I'm a current Googler, so yeah, I'm biased, but I work far away from search so I'm basically a plain consumer of it, and this is lazy thinking: "I’m pretty sur

I'm a current Googler, so yeah, I'm biased, but I work far away from search so I'm basically a plain consumer of it, and this is lazy thinking: "I’m pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search aren’t happy about the quality of results either. I’m wondering if this isn’t really a tech problem but the influence of some suit responsible for quarterly ad revenue increases." I'm pretty sure Google doesn't make enough money on third party sites to intentionally make its own search results worse. What's happening here is the ever-growing battle between search algorithms and SEO. Most of sites that he is complaining about are likely doing an incredible amount of optimizations for search engines and human psychology to show on search results pages and get people to click on them. They A/B test, within singe sites as well as run the same or slightly modified content through site networks. So sites optimize to get crappy filler content on Google, and Google changes to demote those sites and produce better results (which people still complain about). This is also the reason that it's not so simple to do better than Google. A new search engine also has to have an algorithm and presumably it'll share many of the same approaches that Google has used and have been gamed by content farms. If a search engine does come up with a break-though mechanism to separate the bad from the good, then either sites will adapt to that, and/or Google and other engines will adopt similar mechanisms too. And if a search engine somehow made an un-gamable algorithm, then that would be a pure good for humanity and go them. But also in these types of discussions you really need to bring receipts. Otherwise it's hard to talk about what's even good or bad. What terms did he search for? Which results were bad? What should have been there instead? I did a quick search for "hip replacement" and the results look great to me: top result from American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, a definition card, then Mayo Clinic, medlineplus.gov, Johns Hopkins, local MDs, new stories, images, WebMD, etc., and seemingly useful related searches like "What are the signs I need one"... Maybe that's just not a monetizable enough term. "quit smoking" should maybe turn up crappy help articles, but it's also pretty good. Two ads at the top this time, then CDC, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services, lung.org, local results, WebMD, etc.. Not that I don't believe the author, but he's certainly invested either directly or indirectly into companies working both sides of the SEO war, from search tech like Metaphor to algorithmic SEO like RankScience. So rather than trusting him that results are bad, it would help an honest discussion to point out examples.