Comment by spiffworks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spiffworks | Hacker News Reader

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>What you don't realize is that since Google went IPO, it's not all about building an amazing search engine. It's a lot about revenues and net profits. There are lots of businessmen in charge who want to make lots of money quickly, and couldn't care less about the quality of the search results.

First of all, Google went public in 2004. I would like you to point me to a study showing the steady decline in quality since that time. Who are these 'lots of businessmen' you talk about? One of the complaints about Google has actually been that they prefer to have engineers in all sorts of roles including management.

Now, since you've gone all conspiracy theorist, I have a theory of my own, I hope you will excuse it. My theory is that the pro-Apple blogging community has gone ape-shit over a perceived threat to iOS from Google, and are now looking at them as 'The enemy', and this whole rash of blog posts maligning Google is part of a larger 'Death by a thousand paper cuts' strategy to make Google seem uncool, and therefore, as we all concur, dead. I also believe that said bloggers are in fact undercover employees of Apple who get paid by the number of times they mention Apple products in reviews of their competitors' products, but that's just me being nuts.

You seriously believe financial and strategical decisions are made by tech people at Google? That's just silly. Look at glassdoor. They have finance people, directors and executives of all kinds. They also have shareholders. Those are the people who make important decisions.

And then you call me a conspiracy theorist, immediately followed by a pretty insane conspiracy theory about Apple community. I'm not even an Apple fan.

First, let me just say sorry for the previous comment. Clearly, my attempt at humour fell flat. I never intended to imply that you were an apple fan or anything of the sort.

What I meant to say was that I've seen many reports which show a large percentage of executives at Google to be engineers and programmers, although I can't find a link right now. However, I seriously doubt that Google engineers would have gone along without revolt down a slippery slope as the one implied in the original article.

It doesn't matter whether our theories are right or not.

The facts are

1) Google search results are full of spam.

2) Many of the spam sites have been reported (I reported a few myself) and blogged/written about for years.

What can one conclude from that? I think there are 2 possible explanations

1) It's not in Google's financial interests

2) Google is failing at filtering spam

I doubt it's true, because simply banning the top 1000 spammy domains would cut more than 99% of the search spam. It's something that an intern can do.

If Google wants a pure algorithmic solution instead, well, good luck to them. I think until AI is smarter than humans, such solution doesn't exist. Spammers can always find loopholes in algorithms.

I doubt they are failing at spam, at least not in the common sense. My gmail account received 1000's of spam emails a week, and it's a rare for one to pass the filter, and even rarer for a genuine email to not.

It most likely a much simpler explanation: web results with content explicitly generated for a specific target search string is simply getting closer and closer to being actual genuine content, and thus harder and harder to differentiate and filter.

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