Comment by zipy124 2 days ago
Honestly the biggest failing is just SEO spam sites got too good at defeating the algorithm. The amount of bloody listicles or quora nonsense or backlink farming websties that come up in search is crazy.
Certainly seems that way if you observed the waves of usability Google search underwent in the first 15 years. There was several distinct cycles where the results were great, then garbage, then great again. They would be flooded with SEO spam, then they would tweak and penalize the SEO spam heavily, then SEO would catch up.
The funny thing is that it seems like when they gave up it wasn't because some new advancement in the arms race. It was well before LLMs hit the scene. The SEO spam was still incredibly obvious to a human reader. Really seems like some data-driven approach demonstrated that surrendering on this front led to increased ad revenue.
Sites like Credit Karma / NerdWallet exist. While I think they are rife with affiliate link nonsense and paid promotion masquerading as advice, I'm also pretty sure they have paid researchers and writers generating genuine content. Not sure that quite falls into the bucket of SEO blogspam.
I had a coworker who kept up a blog about random purchases she’d made, where she would earn some money via affiliate links. I thought it was horrendously boring and weird, and the money made was basically pocket change, but she seemed to enjoy it. You might be surprised, people write about all sorts of things.
People used to do it early internet before affiliate marketing really took it over. Certainly it was more genuine and products were bemoaned for their compromises in one dimension as much as praised for their performance in another. Everything is a glowing review now and comparisons are therefore meaningless.
This is bullshit the search engines want you to believe. It's trivial to detect sites that "defeat" the algorithm; you simply detect their incentives (ads/affiliate links) instead.
Problem is that no mainstream search engine will do it because they happen to also be in the ad business and wouldn't want to reduce their own revenue stream.
Yes, this is true. It was revealed in Google emails released during antitrust hearings. Google absolutely made a deliberate decision to enshittify their search results for short term gains.
Though maybe it's a long term gain. I know many normal (i.e. non-IT) people who've noticed the poor search results, yet they continue to use Google search.
I feel like google gave up the fight at some point. I think HN had some good articles that indicated that.