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Comment by pupppet | Hacker News Reader

Really ticks me off that Google allows itself to be so easily gamed, it's your core business for christ's sake.

I used to work for a company that gamed Google like this, but with product search results (that were, themselves, CPC ads). The company got bought for scrap because Google got good at downranking their pages in search results and finally taking shopping seriously.

A lot has changed since then, but I doubt that Google has decided these kinds of content farms are suddenly OK. It should also give pause to people asking for "open ranking algorithms." Without some amount of secrecy, content farms will pop up for literally every keyword they can sell ads against, and they'll know how to rank more often rather than just blindly guessing.

It does give me pause, but do you really think there is no way to have both open algorithm and good results? What is users assessed sites as they used a search engine, and then this was broadcast back to the engine?

I have a feeling there is a way to introduce randomness to this search engine in a way that smooths out the game theoretic arms race of gaming an algorithm. This goes against our natural urge to have a fully deterministic algorithm which always brings the most pertinent sites right at the top. However, because humans are trying to bring order to things for their own benefit, throwing in chaos could prevent people from even trying to game the algorithm

Markets dont work when everyone knows what I am THINKING. i.e. If I know with 100% certainty you are going to buy something for 1$ I just bid 1.0001. Same with Google search. If I know with 100% certainty that you rank pages in a certain way, I can game them. Markets only work when all data is available but no all opinions.

Introducing random elements just makes it worse for everyone.

So why was google more effective before? Is this is product of the financial struggle of our society, or do you believe it is an inevitable consequence of a dominant search engine?

It is a lot more effective for me. I usually find what I am looking for in the first few results, there are flights, calculators, wiki pages, etc. So I disagree it has gotten worse.

The task of search has gotten exponentially harder as well. There are billions more website pages, more spam, more sophisticated attacks, more gaming of the system, etc. They could have gone from a 80% relevant result to a 99% relevant result and you perceive at 10% drop in relevancy. It's a hard problem.

Neural network weighting loops and adversarial inputs say yes, it is impossible.

No it isn't. Ads are their core business. Those crap sites almost all run ads from Google

That's a shortsighted view because it would imply that the quality of search doesn't have any bearing on their success. I highly doubt any Googler would agree with that. Especially not the ones who have been working on search specifically.

Extrapolating from an employee's feelings to the behavior of a huge public company is a terrible way to model reality.

This whole topic is extrapolating from people's feelings to the behaviour of a huge public company. I've not seen a single piece of actual data anywhere so far.

That's not what I did. I was implying that those who have a stake in Google's success also have a stake in their search quality.

> That's a shortsighted view because it would imply that the quality of search doesn't have any bearing on their success. I highly doubt any Googler would agree with that. Especially not the ones who have been working on search specifically.

Google is the goto search engine today, the competition is virtually non-existant, so they don't have to compete anymore. Hence the quality of their search engine going down hill, conflict of interests and what not. It's not shortsighted, it would take billions to compete with Google search and even Bing isn't even trying anymore.

When I look at a Google search page result today I see loads of ads, then their shopping stuff, image search stuff, a list of questions related or not to my search and their answers extracted from third party web pages, then only when I scroll 1 page I see actual search results. Google search wasn't like that 15 years ago.

Googlers are working so that Google makes more money, and Google is an ad company first and foremost.

But that's pretty much how Google pushed out the then popular search engines: with search quality and a minimalist UI. It would be irrational for them to stray away too much from that quality focus.

We have to assume that Google devs see these crappy spammy code websites too on a daily basis, right? What's up with the incredibly strong programmer culture over there, gone already after 20 years? You'd think someone would take these weak search results personally...

As someone who knows a handful of devs and hear their near daily grievances of google, it seems like the culture over there has died and it’s just a bog standard Big Corp(tm) now. By how they describe it, a lot of the people, (but not all of course), who deeply care about the ‘craft’ of development have retired or moved onto more interesting roles at newer and more exciting companies and were replaced by people whose main driving force is climbing the corporate ladder at a FAANG. As a result the perf cycles/promotions seem to be heavily based on high impact projects/launches, leaving the “little things” like bad search results or other maintenance work forever on the back burner, because working on those things won’t get you a promotion/more money.

Desktop web search is probably less the core business these days than making search work well on phones/mobile devices with specific applications, such as Maps, etc.

Why would they do that though? Why would they show you a low quality result if there was a better one available? I have pondered some of these sites as well. I think the answer is that they are actually helpful to some people.

I don't think they track 'quality' they just see people clicking and use that as a proxy for 'quality'. (Quoted because what does quality even mean?)

I seem to recall reading that they (used to?) track abandonment of the search results page as a successful answer to your question from the embedded page snippets or info boxes. So if you get a search result page that's complete garbage and just give up, they increase the ranking of those sites.

Businesses are profit seeking entities run by human beings who tend to prefer conservation of energy. If a business goal can be met with X effort, X+1 effort is a waste and the resources can be directed elsewhere or kept as profit.

Search hasn't been Google core business for decades, they're into selling advertisement spaces

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