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Comment by throw_m239339 | Hacker News Reader

> I began to notice some time ago that Google basically disregards my query, and fixates on the lowest common denominator.

Which is funny. Google beat other search engines in the early 2000 because it actually did find what people where looking for, not what the "search engine" wanted people to see.

Now it's more and more the latter, I imagine because it's more lucrative for Google to display the results advertisers pay for...

That's really the product of the lack of competition in the search space. Nothing more. Why should Google bother? It would take billions in VC for a competitor to truly threaten Google dominance on search.

Same with Youtube. Youtube straight out doesn't care anymore about search terms and will just show some results Youtube "cooked up" for the user, unbelievable...

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Consider also the possibility that they do want to deliver good results but their algorithms just passed their useful limit some time ago and people can game the system faster than they can improve the system, but there's too much money on the table to ever admit this in public.

This is the answer thats getting little attention. The SEO game didnt just give us hidden keywords, there are hundreds of millions of 'sites' and blogs for all these topics that are basically crap. Google can't tell the difference anymore. the majority of the internet is now mostly hidden (except during search) spam.

But I can tell the difference within a blink of an eye. There must be a way to train a ML model on „crappy seo“…

Surely they could just have a system to filter out bad sites?

For example, if I want information about some programming stuff, I only really want

* Wikipedia

* StackExchange

* MDN

* cpp-reference

* whatever official docs

There's absolutely no need to have

* geeksforgeeks

* w3schools

* cyberciti.biz

* random wordpress blogs

This takes all of 5 minutes to code, you could even have a userscript for it.

Google benefits from a chaotic and spam-filled ecosystem. At this point technology and network speed are at a point that anyone could re-code a Google if all they did was ignore 99.9% of the wesites out there that are crap and that Google (and Amazon and a few other spam-benefiters) had a hand in creating or promoting.

This is why Adwords has to go. It allowed Google to weaponize the collective man-power of the world to create and regurgitate new ad-space for Google to monetize. Ad-space that didn't exist, and doesn't need to exist.

uBlacklist exists

I have no problems with and frequently use w3schools. I also find tons of programming content on other sites where people post code they are working on or tips. I don't know that I've ever really referenced Wikipedia for anything programming. I normally just do a Stack Exchange site search through google. I feel like this is the only area where Google search is still decent, but anything after the first page, maybe second is like literally nonsense.

> it actually did find what people where looking for

I believe that is more a function of the web being less commercially relevant back then.

And every small and then massively growing online community goes through the same evolution:

While the community is small, commercial value is small enough, information is less tainted - and once it becomes big enough, the commercial value of that community becomes worthwhile to game.

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