Seems like less something that Google did and more just a natural consequence of the massive economic value of being at the top of the ranking and therefore tremendous incentive to hack the algorithm with advanced SEO.
I don’t agree. As soon as commercialisation of the web began, this massive incentive existed. The early search engines all fell victim to “algorithm hacking” (granted, these algorithms were far more primitive). Google won search in these years by having much more sophisticated algorithms that were resilient to such attempts.
Today - well, two possible things have happened. Either scamming search engines have become too effective for even a company with the resources of Alphabet to mitigate. Or, Google optimised for revenue rather than knowledge indexing. Which one seems more likely?
To be clear, Google very much had and has a culture of optimizing for (a certain) quality. They definitely fought spam.
It just so happens that their culture and employees value a “quality” that is distinctly incongruent with the wider 6b-person public. And also they completely dropped the ball on spam 10 years ago when (among other things) Matt Cutts left.
Don’t write off Google. They are an important case study of their own flavor of greed.
They absolutely do not. Google has destroyed the promise of thr internet. In my experience the best resources on the internet no longer exist. They were hosted on some academics home page who retired or died 10 years ago. They could have spent their billions of dollars building a searchable internet archive that connects people to an organized library of the world's information. Instead they destroyed the internet and replaced it with affiliate marketing blog spam.
No doubt, but AI is already and will continue to make the web a true hellscape. The shitshow Google has created is nothing compared to what’s coming, sadly. Big tech is truly ruining everything.
And absolutely did not optimize for returning quality information.
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
The world is all that much worse for their poor character.
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Seems like less something that Google did and more just a natural consequence of the massive economic value of being at the top of the ranking and therefore tremendous incentive to hack the algorithm with advanced SEO.
I don’t agree. As soon as commercialisation of the web began, this massive incentive existed. The early search engines all fell victim to “algorithm hacking” (granted, these algorithms were far more primitive). Google won search in these years by having much more sophisticated algorithms that were resilient to such attempts.
Today - well, two possible things have happened. Either scamming search engines have become too effective for even a company with the resources of Alphabet to mitigate. Or, Google optimised for revenue rather than knowledge indexing. Which one seems more likely?
9 replies →
To be clear, Google very much had and has a culture of optimizing for (a certain) quality. They definitely fought spam.
It just so happens that their culture and employees value a “quality” that is distinctly incongruent with the wider 6b-person public. And also they completely dropped the ball on spam 10 years ago when (among other things) Matt Cutts left.
Don’t write off Google. They are an important case study of their own flavor of greed.
They absolutely do not. Google has destroyed the promise of thr internet. In my experience the best resources on the internet no longer exist. They were hosted on some academics home page who retired or died 10 years ago. They could have spent their billions of dollars building a searchable internet archive that connects people to an organized library of the world's information. Instead they destroyed the internet and replaced it with affiliate marketing blog spam.
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No doubt, but AI is already and will continue to make the web a true hellscape. The shitshow Google has created is nothing compared to what’s coming, sadly. Big tech is truly ruining everything.
In what sense did they monopolise the web with adsense?
I never thought I would pay for searching information; yet now that I do, it's decidedly not google exactly because of this. Adsense hot garbage.