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Comment by dageshi | Hacker News Reader

Google got rich finding the information you wanted.

And many here are too young to remember the hellscape of competing search engines predating Google: Infoseek, excite, yahoo, altavista, etc.

Their poor experience and dubious practices likely spawned Google's internal motto: "don't be evil"

>Their poor experience and dubious practices likely spawned Google's internal motto: "don't be evil"

Sure, I remember the bad ol' days. But Google has (IMHO) become the thing they set out to disrupt. The quality of Google results has declined dramatically in the last 5 years or so.

It's all marketing bullshit now, just as Altavista or whomever was. Finding content I want, as opposed to content advertisers want me to find, is becoming very difficult via Google.

You could argue that the quality of the web itself has declined in much the same way. SEO is a billion dollar industry with the singular goal of analyzing everything search engines do to push whatever crap they want to run ads on.

As Google is the market leader, every website is optimized for its ranking. Much like leading operating systems have the most malware issues.

Many people on HN complain that blogs and personal websites aren‘t prioritized in results anymore compared to bigger news sites. I imagine it‘s incredibly difficult to separate legitimate, trustworthy posts from useless blog spam and agenda/conspiracy-pushing crap in a reliable automated way.

I don't think Google has declined because the quality of the web has declined, I think Google has fostered laziness and a optimistic reliance on algorithms that has caused the quality of the web to decline.

In the early days, algorithmic search wasn't the only way you found stuff. Links had a lot more use, and people would spend time looking at, cataloguing, and grooming lists of resources.

This doesn't scale well if you want a one-second answer to any possible question, but the SEO-gamified Google world is far from perfect in that regard either.

Maybe we just need to give up on that "any answer to anything at your fingertips in one second" goal.

It was the same spammy environment when google started. But it was title/keyword spam. Google introduced pagerank and that made the search experience better. People tried to game that so google introduced 300 datapoints that change every few months.

Personal websites are mostly agenda pushing because they are personal. It might be that this good was fun or Dad got a sunburn but some agenda is being pushed.

But identifying blogs are easy that is how google can depriorize them easily. News sites are easy to identify as well. Assigning a qualities to news sites is a problem. What is trustworthy? What is legitimate? Who is the user using the service how do they define these?

metasearch.com was my bread and butter to mitigate that hellscape, though altavista was probably the best in the mid 90s. Ask Jeeves if I was feeling particularly sophisticated.

And the insight is that knowing what you want is as much about knowing you as it is about knowing what's on the internet.

Not really, no. That's not what they got paid for at least.

yes, they get paid to connect users to what they want to buy. They don't get paid anything for showing users something they don't want.

No, they got rich with good web search, then became dominant, then stopped doing good web search and started doing user intent targeting via payola search results.

And now they don't find it, because of bubbling and removal of "non authoritative sources" - whatever the fuck they decide those are this week.

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