Looking at Google's search results, it's obvious that these tactics are rampant and really winning the war here.
We need a new search engine that cannot be gamed so easily. I know it's non trivial but the stakes are high as is the reward for making such.
This is a real engineering challenge. I'm excited about the problem space and opportunity.
Some smaller scope things can be made completely watertight, for example mathematically proven cryptography, but even that often leaks to government pressure.
So you mean a search engine that's 100% human curated? Or rather, a directory, it wouldn't really be a search engine.
Any algorithmic signal can be gamed. Although I'd be curious to hear how I'm wrong about that.
And Wikipedia, where power tipping super editors can control whatever they want.
Imagine if you could upvote/downvote Google search results, and got rewarded for being "right" or something...
A user-voted search engine is a good idea, I think.
Once upon a time, back in 1994, a startup used this idea as their first product. It was very popular, very useful. It was called Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web.
But, as the WWW grew insanely fast in the 1990s, the human approach couldn't keep up with the algorithms. Eventually it was abandoned.