zlacker

>>i13e+(OP)
The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while.

Over the last year, its become palpable.

Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet.

This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their searches. They can do better. They've chosen to not do so.

>>Rosana+K9
I see this sort of comment a lot, and I honestly don't know what it's talking about. What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering?

It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge.

I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yahoo!? Back in that era, if I were looking for something as simple as the University of Michigan, I clicked and drilled down through a Yahoo directory. The obvious search query would have been useless. Google changed all that.

I view Google as the yellow pages. It works well for that. Is it an oracle of knowledge? Of course not. How could I possibly expect to find knowledge on a place where there is no reward for making it available? People producing knowledge don't work for free.

I've tried ChatGPT and it's no better. It serves up stuff that is flat-out wrong.

>>massys+7d
> What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering?

Not optimize for "most documents indexed" but "highest quality of results". One of them encourages adding spam to their index, the other encourages removing spam from their index.

>>luckyl+Pd
There are giant teams of people at Google whose only job is trying to define things like "spam" and "seo abuse" more precisely in more diverse contexts. There are equally large armies of people outside of it trying to outwit the first group and find more and more elaborate loopholes and workarounds.

HN is constantly pushing this notion that "spam" is some well-defined, solvable problem, so obviously Google wants it. That narrative just doesn't make sense from any angle. The notion that more click bait improves Google's bottom line is absurd

>>gipp+Cf
Their giant teams are an organizational failure then.

Product reviews alone, whether it is enterprise software or sports clothing should be something that they can easily comb through by hand, as humans, and uprank sites that are putting out more than affiliate link assemblies.

>>basch+wg
Why wouldn’t they do this, if it’s scalable and profitable? Is your theory just “incompetence”? I can’t prove that’s wrong, but I feel the simpler answer is more convincing; that handing off page rank to an army of minimum wage call center workers (for every country & language in the world…) wouldn’t be more effective than the existing algorithms at filtering out spam.

>>bbor+ei
Some form of paralysis. They dont have a single leader who has taken responsibility for it and corrected it. CEO/SVP has too many pots on the stove.

Im legitimately asking, who is responsible for Search at Google? Prabhakar Raghavan is SVP, Search, Assistant & Ads, and I click under him, he has 8 product groups reporting to him, and none of the people are responsible for Search. Yossi Matias is responsible for Search Engineering.

https://theorg.com/org/google

It may at first come off as a laughable answer, but Google Search has been in a directionless spiral since Marissa Mayer left. Her Yahoo tenure was not well received, but at Google she cared about the end quality of the product. Her title was Search Products and User Experience. Notice how we have gone from User Experience to Search Engineering, forgetting about the people who actually use the product.