> The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said, much less the intent. "Actual quality" is not an objective metric, and many ads are promo

> The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said, much less the intent. "Actual quality" is not an objective metric, and many ads are promoting new products that are high quality. And many aren't. The question is: what heuristic better matches the average person's definition of "actual quality". Let's look at this as if you were approaching this as a fresh, new problem: you're trying to design a heuristic that finds products that most closely match what people want. You'd have to be an idiot to think that "products that paid me to rank them higher" is a good heuristic. Even very naive heuristics would be better. Paid advertising serves advertisers and people creating crappy products who can artificially inflate their image. It doesn't serve consumers or people creating quality products. > Ranking in Google isn't magic. It's an algorithm based (in large part) on popularity. You're basically saying no new business or product ever has the right to exist, because anything that isn't popular now has no right to become popular. No, I'm saying that advertising breaks popularity as a good metric. If it weren't for ads, organic popularity would be a good metric of quality. But advertising allows people to manipulate popularity in their favor without actually providing quality. > How exactly do you expect something to become popular quickly enough for a company not to go out of business without getting the product in front of enough consumers? I don't. I think that creating something good takes time. Why do you think people are entitled to a get-rich-quick scheme?