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I don’t think Google hides small sites as much as people are really good at SEO for Google specifically. Like my blog has literally 0 SEO and you’ll never find

by dartos 2y ago

I don’t think Google hides small sites as much as people are really good at SEO for Google specifically. Like my blog has literally 0 SEO and you’ll never find it, but a friend of mine has a blog where he does not post very often, but spends a lot of effort on SEO and it’s very easy to run into his blog. The SEO meta destroyed small blogs.

marginalia_nu 2y ago
It's impossible to say this is something they do, but it's worth noting that Google also has an economic incentive to mostly show commercial/ad-ridden results, as leading users to blogs with no adsense on them make them less money; so it would at least be in their interest to let the search results look like they do. To fully understand Google you need to look at them not as a service that brings websites to people, but directs people to websites.
- leephillips 2y ago
  “we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” -- Sergey Brin and Larry Page http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-search-engine-bias/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-search-e...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - marginalia_nu 2y ago
    Appendix A in this paper is a gem as well: http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
    - leephillips 2y ago
      Contains the quote above and “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.” So what we observe in the deterioration of Google search was predicted by its creators, who made the deliberate decision to let this happen by accepting advertising.
      - marginalia_nu 2y ago
        Google went public in 2004, after that I don't think any amount of founder idealism could have saved it from shareholder pressure. If anything it's remarkable they held out as long as they did.
      - philistine 2y ago
        It’s so unfortunate that no one inside Google is taking any decision to clearly make things worse. It’s simply the structure of their business that is fundamentally wrong, and their founders had correctly identified the problem right at the start.
- dartos 2y ago
  I think the game of SEO works in the favor of advertisers naturally. Google doesn’t need to downrank small sites, it just happens. Maybe it’s just semantics
  - marginalia_nu 2y ago
    It's not like it's impossible to combat search engine spam. The by far most effective tool is to just go after affiliate links and ad-heavy websites. Penalize those websites and 99% of the search engine spam vanishes. Though as noted, this is not in Google's economic interest to do.

by dartos 2y ago

marginalia_nu 2y ago

It's impossible to say this is something they do, but it's worth noting that Google also has an economic incentive to mostly show commercial/ad-ridden results, as leading users to blogs with no adsense on them make them less money; so it would at least be in their interest to let the search results look like they do. To fully understand Google you need to look at them not as a service that brings websites to people, but directs people to websites.

leephillips 2y ago
“we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” -- Sergey Brin and Larry Page http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-search-engine-bias/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-search-e...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  Appendix A in this paper is a gem as well: http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
  - leephillips 2y ago
    Contains the quote above and “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.” So what we observe in the deterioration of Google search was predicted by its creators, who made the deliberate decision to let this happen by accepting advertising.
    - marginalia_nu 2y ago
      Google went public in 2004, after that I don't think any amount of founder idealism could have saved it from shareholder pressure. If anything it's remarkable they held out as long as they did.
    - philistine 2y ago
      It’s so unfortunate that no one inside Google is taking any decision to clearly make things worse. It’s simply the structure of their business that is fundamentally wrong, and their founders had correctly identified the problem right at the start.
dartos 2y ago
I think the game of SEO works in the favor of advertisers naturally. Google doesn’t need to downrank small sites, it just happens. Maybe it’s just semantics
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  It's not like it's impossible to combat search engine spam. The by far most effective tool is to just go after affiliate links and ad-heavy websites. Penalize those websites and 99% of the search engine spam vanishes. Though as noted, this is not in Google's economic interest to do.