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The organic search results have also been tweaked over the years to put a greater emphasis on domain "authority." Google SERPs are a very different animal than

The organic search results have also been tweaked over the years to put a greater emphasis on domain "authority." Google SERPs are a very different animal than they were 5 or 10 years ago -- back then there was a greater emphasis on keyword relevancy. Nowadays, you get stuff that doesn't match your search very well, but it comes from a domain that is popular, old, has lots of links, and maybe has a little bit of secret Google blessing because it's a big brand... People commonly lament that the Web has changed, it's dominated by big brands, it's not weird anymore, etc. I think this is a big part. Google has made these changes in an effort to address some legitimate problems around spam, black/gray hat SEO etc. But they likely have some less user-centric incentives as well ($$$) and either way, Google SERPs have become more boring and less relevant. There might be an opportunity for disruption emerging because of this. Google knows its search engine isn't very good anymore! That is why they're increasingly trying to pitch their service as a recommendation engine with special AI sauce, not an index of the Web. But frankly as this article demonstrates, what Google wants to recommend comes from a smaller sandbox and often is not the most interesting stuff out there. If someone can come up with a distribution mechanism which solves the problem of helping the user discover All The Content minus the spammers, scammers and fake news, they will be able to deliver more relevant information than search or social media can today. Google being large actually gives them an in-built disadvantage here because no matter what algorithm they develop, it's going to be everyone's first priority to reverse engineer and game.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> If someone can come up with a distribution mechanism which solves the problem of helping the user discover All The Content minus the spammers, scammers and fake news, they will be able to deliver more relevant information than search or social media can today. Google being large actually gives them an in-built disadvantage here because no matter what algorithm they develop, it's going to be everyone's first priority to reverse engineer and game. I wish there was a way to detect people attempting to game the algorithm, and just ban them indiscriminately. That's the only way. It probably requires AGI, though. Just like the old saw, "you're not stuck in traffic, you're the traffic", if you're doing SEO beyond making your page lightweight and useful to people, you are a part of the problem. It won't solve fake news issue; people could still make nice and fast sites full of lies. But at least low-effort "content marketing" spam would hopefully disappear, not to mention comment spam and all the other content that exists solely to push useless sites higher in SERPs.
- hnnh44 8y ago
  > if you're doing SEO beyond making your page lightweight and useful to people, you are a part of the problem. This is, unfortunately, an overly simplistic model. Everything can be manipulative if done to an extreme extent. There's no individual thing that you can easily draw the line at. The question is where do you draw the line, and what combination of factors is ban worthy.
- hopefulengineer 8y ago
  >I wish there was a way to detect people attempting to game the algorithm, and just ban them indiscriminately There is and google does ban sites. The problem that creates is that it is now easier to do "negative" SEO where you spam your competitors with 2010 era backlink spam to get them de-indexed. If your goal is to rank number 1 you can either raise your site up or just remove the sites ranking above you, same effect and the second option is far easier now
searchanon 8y ago
Hi there! Search Quality engineer here (though I don’t actually work on the core ranking myself, know very little about the specifics of its evolution over the years, and am nowhere near the news team). Every change we launch to search (and there are a lot) has very stringent requirements to meet. We have to, first and foremost, improve things for our users. That means a radical focus on improving the relevance, quality, and accuracy with which Google responds to your query. We measure this in a lot of ways. We relentlessly evaluate every change based on live traffic experiments (in which our metrics continuously evolve alongside our understanding of how to measure a good experience for our users) and side-by-side comparisons of queries with and without the change by real humans (trained to evaluate things with an eye towards the ideal results page). In every way we can measure, our search engine is the best it’s ever been. We definitely aren’t perfect; edge cases at scale are a never-ceasing job, and core improvements to the experience of searching on google always show that there’s plenty of headroom to improve what we return to users. But I heartily push back against both of these statements: > Google knows its search engine isn't very good anymore! And > That is why they're increasingly trying to pitch their service as a > recommendation engine with special AI sauce, not an index of the web We provide some content discovery tools (Discover, News), but those are offshoots made possible by our core mission and competencies: organizing the web’s information and making it accessible to users (yes we really say that, though frequently with a wink and a nod). We don’t try to be an index of the web, but instead as the best place to find out anything. For a high-level read (and some in-depth coverage, like the rater guidelines) on what I’m taking about, consult this page: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/web-users/ https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/web-use...
- sarcasmOrTears 8y ago
  Just an example: recently I made a search about korean pilots. Nothing controversial. First page results were all big media. In particular I noticed an article on NYT which was a badly made summary of a blog post that perfectly answered the question in the original search and it was even linked as source. Yet this blog wasn't even in the first page of results, but it would have been years ago. And that's true for all kind of queries. We always get those pathetic summaries made by big media of much better blogs by small companies and normal people who it seems don't deserve the first page anymore (despite being the original creators of so much quality content thst get rewritten by the big media). And let's not start on how inaccurate results are when a search is even slighly controversial. Google shifted from being a web search engine to a promoter for big media companies. They should start advertising the company as such instead of lying to consumers.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

> If someone can come up with a distribution mechanism which solves the problem of helping the user discover All The Content minus the spammers, scammers and fake news, they will be able to deliver more relevant information than search or social media can today. Google being large actually gives them an in-built disadvantage here because no matter what algorithm they develop, it's going to be everyone's first priority to reverse engineer and game. I wish there was a way to detect people attempting to game the algorithm, and just ban them indiscriminately. That's the only way. It probably requires AGI, though. Just like the old saw, "you're not stuck in traffic, you're the traffic", if you're doing SEO beyond making your page lightweight and useful to people, you are a part of the problem. It won't solve fake news issue; people could still make nice and fast sites full of lies. But at least low-effort "content marketing" spam would hopefully disappear, not to mention comment spam and all the other content that exists solely to push useless sites higher in SERPs.

hnnh44 8y ago
> if you're doing SEO beyond making your page lightweight and useful to people, you are a part of the problem. This is, unfortunately, an overly simplistic model. Everything can be manipulative if done to an extreme extent. There's no individual thing that you can easily draw the line at. The question is where do you draw the line, and what combination of factors is ban worthy.
hopefulengineer 8y ago
>I wish there was a way to detect people attempting to game the algorithm, and just ban them indiscriminately There is and google does ban sites. The problem that creates is that it is now easier to do "negative" SEO where you spam your competitors with 2010 era backlink spam to get them de-indexed. If your goal is to rank number 1 you can either raise your site up or just remove the sites ranking above you, same effect and the second option is far easier now

searchanon 8y ago

Hi there! Search Quality engineer here (though I don’t actually work on the core ranking myself, know very little about the specifics of its evolution over the years, and am nowhere near the news team). Every change we launch to search (and there are a lot) has very stringent requirements to meet. We have to, first and foremost, improve things for our users. That means a radical focus on improving the relevance, quality, and accuracy with which Google responds to your query. We measure this in a lot of ways. We relentlessly evaluate every change based on live traffic experiments (in which our metrics continuously evolve alongside our understanding of how to measure a good experience for our users) and side-by-side comparisons of queries with and without the change by real humans (trained to evaluate things with an eye towards the ideal results page). In every way we can measure, our search engine is the best it’s ever been. We definitely aren’t perfect; edge cases at scale are a never-ceasing job, and core improvements to the experience of searching on google always show that there’s plenty of headroom to improve what we return to users. But I heartily push back against both of these statements: > Google knows its search engine isn't very good anymore! And > That is why they're increasingly trying to pitch their service as a > recommendation engine with special AI sauce, not an index of the web We provide some content discovery tools (Discover, News), but those are offshoots made possible by our core mission and competencies: organizing the web’s information and making it accessible to users (yes we really say that, though frequently with a wink and a nod). We don’t try to be an index of the web, but instead as the best place to find out anything. For a high-level read (and some in-depth coverage, like the rater guidelines) on what I’m taking about, consult this page: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/web-users/ https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/web-use...

sarcasmOrTears 8y ago
Just an example: recently I made a search about korean pilots. Nothing controversial. First page results were all big media. In particular I noticed an article on NYT which was a badly made summary of a blog post that perfectly answered the question in the original search and it was even linked as source. Yet this blog wasn't even in the first page of results, but it would have been years ago. And that's true for all kind of queries. We always get those pathetic summaries made by big media of much better blogs by small companies and normal people who it seems don't deserve the first page anymore (despite being the original creators of so much quality content thst get rewritten by the big media). And let's not start on how inaccurate results are when a search is even slighly controversial. Google shifted from being a web search engine to a promoter for big media companies. They should start advertising the company as such instead of lying to consumers.