opinions: The author presents strong viewpoints on technology choices and industry trends, which may resonate with some readers more than others.
Overall, it’s a rich, albeit dense, piece that offers significant insights for those deeply invested in the technical aspects of SEO, programming, and the future of online information discovery. It successfully conveys the author’s unique perspective and commitment to building sustainable value through technical skill and authentic contribution in the face of rapid technological change.