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Google was good at launch because it was harvesting data from webrings and directories to provide it "high quality" link ranking data. However, they didn't than

Google was good at launch because it was harvesting data from webrings and directories to provide it "high quality" link ranking data. However, they didn't thank or credit or share any of their revenue with the sites whose human curation helped their results become so impressive. Seeing that Google search was effective, most human curators stopped curating directories and webrings. The SEO industry picked up the slack and began curating "blogs" that are junk links to junk products. This pair of outcomes led to the gradual and ongoing decay of Google's result quality. Google has not yet discovered how to automate "is this a quality link?" evaluation or not, since they can't tell the difference between "an amateur who's put in 20 years and just writes haphazardly" and "an SEO professional who uses Markov-generated text to juice links". They have started to select "human-curated" sources of knowledge to promote above search results, which has resulted in various instances of e.g. a political party's search results showing a parody image. They simply cannot evaluate trust without the data they initially harvested to make their billions, and without curation their algorithm will continue to fail.

hiram112 7y ago
> Google has not yet discovered how to automate "is this a quality link?" Google has so much more data than just the keywords and searches people make, it seems like this should be a problem they could solve. Through tracking cookies (e.g. Google Analytics) they should be able to follow a single user's session from start to finish, and they also should be able to 'rank' users in some vague way where they'd learn which users very rarely fall for ads or spend time on the sites that they know are BS. Those sites that are showing up on page 5 or 6 of the search results, but still get far more attention than others on the first few pages, could get ranked higher. But I don't think many of Google's problems these days are technical in nature. They're caused by the MBAs now having more power at Google than the techies, and thus increasing revenue is more important than accuracy.
- luckylion 7y ago
  Theoretically, they could do a lot of things, but plenty of those would get them in hot water from a regulatory standpoint. Also, don't underestimate the adversaries. Ranking well on Google means earning a lot of money. So much so, that I'd argue the SEO-people are making significantly more money than Google loses by having spammy SERPs. They will happily throw money at the problem and work around the filters. I don't think you can really select for quality by statistical measures. Google tried and massively threw "trust" at traditional media companies and "brands". The SEO-people responded by simply paying the media companies to host their content, and now they rank top 3, pay less than they did by buying links previously, and never get penalties.
- svieira 7y ago
  Nope, all they could do there would be to group people together based on their "search behavior graph". The problem of finding BS sites is in itself a "shirt without stripes"-level hard problem. That's why being able to rely on user curation is (was?) so important for Google. People didn't curate the internet at first for money, they did it because they were interested in the subject for which they were curating their web ring.
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  SEO would just pay people to surf bad sites on the web, in order to feed the data into Google’s engine. They already do this today for any venue where they can link “traffic volume” to “ranking increase without human review”.
ipsum2 7y ago
I disagree with your first point but agree with your second. Google obsoleted most webrings/directories because page rank was a better way of calculating a websites popularity. Then, websites figured out how to game page rank, and its been a gradual decline ever since.
- skywhopper 7y ago
  The point is that the web rings and directories were an important source of good PageRank input. By killing them off, Google basically clearcut all their resources and did nothing to replant, and now the web is becoming a desert where nothing can grow.
- eitland 7y ago
  HN keeps mentioning dark SEO and companies gaming the ranking. That might explain a lot but I don't think so. Just look to how they are messing up simple searches because of basic lack of quality controls: - Why doesn't doublequotes work anymore? Not because dark SEO vut because nobody cares. - Same goes for the verbatim option. - The last Android phone I liked was the Samsung SII, and last year I finally gave up and got the cheapest new iPhone I could get, an XR. My iPhone XR reliably does something my S3, S4, S7 Edge and at least one Samsung Note couldn't do: it just work as expected without unreasonable delays. - Ads. They seem to be optimized to fleece advertisers for pay-per-views because a good number of the ads I've seen are ridiculous, especially given that I had reported those ads a number of times. I guess what certain customers that probably paid a lot for those impressions would say if they knew that I had specifically tried to opt out from those ads and weren't in the target group anyway.
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
Google was good because they used to optimise to giving the best search results, that was their aim. Now their aim is best profit, it seems, and their results appear to correspond (keep you on site longer).
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  An interview with the founders of Google from 1999 offers a more nuanced view on this. https://www.kalemm.com/words/googles-first-steps/ https://www.kalemm.com/words/googles-first-steps/ Google's aim was to replace other sources of information with Google: > People make decisions based on information they find on the Web. So companies that are in-between people and their information are in a very powerful position Profit was on their minds from the very beginning: > There are a lot of benefits for us, aside from potential financial success. Revenue, however, was not urgent back then, to them or to their VCs: > Right now, we’re thinking about generating some revenue. We have a number of ways to doing that. One thing is we can put up some advertising. So over the past two decades, they executed a two-pronged approach: Become indispensable and Become profitable. But now they're trying to pivot from "at web search" to "at assisting human beings", and that's a much more difficult problem when their approach to "Become profitable" was to use algorithms rather than human beings. Here's a useful litmus test for whether Google has succeeded at that pivot: If you were in a foreign city and you suddenly wanted to propose marriage to your partner, would you trust Google Assistant to help you find a ring, make a dinner reservation, and ensure that the staff support the mood you want (Quiet or Loud, Private or Public)? If so, then Google's pivot has been successful.

hiram112 7y ago

> Google has not yet discovered how to automate "is this a quality link?" Google has so much more data than just the keywords and searches people make, it seems like this should be a problem they could solve. Through tracking cookies (e.g. Google Analytics) they should be able to follow a single user's session from start to finish, and they also should be able to 'rank' users in some vague way where they'd learn which users very rarely fall for ads or spend time on the sites that they know are BS. Those sites that are showing up on page 5 or 6 of the search results, but still get far more attention than others on the first few pages, could get ranked higher. But I don't think many of Google's problems these days are technical in nature. They're caused by the MBAs now having more power at Google than the techies, and thus increasing revenue is more important than accuracy.

luckylion 7y ago
Theoretically, they could do a lot of things, but plenty of those would get them in hot water from a regulatory standpoint. Also, don't underestimate the adversaries. Ranking well on Google means earning a lot of money. So much so, that I'd argue the SEO-people are making significantly more money than Google loses by having spammy SERPs. They will happily throw money at the problem and work around the filters. I don't think you can really select for quality by statistical measures. Google tried and massively threw "trust" at traditional media companies and "brands". The SEO-people responded by simply paying the media companies to host their content, and now they rank top 3, pay less than they did by buying links previously, and never get penalties.
svieira 7y ago
Nope, all they could do there would be to group people together based on their "search behavior graph". The problem of finding BS sites is in itself a "shirt without stripes"-level hard problem. That's why being able to rely on user curation is (was?) so important for Google. People didn't curate the internet at first for money, they did it because they were interested in the subject for which they were curating their web ring.
floatingatoll 7y ago
SEO would just pay people to surf bad sites on the web, in order to feed the data into Google’s engine. They already do this today for any venue where they can link “traffic volume” to “ranking increase without human review”.

ipsum2 7y ago

I disagree with your first point but agree with your second. Google obsoleted most webrings/directories because page rank was a better way of calculating a websites popularity. Then, websites figured out how to game page rank, and its been a gradual decline ever since.

skywhopper 7y ago
The point is that the web rings and directories were an important source of good PageRank input. By killing them off, Google basically clearcut all their resources and did nothing to replant, and now the web is becoming a desert where nothing can grow.
eitland 7y ago
HN keeps mentioning dark SEO and companies gaming the ranking. That might explain a lot but I don't think so. Just look to how they are messing up simple searches because of basic lack of quality controls: - Why doesn't doublequotes work anymore? Not because dark SEO vut because nobody cares. - Same goes for the verbatim option. - The last Android phone I liked was the Samsung SII, and last year I finally gave up and got the cheapest new iPhone I could get, an XR. My iPhone XR reliably does something my S3, S4, S7 Edge and at least one Samsung Note couldn't do: it just work as expected without unreasonable delays. - Ads. They seem to be optimized to fleece advertisers for pay-per-views because a good number of the ads I've seen are ridiculous, especially given that I had reported those ads a number of times. I guess what certain customers that probably paid a lot for those impressions would say if they knew that I had specifically tried to opt out from those ads and weren't in the target group anyway.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago

Google was good because they used to optimise to giving the best search results, that was their aim. Now their aim is best profit, it seems, and their results appear to correspond (keep you on site longer).

floatingatoll 7y ago
An interview with the founders of Google from 1999 offers a more nuanced view on this. https://www.kalemm.com/words/googles-first-steps/ https://www.kalemm.com/words/googles-first-steps/ Google's aim was to replace other sources of information with Google: > People make decisions based on information they find on the Web. So companies that are in-between people and their information are in a very powerful position Profit was on their minds from the very beginning: > There are a lot of benefits for us, aside from potential financial success. Revenue, however, was not urgent back then, to them or to their VCs: > Right now, we’re thinking about generating some revenue. We have a number of ways to doing that. One thing is we can put up some advertising. So over the past two decades, they executed a two-pronged approach: Become indispensable and Become profitable. But now they're trying to pivot from "at web search" to "at assisting human beings", and that's a much more difficult problem when their approach to "Become profitable" was to use algorithms rather than human beings. Here's a useful litmus test for whether Google has succeeded at that pivot: If you were in a foreign city and you suddenly wanted to propose marriage to your partner, would you trust Google Assistant to help you find a ring, make a dinner reservation, and ensure that the staff support the mood you want (Quiet or Loud, Private or Public)? If so, then Google's pivot has been successful.