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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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