←back to thread

The man who killed Google Search?

(www.wheresyoured.at)
1884 points elorant | 1 comments | 23 Apr 24 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.399s | source
Show context
KaoruAoiShiho ◴[23 Apr 24 18:45 UTC] No.40135615[source]▶
While entertaining it doesn't actually say anything about what the villain guy actually did, am I crazy? There's 2 serious charges he levied to google.

1. Ads look more like results.

2. Google results got more useless spam.

While 1 is kinda icky it's not that big of a deal, especially since I use an adblocker... and for 2 why does the author think this is the fault of google? Does shittier results increase in more people using google? I feel like it's the opposite, this doesn't seem right to me. Can it not just be that spammers and SEO freaks got more sophisticated and the problem got more challenging?

replies(4): >>40135871 #>>40135925 #>>40136406 #>>40137576 #
1. mjamesaustin ◴[23 Apr 24 19:05 UTC] No.40135871[source]▶
Shitty results increase the number of queries, because the initial query fails to produce a desired link, and it increases the number of ad clicks because the ads are comparatively helpful sitting next to the steaming pile of crap that is the results.

I thought the author covered this well in the breakdown of the "Code Yellow" results in 2019, and what happened when the resulting update reversed optimizations that had cut down on SEO spam.