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Comment by lll-o-lll

1 year ago

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?

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lll-o-lll

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devjab  1 year ago

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.

  • lll-o-lll  1 year ago

    > Google has quite literally auctioned off result placement for two decades

    Adwords - clearly marked as ads. Or are you suggesting the results themselves could be bought and sold? This was definitely not the case.

    > 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?

    Again, manipulating the actual results via financial inducement to google was not a thing. Quite the reverse.

    > 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.

    I’m not sure why you have this impression. There were many competitors for search prior and concurrent with google that operated in the same fashion. As I said earlier, they were simply hacked into uselessness. The concept of adversarial knowledge indexing was at this time new; PageRank was a novel and revolutionary solution.

  • hibikir  1 year ago

    When google won, they were still having 2 text ads per page with a noticeable different font and style as the search results. It was trivial to point out the ad. All the ad growth, from the sensible to the massive, and the change to their relationship with SEO, all occurred after the competition had been sent down to, at best, the single digits

    • lll-o-lll  1 year ago

      Yes, which is the point I was trying to make. I don’t think what we see is the cruel SEO victory over a valiant, but ultimately doomed defence by google. What we see is revenue optimization, that also happens to benefit SEO’s.