But the search revenue comes from ads. Or are you merely pointing out that search ad revenue is the largest piece of total ad revenue? To be honest, I don't un

But the search revenue comes from ads. Or are you merely pointing out that search ad revenue is the largest piece of total ad revenue? To be honest, I don't understand how everyone can remember the "quality" of their Google searches from 7 years ago. I can't even remember the quality from a year ago. The things I find most frustrating with search (such as maternity blogs being the first options when looking for medical information related to a newborn or tutorial sites being at the top of the results rather than the official language docs) rank highly because those are the things people are clicking on. As an example, I think the crown on HN is more likely to read the official documentation rather than go to a site such as TutorialsPoint or StackOverflow. On the other hand, the average programmer most likely just wants to go to TutorialsPoint or StackOverflow and copy-paste the solution they are looking for. And I think there are many more average programmers than there are visitors to HN. From Google's point of view, they are giving the user what they want. All that being said, it is easy to criticize Google, but dealing with search at the scale of the internet is non-trivial. It isn't clear to me that Google's algorithms from 7 years ago would do just as good of a job today as they did 7 years ago. There is a lot more junk and abuse online, people are figuring out ways to hack their search ranking or spamming useless articles.