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Comment by pixelgeek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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