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Comment by herhor | Hacker News Reader

It might not only be the search engine's fault. Another reason might just be that the amount of shitty content is growing exponentially...

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Another reader quoting a passage from Neal Stephenson's Anathem about crap on the Reticulum:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/01/the-follower-factory/#comme...

But this is the point of the algs, to sift through the crap and give you relevant search results.

I don't think the internet has changed that much in the last year or so. If that's true, then it must be alg changes or that content creators have figured out how to beat the algs.

I'm guessing it's the algs, since quoting every single word I want to search for is usually the only way to get reasonable results.

Exactly. Even if the internet is to blame, this is a moving window. Good yesterday doesn't mean good today, and keeping up with that is needed to be considered "good".

Or the incentive to create quality content has diminished since it's become much harder to monetize?

Was it ever easier to monetize? AFAIR good content was always free. If content is created only out of monetary incentive it's rarely good.

Yeah, fair point.

That's an excellent point for searches on new things. But for things that had a lot of existing content, I also find them more and more drowned out.

I think the reason is that Google rewards following it's instructions for mobile, security, etc, and existing quality content is often kept online merely as a donation to the public. Having the incentives of a spammer and following through on every rumored 2% rank improvement is almost a requirement to get near the top results.

I really hope someone working on Google's search algs thinks about this. So, so many incredible sources of information are found on un-optimized pages.

I'd go so far as to say that an optimized page is often an indicia of low quality / unoriginal content.

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