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My understanding is that Google has an incentive to send people to content farms because those farms will show Google's ads. Stackoverflow doesn't. So they can
by lolc 3y ago
My understanding is that Google has an incentive to send people to content farms because those farms will show Google's ads. Stackoverflow doesn't. So they can increase ad exposure.
Thinking of it, it would be an interesting test to compare the ranking of two similar sites, one with google ads, another with ads from another provider. Might be good evidence for antitrust litigation. But what do you do if they just prefer sites with more ads? Because due to their market position, that benefits them, but it isn't anti-competitive against other ad-pushers.
- geysersam 3y agoMaybe you're correct. I've heard that explanation before but it just seems too incredible that they'd undermine their monopolistic global billion dollar business for a measly share of the revenue of geeks4geeks.
- permo-w 3y agothe way you phrase it there makes it sounds miniscule, but you scale that up to the size of the SEOified internet and the numbers are surely into the billions
- martin_a 3y agoI was thinking the same. Taking in consideration the vast amount of such SEO farms, there's surely a lot of ad money to be spend/earned if you prioritize the "right" sites.
- marcosdumay 3y agoLast time I saw, Google gets much more revenue from ads on search than from the entire 3rd party ecosystem.
- permo-w 3y agoa big number that's much smaller than a big number is still a big number
- rightbyte 3y agoGoogle is a self playing piano with clueless leadership. There is probably no plan involved. Just managers doing what they get more money for or devs hunting promotions by increasing ad revenue by 0.01% in the short term one sting at a time.
- arp242 3y agoI don't think it's an intentional decision anyone has taken, or that they intentionally made the search engine the way it works now, but more of a "there's nothing wrong here from out perspective, so what's there to fix?" kind of thing.