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I'm advocating for a ranking algorithm aligned to the benefit to the users, instead of the marketers. I think you're not appreciating Google's ranking algorithm

I'm advocating for a ranking algorithm aligned to the benefit to the users, instead of the marketers. I think you're not appreciating Google's ranking algorithms lending a hand to the popularity of SEO. Their rankings are certainly not objective. As for "far too valuable of a piece of real estate"... I feel like that's an unimaginative view trapped in the commercial state that we're in. Perhaps if Google had beat Wikipedia to online encyclopedias, but had pumped theirs with ads, we'd be saying the same thing about the far too valuable real estate of online information.

jaspax 6y ago
I don't think that an algorithm "designed to the benefit of the users" is nearly as straightforward as you think it is. We didn't get into the current situation because Google deliberately chose to make their algorithm friendly to marketers; we got here because marketers competed with each other to rank up in search results, effectively reverse-engineering Google's algorithm in an effort to exploit it. This would happen to any search algorithm that was widely adopted enough that marketers started trying to optimise for it. (Google has deliberately slanted their news results towards mainstream sources in an attempt to suppress political messaging that they consider unacceptable, but it's not clear whether this is having an impact on the specific problem of commercial results drowning out other sources.)
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > We didn't get into the current situation because Google deliberately chose to make their algorithm friendly to marketers. This isn't quite true. Google has changed its search results in recent years to cut out content from more than a decade or so ago. You can no longer find the content even if you search for the exact strings in the website. If you have your own old site, it is easy to see from the logs that the Google Bot is still crawling the old pages, it just doesn't index them any more. There are many instances where the most relevant content to return for a search would be from a website from the early millennium, but Google refuses to show that, while Google will show a big commercial website from more recent times even if the result is less relevant to the query.
  - jaspax 6y ago
    Good point; this is in addition to their other missteps and contributes to the problem. The early web was less commercial, so phasing out old results pushes ever harder for commercial results over others.

jaspax 6y ago

I don't think that an algorithm "designed to the benefit of the users" is nearly as straightforward as you think it is. We didn't get into the current situation because Google deliberately chose to make their algorithm friendly to marketers; we got here because marketers competed with each other to rank up in search results, effectively reverse-engineering Google's algorithm in an effort to exploit it. This would happen to any search algorithm that was widely adopted enough that marketers started trying to optimise for it. (Google has deliberately slanted their news results towards mainstream sources in an attempt to suppress political messaging that they consider unacceptable, but it's not clear whether this is having an impact on the specific problem of commercial results drowning out other sources.)

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> We didn't get into the current situation because Google deliberately chose to make their algorithm friendly to marketers. This isn't quite true. Google has changed its search results in recent years to cut out content from more than a decade or so ago. You can no longer find the content even if you search for the exact strings in the website. If you have your own old site, it is easy to see from the logs that the Google Bot is still crawling the old pages, it just doesn't index them any more. There are many instances where the most relevant content to return for a search would be from a website from the early millennium, but Google refuses to show that, while Google will show a big commercial website from more recent times even if the result is less relevant to the query.
- jaspax 6y ago
  Good point; this is in addition to their other missteps and contributes to the problem. The early web was less commercial, so phasing out old results pushes ever harder for commercial results over others.