Comment by choppaface
1 year ago
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...