I disagree, their character does not matter, business incentives matter. Nothing would change, if other personalities were in charge, since profit maximization is still there.
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?
I wonder what makes you say that Google was more resilient to what you call “algorithm hacking” considering Google has quite literally auctioned off result placement for two decades. Do you think that selling result placement for keywords and search terms to the highest bidder had a higher resilience to search engine optimisation than other search engines? I’d argue that Google was simply good at turning search itself into a product. A lot of their early competition around the world didn’t really do “search” as much as they did a combination of web content in a “portal” sort of presentation.
Google is still better at it than their competition, but Google’s model is now being pressured by big money. Local businesses in Europe are simply losing any sort of search auction to the Chinese sites as an example.
Anyway, you can always pay for Kagi if you want a better experience on the internet.
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.
A lot of my favorite sites exist only as bookmarks and on the internet archive. If only there was software to explore the library. We could call it a 'search engine'. It would never catch on...
> 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.
I disagree, their character does not matter, business incentives matter. Nothing would change, if other personalities were in charge, since profit maximization is still there.
Nothing personal, just business. Yes it sucks, but advertising is the business, not search. If it’s free, you’re the product.
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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?
I wonder what makes you say that Google was more resilient to what you call “algorithm hacking” considering Google has quite literally auctioned off result placement for two decades. Do you think that selling result placement for keywords and search terms to the highest bidder had a higher resilience to search engine optimisation than other search engines? I’d argue that Google was simply good at turning search itself into a product. A lot of their early competition around the world didn’t really do “search” as much as they did a combination of web content in a “portal” sort of presentation.
Google is still better at it than their competition, but Google’s model is now being pressured by big money. Local businesses in Europe are simply losing any sort of search auction to the Chinese sites as an example.
Anyway, you can always pay for Kagi if you want a better experience on the internet.
8 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.
A lot of my favorite sites exist only as bookmarks and on the internet archive. If only there was software to explore the library. We could call it a 'search engine'. It would never catch on...