Comment by acdha

> Google has been playing the SEO cat and mouse game forever, so can startups with a fraction of the experience be expected to do any better at filtering the noise out of fresh web scrapes?

Google has been _monetizing_ the SEO game forever. They chose not to act against many notorious actors because the metric they optimize for is ad revenue and and those sites were loaded with ads. As long as advertisers didn’t stop buying, they didn’t feel much pressure to make big changes.

A smaller company without that inherent conflict of interest in its business model can do better because they work on a fundamentally different problem.