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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

I'm often critical of Google's recent product quality but how much of the blame is really on Google?

There are no longer "organic" content on the internet, everything is produced by professionals that are guided by analytics and optimisation.

The social media is searchable by it's vendor but the content there is also optimised for metrics that often don't align well with qualities like accuracy.

Only at places like HN or Reddit there's some organic content in form of commentary. HN is kind of special IMHO as its probably optimised for reach to a specific audience and pays for itself that way, therefore it can be optimised for quality through content moderation.

The web is well optimised for monetisation. Unless someone finds a way to optimize it for some other qualities, I don't think that Google or any competition can do anything about it.

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> There are no longer "organic" content on the internet

There is plenty of "organic" content, probably more than ever before. But there is also 100x more junk and Google is no longer good at surfacing the right stuff. Even for something as seemingly obvious as github issues it will often prefer spammified versions of the same.

Everything is measured and optimised by some simple metrics like profit, growth, reach or fame as far as I am aware.

Can you give some examples of great, contemporary organic content that Google fails to surface?

Maybe not failing to surface, but definitely obscuring... Stack Overflow?

The fact that Google is showing these blatant scam sites that mirror questions is absolutely mind boggling to me. You'd think Google would just manually derank them for being absolute garbage. At best they're horribly mangled versions of the real site, at worst they're portals for malware infested ads.

> spammified versions of the same

Seriously. What's up with these websites that are copies of Github/stackoverflow with a different UI? Cash grab for ad pennies?

I've wondered this too, sometimes I land on one without ads and its a very high turnover, it's almost like there's a college course out there with the final project: "scrape and clone stackoverflow, grades will be proportional to web traffic you capture"

> Cash grab for ad pennies?

It costs almost nothing to run a crawler and host these mostly static clone pages. So yeah, if there is a $100 profit in this, someone will do it. Keep in mind there are still plenty of countries out there where the average wage is well bellow $1k. For many people, the "ad pennies" are worth it.

I don't understand why Google's engineers haven't figured out a solution to these. Other search engines, like Bing, do a better job.

It can't be that they don't see the problem themselves. I have trouble believing they're OK working on such a shoddy product or that they're told to leave it so shoddy (when they could probably work anywhere else). Maybe there is some technical challenge I'm missing.

I'm pretty sure there is less organic content in proportion today than before, first because monetization wasn't in fashion, it was less common/accessible, but also because people who make organic content are fighting with SEO focused people who monopolize attention time / steal & rewrite organic content very efficiently. Less people viewing your organic content = less motivation to spend time on it.

If only we could send all these money obsessed intermediaries & creators to an island somewhere, left to scalp & scam & plagiarize each other out.

HN is a special kind of job board to steer people towards YC companies. You can tell this is the case because they regularly post job openings at YC companies that have comments disabled on the front page. Is this form of advertising bad? I don’t think so, but it’s good to recognize that there is a transaction here.

> There are no longer "organic" content on the internet...

There are billions of people on the internet. The likelihood that this is true is miniscule. Sure, it's probably smaller than it used to be, seeing as most people not in it for some commercial reason use silos to publish instead of their own websites, but if it looks like there's no organic results anymore, it's probably because your search engine isn't ranking organic results, because the websites are out there.

> There are no longer "organic" content on the internet, everything is produced by professionals that are guided by analytics and optimisation.

Then you detect commercial content and downrank it. Ads or the aforementioned analytics should be included in ranking signals to prioritize websites without them.

And then the partner manager raises hell about how you downranked their client, and it gets escalated, two VP's enter a room, one VP leaves and the penalty is quietly removed.

Of course, for such a search engine to be viable the only "partners" need to be the paying users.

Indeed. I suspect that, despite the sensibilities of the average HN’er, Google’s metrics tell them these garbage results are actually satisfying the average user more than results that alternative weightings would produce.

Yeah, but their metrics probably suck.

So do mine of course, and so do yours. Metric design is a hard, hard problem.

I've come to the conclusion that I should keep secret metrics from people so that they aren't captured by Goodhardt's law, but apart from the ethical implications, I haven't managed to implement this anywhere yet.

One metric I started to use is the amount of stuff on a webpage blocked by ublock adblocker. The higher the number displayed by the unlock icon, the worse I expect the content to be.

It is an ironic if not sad fact of this global system. It's become its own metric with all the bias and larsen you can think of.

Google is not really fighting the political version of search results either. One visually obvious comparison is the searches for "happy black family" vs "happy white family". With such clearly politically adjusted search results, how much do you trust your search for "is the coronavirus vaccine safe?"

What is the difference for you? I get "happy family" stock photos of either all white or all black skin color for both queries. The only difference is that there are like 10x more "happy black family" hits.

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