Comment by gambiting
22 days ago
The threat to their search business had nothing to do with AI but with the insane amount of SEO-ing they allowed to rake in cash. Their results have been garbage for years, even for tech stuff where they traditionally excelled - searching for "what does class X do in .NET" yields several results for paid programming courses rather than the actual answer, and that's not an AI problem.
SEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have more sympathy for Google. They are just… losing at the cat-and-mouse game. They are playing cat against a whole world of mice, I don’t think anyone other than pre-decline Google could win it.
The number of mice has grown exponentially. It's not clear anyone could have kept up.
Millions, probably tens of millions of people have jobs trying to manipulate search results - with billions of dollars of resources available to them. With no internal information, it's safe to say no more than thousands of Googlers (probably fewer) are working to combat them.
If every one of them is a 10x engineer they're still outnumbered by more than 2 orders of magnitude.
> SEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have more sympathy for Google. They are just… losing at the cat-and-mouse game.
I don't think they are; they have realised (quite accurately, IMO) that users would still use them even if they boosted their customers' rankings in the results.
They could, right now, switch to a model that penalises pages for each ad. They don't. They could, right now, penalise highly monetised "content" like courses and crap. They don't do that either.[1]
If Kagi can get better results with a fraction of the resources, there is no argument to be made that Google is playing a losing game.
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[1] All the SEO stuff is damn easy to pick out; any page that is heavily monetised (by ads, or similar commercial offering) is very very easy to bin. A simple "don't show courses unless search query contains the word courses" type of rule is nowhere near computationally expensive. Recording the number of ads on a page when crawling is equally cheap.
> If Kagi can get better results with a fraction of the resources, there is no argument to be made that Google is playing a losing game.
Google's algorithm is the target for every SEO firm in the world. No one is targeting Kagi. Therefore, Kagi can use techniques that would not work at Google.
>A simple "don't show courses unless search query contains the word courses" type of rule is nowhere near computationally expensive
It’s nowhere near good either. What about the searches for cuorses or classes or training?
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I understand what you're saying, but also supposedly at some point quality deliberately took a back seat to "growth"
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
> The key event in the piece is a “Code Yellow” crisis declared in 2019 by Google’s ads and finance teams, which had forecast a disappointing quarter. In response, Raghavan pushed Ben Gomes — the erstwhile head of Google Search, and a genuine pioneer in search technology — to increase the number of queries people made by any means necessary.
(Quoting from this follow-up post: https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/)
Btw this was the HN discussion, I realized, well, where else would I have come across that?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
Google isn’t even playing that game, they’re playing the line-go-up game, which precludes them from dealing with SEO abuse in an effective way.
No, they made the problem by not dealing with such websites swiftly and brutally. Instead, they encouraged it.
Getting high SEO ranking is a lot of job. Some FTEs could just manually downrank SEO farms.