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"that heavily punishes presence of advertisements in a result." while that is pleasing to read at face value, it has two fundamental problems: 1. it's orthogon

by zeruch 4y ago

"that heavily punishes presence of advertisements in a result." while that is pleasing to read at face value, it has two fundamental problems: 1. it's orthogonal to relevance of content (semi-solvable algorithmically I suspect) 2. it's antithetical to Google's core business model (a lot tougher nut to crack)

fredophile 4y ago
> it's orthogonal to relevance of content I disagree. The way content is presented matters. Splitting an article into 4-6 pages and filling those pages with ads makes me not want to read that content. I'd much rather go somewhere that has the same text in a single page and only a few ads.
- beambot 4y ago
  What about playing 2-3 unskippable video ads before watching the actual content? Thus, Google should degrade YouTube search results as well!
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    The ideal search engine would show me the ad-free page first given otherwise identical quality. Of course Google will never do anything like that. That's why I'm hoping for an alternative search engine to do so.
ajmurmann 4y ago
> 1. it's orthogonal to relevance of content The entire point of my comment was that it's not orthogonal. The ads are what fuels the click bait and SEO-driven articles. Nobody for example would ever pay a subscription to a website that is just waffle filler. While stackoerflow has ads, it's much better in that regard to the SEO spam pages.
- kelnos 4y ago
  Aren't you contradicting yourself there? Stack Overflow is ad-supported, but is good. But you want search engines to penalize sites that have ads? I hate ads, but I don't think we should be focusing on them here. Some sites that have ads have garbage content, and some sites that have ads have useful content. Just... find the useful content, and return it in search results. I know "just" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there, but I don't think "has/does not have ads" is as important a signal to a search engine's algorithm as you think it is.

by zeruch 4y ago

fredophile 4y ago

> it's orthogonal to relevance of content I disagree. The way content is presented matters. Splitting an article into 4-6 pages and filling those pages with ads makes me not want to read that content. I'd much rather go somewhere that has the same text in a single page and only a few ads.

beambot 4y ago
What about playing 2-3 unskippable video ads before watching the actual content? Thus, Google should degrade YouTube search results as well!
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  The ideal search engine would show me the ad-free page first given otherwise identical quality. Of course Google will never do anything like that. That's why I'm hoping for an alternative search engine to do so.

ajmurmann 4y ago

> 1. it's orthogonal to relevance of content The entire point of my comment was that it's not orthogonal. The ads are what fuels the click bait and SEO-driven articles. Nobody for example would ever pay a subscription to a website that is just waffle filler. While stackoerflow has ads, it's much better in that regard to the SEO spam pages.

kelnos 4y ago
Aren't you contradicting yourself there? Stack Overflow is ad-supported, but is good. But you want search engines to penalize sites that have ads? I hate ads, but I don't think we should be focusing on them here. Some sites that have ads have garbage content, and some sites that have ads have useful content. Just... find the useful content, and return it in search results. I know "just" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there, but I don't think "has/does not have ads" is as important a signal to a search engine's algorithm as you think it is.