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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking about this for years[1]. The truth is, what Google solved was parsing the search query, not identifying the best results. In fact, Google is not incentivized to give you the best results, they are designed to maximize their revenue, derived from getting you to view / click ads.

Google is not a search company, they are an advertising company. The more searches you make, the more revenue they make. Their goal is to quickly and often get you to search things. As long as you keep using their platform, the more you search the better.

[1] https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/

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The ‘Google is an advertising company’ is said often on HN. I agree to some extent but, doesn’t that imply that every newspaper company is also just an advertising company? Google solves a real problem and this works well, for them, with an advertising based revenue model. Do they compromise their search to that end? Probably. Do newspapers? Hopefully not, but maybe. To me, that doesn’t make them advertising companies. Apologies if this is pedantic.

> * but, doesn’t that imply that every newspaper company is also just an advertising company?*

Historically, at least, they sold subscriptions.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-i-have-...

Hsbc demanded The Telegraph pull negative stories or they would pull their advertising.

All newspapers are full of stories about property "investment" and have a separate segment one a week for paid advertising of property.

Subscriptions for the “modern newspaper” did not pay the bills, but were proof that people were actually reading the newspaper.

Prior to that there were papers which did indeed make their money from subscriptions. But their content was different as well: explicitly ideological and argumentative. The NYT or Wapo idea of neutral journalism was a later development.

According to this, the newspaper subscription only covered about 18%. The rest was from advertising.

https://idiallo.com/blog/we-never-paid-for-journalism

Of course they are. Page ads are probably as old as print. Most reviews are ads. Travel sections are ads. There are real estate sections, and classifieds as well. Perhaps the most honest reporting is found in the local sports section.

I used to work for a company that did product search. Search is hard. The original idea behind Page Rank was really insightful and made search a lot easier, at least until first SEO, then no one linking as much as they used to. The other trick Google figured out was good ML on query results, so all the popular queries have decent results. That sill leave you with search being hard.

Is it time for paid search engines? Make users vote with their wallets and pay for the eternal arms race. Problem is, whoever is behind something like that would have to start with an already sufficiently superior experience (or massive geek cred) to make people pay from the early days. Maybe going back to manually curated results of a subset of topics would work? Or some Stack Overflow-esque model of user powered metadata generation?

Probably not. The problem with current search engines is that they need some way to rank the pages and hence inherently susceptible to clever SEO (that curates pages to get ranked high for certain type of queries).

So having a paid search engine does not fully solve the SEO problem. Having no Ads does not takeout the SEO problem of boosting pages to top.

If the paid for search engine ignores SEO "optimizations" and actually ranks on content AND these results prove better that attracts actual paying users, then we don't have to wait for SEO to die. Just like SEO rose to prominence to win Google result ranking because that's where the users were, the sites would stop the SEO crap.

Getting this hypothetical site to get users is the real problem. Same thing with getting users to a Facebook alternative.

Simpler idea:

Paid search engine that ranks sites based on how often the users click results from that site (and didn't bounce, of course). The fact that it's paid prevents sybil attacks (or, at least, turns a sybil attack into a roundabout way of buying ads).

Of course, at this point, you are now the product even though you paid. But it's a tactic that worked for WoW for ages.

Google already includes clicks and bounces in its ranking factors.

No. Just because you pay for something doesn't mean you aren't also the product. The other ideas are specifically ones which failed. It didn't even work that well in the 90s. User metadata isn't even a solution in itself but an optimization layer at best.

I somehow doubt that all of Google’s internal decisions are as simple as “well we’re an ads company, let’s just not worry about search quality.”

Why do you doubt this? As a company in total, I believe that all decisions are made on "will this sell more ads". At the same time, I believe that some of the ideas from the software devs are born from doing something cool. It then gets rolled into "how can we use this new thing to sell more ads"?

Because search quality drives ads.

There were search engines around but when Google came out with superior search results everyone switched and those search engines quickly vanished. There are search engines in direct competition with Google today. If Google does not provide the best service there's an extremely low switching cost. Bing, Baidu, DuckDuckGo et al would be happy to take your traffic.

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