4 ms·
Some curious misconceptions here about how the search industry works. There's a very strong financial incentive for ad-powered search engines to keep SEO spam
by cbsmith 1y ago
Some curious misconceptions here about how the search industry works.
There's a very strong financial incentive for ad-powered search engines to keep SEO spam out of search results, because that makes advertisers more willing to pay for search placement. A publicly run search engine would not have those incentives and would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the commons" type scenario where the engine is overtaken with spam.
Yes, there are perverse incentives to populate search engine results with paid placements, but the best corrective force I can think of is having more competition in the search space. As long as people are willing to try other search engines (spoiler: for the most part, they are currently not), this creates a strong incentive to ensure that paid placements that harm the search experience are kept to a minimum.
...and I think the concerns about profitability of the LLM space is completely missing the larger agenda. Even if public use of OpenAI and its competitors NEVER TURNS A PROFIT, there is tremendous economic opportunity that investors expect to realize from a company with intelligent/powerful LLMs. That is why they are pumping so much money into these companies.
- nehal3m 1y agoThis reeks of “communism is when capitalism” to me, because: >A publicly run search engine would not have those incentives and would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the commons" type scenario where the engine is overtaken with spam. But then how come that is exactly what is happening with modern search engines? It’s just always advertising that comes along and fucks up a good thing.
- hnbad 1y agoIf "the government" were to run Google Search, it would be bad because nobody cares about making it good because profit is the only motivating force for organizations. Because Google runs Google Search, it's instead only bad because profit motivates Google to push its services, increase ad impressions/interactions and incentivize users to not actually leave the search engine result page (e.g. by citing or summarizing content of the related web pages on the result page). And because competition is good that means Google actively competing with the sites it indexes for the attention of its users is a good thing even if those sites losing out and failing would result in worse search results over time. Hang on, maybe "content stealing" really already was a problem before LLMs made it their entire MO and those greedy newspaper publishers were onto something when they complained about Google lifting their news feeds even if it provided "exposure" for them.
- cbsmith 1y ago> But then how come that is exactly what is happening with modern search engines? ...because there are systemic forces driving this outcome, and those forces don't much care whether the company is a public service or a privately held one.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cess11 1y ago"There's a very strong financial incentive for ad-powered search engines to keep SEO spam out of search results" No. Shitty results keep people exposed to ads for longer, on average. 'A publicly run search engine would not have those incentives and would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the commons" type scenario where the engine is overtaken with spam.' You might be pleasantly surprised by the main work of the 2009 Nobel prize winner in economics, Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons.
- willvarfar 1y agoThis stopped being true when Google brought Doubleclick? Google gets money from sending users to ad-laden sites. They get to double-dip. If Google _didn't_ own Doubleclick etc, then there would be an incentive for them to prioritise content over content farms etc.