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Google created this problem by slurping up all advertising money from open web activity for themselves. The more market share of online display advertising the

Google created this problem by slurping up all advertising money from open web activity for themselves. The more market share of online display advertising they gained, the worse their results got. Why? Because the only way to have a large volume of authentic content being produced at scale is to have a healthy ecosystem of independent sites that are profitable based on display ads. As much as HN-types hate advertising, it was literally the only thing that made the web of yesteryear so special. Things like Adsense enabled blogs on tons of niche topics to be monetized and thus we had better open web content. When Google decided there was more money to be made off ads before you even clicked on a search result, that ironically was what ended up killing search. Now the only way to monetize content from search is via shill company blogs, affiliate marketing listicles (10 best dog toys), etc. So that’s what we get. For example, if there was a passionate person creating authentic, amazing content about dogs, they wouldn’t even crack page 1 on any search for dog toys no matter how good their content is.

mrkramer 3y ago
>For example, if there was a passionate person creating authentic, amazing content about dogs, they wouldn’t even crack page 1 on any search for dog toys no matter how good their content is. So basically the problem of search engines and Google in particular is discovery. All early Google adapters say that they loved Google because it gave them relevant results and because they discovered new websites on Google. Nowadays they "discover" SEO spam, ads and the usual suspects like the most popular sites in that search category. That's why we need "discovery engine" for Web, something like TikTok but adapted to Web. If search engines were the evolution of web directories, we need to think about how we can evolve search engines.

mrkramer 3y ago

>For example, if there was a passionate person creating authentic, amazing content about dogs, they wouldn’t even crack page 1 on any search for dog toys no matter how good their content is. So basically the problem of search engines and Google in particular is discovery. All early Google adapters say that they loved Google because it gave them relevant results and because they discovered new websites on Google. Nowadays they "discover" SEO spam, ads and the usual suspects like the most popular sites in that search category. That's why we need "discovery engine" for Web, something like TikTok but adapted to Web. If search engines were the evolution of web directories, we need to think about how we can evolve search engines.