Comment by chemotaxis
Comment by chemotaxis a day ago
I think they do. The problem is different. It used to be that if you had a blog about something like guitar maintenance or linear algebra, that was enough to show up in the results, because no one else was directly competing with you.
Over time, a lot of companies figured out that if they start posting content-farmed articles on notionally non-commercial topics, this drives people to their website, so you ended up with billions of pages like this: thecleaningauthority . com/blog/how-to-clean/the-ultimate-guide-to-cleaning-pillows-and-pillo/ (remove spaces if you really want to).
And then LLMs brought down the marginal cost of cranking out content on any conceivable topic basically to zero, so you're all of sudden competing with 500 companies publishing spammy guitar maintenance advice. It's not that search engines want to show that stuff, but it's hard for them to tell.
I'm not sure whether we're disagreeing all that much. Your examples are of low-quality results. From a user's point of view, the one and only job of a search engine is to surface high-quality results, especially if it's hard for the engine to tell.
But the incentive for search engines to pick profitable results over quality results has only gotten stronger over time.
Just imagine a world where your one-person, part-time, labor-of-love guitar-maintenance blog were the top search result, simply because it had the best content. Democratizing access to information was the original promise of the web. I don't think we're there anymore, and I don't think it's correct to let search engines off the hook because their lucrative job has gotten harder.