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There is no technical reason, it's all about incentives. What Kagi and Marginalia do is fundamentally incompatible with Google's business model. The reason Goo

by jorams 3y ago

There is no technical reason, it's all about incentives. What Kagi and Marginalia do is fundamentally incompatible with Google's business model. The reason Google shows you search results is to serve you ads, but the presence and volume of ads is an inherently negative quality of those search results. So Google is incentivized to show you lower quality search results, as long as those results don't become so bad that you stop using the service. Endless terribly formatted clones of Stack Overflow or GitHub issues don't provide any value to the world, but they do show Google's ads, so they weren't banned from all results after the first person at Google noticed them. Empty results pages don't lead you to ads, but ad spam that doesn't answer your query does, so over the years the "no results" page has more and more been replaced with useless results. Some of us spend some mental energy looking at the SRP to determine they're useless, many more probably click the first result and are served ads. Google's founders knew this, wrote it into their paper, then ignored it and made it their business model anyway.

is_true 3y ago
Is it possible google added "revenue earned" as a ranking factor? I guess so. If market share starts to decrease we should see an improvement in results, the problem is that's gonna be too late.
avidiax 3y ago
There could be a technical reason. At this point, Google's search ranking algorithm is probably a pile of interrelated heuristics designed to maximize revenue without sacrificing quality too much. It would not be simple to integrate another algorithm in a revenue neutral way. The signals may be missing, and the new algorithm may overlap or interfere with several other rules, either negating or over promoting their effects.
- acdha 3y ago
  There’s some truth to this but Google has highly-ranked sites which stay above the sources they’re scraping for years. It’s hard to believe that the experience wouldn’t be better at almost no cost if they were quicker to ban those spam domains or let users do so.
sanitycheck 3y ago
Marissa Mayer has claimed that Google's ads actually increase search result quality, based on an accidentally long A/B test.. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ & Ctrl-F for "3 percent more" in the transcript. ...Although I think those results are open to some interpretation. Perhaps people who got ads did 3% more searches not because Google was so good, but because they got tricked into clicking an ad instead of a real result 3% of the time so had to come back and search again.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"Google's founders knew this, wrote it into their paper, then ignored it and made it their business model anyway." https://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf https://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
Ferret7446 3y ago
> The reason Google shows you search results is to serve you ads You could also say that the reason Google serves you ads is so it can show you search results.

by jorams 3y ago

is_true 3y ago

Is it possible google added "revenue earned" as a ranking factor? I guess so. If market share starts to decrease we should see an improvement in results, the problem is that's gonna be too late.

avidiax 3y ago

There could be a technical reason. At this point, Google's search ranking algorithm is probably a pile of interrelated heuristics designed to maximize revenue without sacrificing quality too much. It would not be simple to integrate another algorithm in a revenue neutral way. The signals may be missing, and the new algorithm may overlap or interfere with several other rules, either negating or over promoting their effects.

acdha 3y ago
There’s some truth to this but Google has highly-ranked sites which stay above the sources they’re scraping for years. It’s hard to believe that the experience wouldn’t be better at almost no cost if they were quicker to ban those spam domains or let users do so.

sanitycheck 3y ago

Marissa Mayer has claimed that Google's ads actually increase search result quality, based on an accidentally long A/B test.. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ & Ctrl-F for "3 percent more" in the transcript. ...Although I think those results are open to some interpretation. Perhaps people who got ads did 3% more searches not because Google was so good, but because they got tricked into clicking an ad instead of a real result 3% of the time so had to come back and search again.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"Google's founders knew this, wrote it into their paper, then ignored it and made it their business model anyway." https://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf https://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Ferret7446 3y ago

> The reason Google shows you search results is to serve you ads You could also say that the reason Google serves you ads is so it can show you search results.