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Yeah, about that... reread my entire post. >Metrics are a popularity contest and nerds just can't win a popularity contest. Even if Google SERPs are all garba

Yeah, about that... reread my entire post. >Metrics are a popularity contest and nerds just can't win a popularity contest. Even if Google SERPs are all garbage, they still win if most people are fine with garbage results. It doesn't matter if a loud minority of nerds bitch about it in their blogs and podcasts and research papers and hacker forums. Most people will still use Google and they will be "okay" with spammy results. I know this sounds crazy, but if spammy results weren't drawing real numbers, they wouldn't be a viable business model in first place.

ethbr1 3y ago
> I know this sounds crazy, but if spammy results weren't drawing real numbers, they wouldn't be a viable business model in first place. I would agree... in a competitive marketplace open to new entrants. I don't think we've had that after ~2010. Defaults or pushed adoption on dominant platforms are powerful. Look at Chrome adoption once Google started using the homepage to push it. So nowadays, I would say we can be stuck in a local optimum by virtue of marketing dollars and platform defaults/controls. Or to put it another way -- if Google delivered half as quality (by some objective metric) search results as a free version of Kagi -- do you honestly think search share (including mobile) would shift? And how long would that take?