Opinion | ‘Ultimate’ travel guides debunked: brief, unoriginal, and often not based on personal research, they are the opposite of what they promise
- On the internet, where fooling search engines is far more important than actual content, most ‘ultimate guides to’ a destination are anything but
- Short enough not to bore anyone and with enough keywords to excite search engine algorithms, here is the ultimate guide to ultimate guides
Hello, and welcome to the ultimate guide to ultimate guides, and particularly those of the travel sort.
These days almost every destination has several internet-based ultimate guides, which suggests that there is a lot of false advertising about, or there are a lot of influencers in need of a dictionary.
On any topic there can, by definition, be only one ultimate guide.
However, we’re using the word “ultimate” here in a special sense largely unknown outside the world of digital drivel. Not “the best achievable of its kind”, nor “something final or fundamental”, but “a brief and haphazard collection of poorly written material based on little or no personal experience or expertise, that has been given its title to attract more readers”.
Like most other ultimate guides, this one will also be brief, threadbare and unoriginal, and will equally fail to live up to its title. As elsewhere, use of the word ultimate is intended only to attract your attention, or that of search engine algorithms.
