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Given that Google owns Chrome, the most used browser by a wide margin, I am surprised they don't leverage this to improve their search results. The consensus s

Given that Google owns Chrome, the most used browser by a wide margin, I am surprised they don't leverage this to improve their search results. The consensus seems to be that SEO has won, that experts are stuffing websites with keywords and the search engines are simply unable to figure out what is good content anymore. So why not use your own browser to measure how people interact with a website? How long do they stay on it? Do they just scroll and exit immediately? Do they seem to have a hard time finding information? Maybe randomly ask people if a website is helpful or not from time to time. Then aggregate that info and score a website. This should cut down on website that have nothing but fluff.

bad_user 3y ago
If you enable synchronization, even with encryption enabled, by default Chrome shares your browsing history with the purpose of "improving search". The opt-out option is right there in Chrome's settings, which is really creepy actually.
xerox13ster 3y ago
They don't need to abuse their control of the browser to do this. They were capable of and were inferring this info from people's visits to/from Google to determine whether a page was useful or not. The problem is that SEO outfits gamified that metric as well. The idea of determining whether a site is useful based on how long the user stayed on it only served to cause sites to hide information halfway down the page. That idea is THE CAUSE of the meme about recipe sites telling you how your long-dead great-great-great grandma wrote this recipe for a special event and how it has become a family staple and some of the ingredients might not exist anymore in the same way they did, before they get around to giving you the recipe. Recipe sites were HUGE in the heyday of the DotCom boom and the only way to get your page to rank higher than every other online cookbook was to capture people's attention with a story before showing them what they came there for. If they can just get what they came for and leave, you got downranked as not a useful site.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  And now many recipe sites have a link to skip to the recipe, so it's becoming unclear what the benefit is.
  - orev 3y ago
    The benefit is that the site gets to serve all the backstory to the search engine crawler to boost the ranking, while real people can go right to the recipe.
- dataviz1000 3y ago
  It might have to do with recipes like fasion not being copyright therefore easily copied.
- josefritz 3y ago
  That's correct. Even under CCPA analysis of anonymous aggregate data is consisted a legitimate use and not really a risk to PII.
ajkjk 3y ago
> I am surprised they don't leverage this to improve their search results. Oh. Um. Well, hypothetically, maybe they do but the metric they're optimizing is their profit instead of user-facing quality? I just assumed that everyone already knew this. Of course Google could fix their results. They want them this way.
mpalmer 3y ago
I have to think that ad revenue is the prime metric, and Google is loath to change search non trivially to improve UX according to the measures you list. Read the emails released in the recent antitrust suit and you'll see intense pressure not to make changes to search, or even to Chrome flows that drive users to Google search results. Bottom line, if ads is performing, what incentive is there to change?

bad_user 3y ago

If you enable synchronization, even with encryption enabled, by default Chrome shares your browsing history with the purpose of "improving search". The opt-out option is right there in Chrome's settings, which is really creepy actually.

xerox13ster 3y ago

They don't need to abuse their control of the browser to do this. They were capable of and were inferring this info from people's visits to/from Google to determine whether a page was useful or not. The problem is that SEO outfits gamified that metric as well. The idea of determining whether a site is useful based on how long the user stayed on it only served to cause sites to hide information halfway down the page. That idea is THE CAUSE of the meme about recipe sites telling you how your long-dead great-great-great grandma wrote this recipe for a special event and how it has become a family staple and some of the ingredients might not exist anymore in the same way they did, before they get around to giving you the recipe. Recipe sites were HUGE in the heyday of the DotCom boom and the only way to get your page to rank higher than every other online cookbook was to capture people's attention with a story before showing them what they came there for. If they can just get what they came for and leave, you got downranked as not a useful site.

BobaFloutist 3y ago
And now many recipe sites have a link to skip to the recipe, so it's becoming unclear what the benefit is.
- orev 3y ago
  The benefit is that the site gets to serve all the backstory to the search engine crawler to boost the ranking, while real people can go right to the recipe.
dataviz1000 3y ago
It might have to do with recipes like fasion not being copyright therefore easily copied.
josefritz 3y ago
That's correct. Even under CCPA analysis of anonymous aggregate data is consisted a legitimate use and not really a risk to PII.

ajkjk 3y ago

> I am surprised they don't leverage this to improve their search results. Oh. Um. Well, hypothetically, maybe they do but the metric they're optimizing is their profit instead of user-facing quality? I just assumed that everyone already knew this. Of course Google could fix their results. They want them this way.

mpalmer 3y ago

I have to think that ad revenue is the prime metric, and Google is loath to change search non trivially to improve UX according to the measures you list. Read the emails released in the recent antitrust suit and you'll see intense pressure not to make changes to search, or even to Chrome flows that drive users to Google search results. Bottom line, if ads is performing, what incentive is there to change?