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Just like pretty much every other thing online Google (search) is constantly in danger of being run over by people acting in bad-faith to game the system. Of c
by shuntress 5y ago
Just like pretty much every other thing online Google (search) is constantly in danger of being run over by people acting in bad-faith to game the system.
Of course their actions have not been perfect but it is a mistake to say that their search would be better as a "plain old algorithm" no matter how well-engineered it is.
I'm certain that search results would be worse than they are now if the algorithm was just "grep but for the whole internet". Or that, in that case, the careful complexity necessary in each search to exclude all the SEO garbage would be unbearable.
- sph 5y agoEh, I don't know. There was spam but search was useful. Now there's still spam, and search is useless. Also, I don't think people remember how much interesting stuff is on the internet. There used to be tons of results from small sites of blogs which are still there, but not listed on Google anymore. Modern Google has made the internet incredibly smaller. Everything is still out there, hidden from our searches. It's like their algo has been tuned to favour silos, spam or content silos that is, to the detriment of the long tail of small, hobbyist websites with high signal-noise ratio.