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Google has two problems. One is that they're actually Doubleclick in a trenchcoat, and serving you relevant information isn't their goal. Serving you ads is. T

Google has two problems. One is that they're actually Doubleclick in a trenchcoat, and serving you relevant information isn't their goal. Serving you ads is. The other is Goodhart's Law: When a measure (being highly-ranked on google) becomes a target, it ceases to be an accurate measure. Pages now optimize for search as measured by Google. If Marginalia because the #1 search engine in the world tomorrow, I suspect SEO spam would start trying to beat it a few days later, and the results would be crap inside a month.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
> If Marginalia because the #1 search engine in the world tomorrow, I suspect SEO spam would start trying to beat it a few days later, and the results would be crap inside a month. This is only actually a problem if there is one big search engine. Monocultures of all varieties are vulnerable to specialization, this is as true in a country that grows nothing but wheat to a world where every computer runs Windows XP. If there would be two or three big search engines with conflicting means of evaluating a site, it would decimate the effectiveness of SEO. A lot of what I'm doing to find good results is promoting the sort of sites that Google rejects. While there are search engine optimized sites that aren't SEO spam, there is no SEO spam that isn't search engine optimized.