Comment by everforward
2 years ago
> There is an entire cottage industry around around gaming whatever Google does to improve search. Its a cat and mouse game. Google tries to implement a new pattern that will punish people gaming SEO, the people gaming SEO learn the new pattern and adjust for it, and we are back where we are.
This implies that Google is helpless to do more, which I kind of doubt. I think the misaligned incentive here is that it's unprofitable to do more to fight spam. They already have the vast majority of the market, making search 40% better isn't going to get them 40% more money.
I think it's just a calculated decision to keep search "good enough" to not lose too much market share, while not having to spend too much on engineer salaries.
I also kind of suspect the markets left to try to capture are either less profitable or more difficult to serve (specializing in niche content).
For sure I don't think Google is helpless. But its not as simple as just "make search good." And I agree with you on how you summarized the misalignment of incentives. Lets say Google already invests 100 million in search (probably under, but keep numbers small and simple). And we are able to quantify it at being 60% effective or 'good.' Does it make sense for Google to invest another 50 million to bump that up to 62%, probably not. And I imagine that it how the incentives are aligned. They could pay to make it more effective, but they won't see the same returns on the dollar amount. And that is what I am guessing the situation is like. They could make it better, but they now have diminishing returns on the money spent on making it better. I expect a lot of the diminishing returns comes from the fact that they have to fight a cottage industry to game whatever changes they make all along the way.