> I almost certainly would not have said that everyone “who tried to rank higher by messing with the algorithm would be blocked.” That’s not a direct quote, but

> I almost certainly would not have said that everyone “who tried to rank higher by messing with the algorithm would be blocked.” That’s not a direct quote, but it also doesn’t make sense as a paraphrase. > We have ranking systems that largely do not “block” content. They look to reward good content and show it highly in results; lower-quality content drops. Even with actual spam, it’s unusual that we’d literally “block” an entire site. It just isn’t likely to rank well for general queries that aren’t somehow very specific to it. This, to me, is the fundamental problem that is ruining Google search results. There are many many sites that absolutely should be completely blocked. But Google will never block or downrank those sites because those sites are their golden goose. We've all done a search with a programming question, expecting the top result to either be the official documentation or Stack Overflow. Instead, we get a content farm site that has either stolen, or ML-generated, the answers from other sites that were actually responsible for crafting the content in the first place. You know the sites, I don't have to name them here. These content farm sites not only stole their content, but they are very unpleasant to visit. Sure, they may load fast. They may have the content you searched for. But they also have ads. Lots of ads. They also have ad blocker blockers. And they have little pop-ups that ask you to subscribe to the newsletter. Those sorts of things make a site unpleasant to visit. Those are the sorts of things that should make a site get heavily downranked, or completely blocked. No matter what content such a site has, a human doesn't want to suffer through the experience of going to that site. But Google can't do that. Those sites are their golden goose. Those sites are serving up ads powered by Google. If Google downranks sites that are a bad unpleasant ad-filled user experience, and upranks ad-free wonderful web sites, they're hosed. All those ad impressions their customers paid for will never happen if traffic to ad-laden web sites plummets. TL;DR: The ideal search engine would only allow a site to show up in a search result if that site was completely free of all ads, trackers, paywalls, pop-ups, or any other unpleasant similar thing. The entire rest of the web would be de-indexed. A search engine that itself is paid for by ads can never do that.