Comment by graeme 13 hours ago
Very good article. Not clear to me why Google has let parasite SEO become so successful. Possibly they are starved of human generated content kept to a certain quality level. But it's very strange to see sites leveraging a legacy brand to expand far beyond their expertise. Forbes is the most prominent example.
Someone once described the state of mobile gaming on Android like this. Games that are good make less money. Games that are just good enough to get you to open them but are also just shitty enough that when you hit an ad in-game, you click on it and leave, make more money.
Google team has long given up its user’s needs for incremental revenue goals. See the 10 ads that come before any result
Nobody has come up with a scalable metric for determining quality that can't be appropriated by SEO. Pagerank was one of the best for awhile (number sites that link to your site, weighted by their rank). Whether it be clicks, time on page, percentage of people who clicked onto the page then ended the session, etc it all gets gamed.
Like it or not, it's what the people want. The "trashy" movies, books, music, etc. all sell like wildfire, why do most people on hn think that the internet should be any different?
Since there is no competition and people will keep using Google whatever happens, might as well push the ad-filled garbage site than the ad-free handwritten blogpost. The former probably makes them more money, everything else humanity holds dear be damned.
Complacency? Google has such a dominance in search that their name is used as a verb. Combine that with their culture of automating everything to an extreme degree. And the end result seems to be: search that is just good enough that people keep using it and requires little human fine tuning/curation making it cheap at scale.
It has to do with these old brands exploiting domain authority, plus buying tons of backlinks. Investopedia.com is another example of this. Google assigns too much weight to authority domains. Google doesn't actually penalize paid backlinks for old domains, I think.
Because Google makes money through all this. These move ads. That's all they care about at this stage. I had stated a few years back Google is dying. It will take a while and it's going to be painful but we will get over this soon. 20 years is a good run.
google search result can be shit and they will still make tons of money from 3rd party/publisher ads and youtube, cloud, gmail, atc.
On why Google allows bad quality results nowadays:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Also discussed on HN earlier
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976