Comment by jedwhite | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedwhite | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There have been many interesting threads recently about the decline of Google's search quality here on HN. There's zero doubt search results are getting worse, and that ads and spam are the cause. But Google's financial performance has been going from record to record. So there is a huge disconnect building in the market.

Each thread has had some common themes, but what's surprising is how different the problems discussed are. Here are a few of the best recent discussions:

Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories (twitter.com/mwseibel):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136

Search engines and SEO spam (twitter.com/paulg):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29782186

Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794372

DuckDuckGo Traffic - with spam discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29852783

Is Google Search Deteriorating?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29886423

Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30031672

Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30130535

For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30213110

Disclaimer: I'm working on a search startup, so I have a clear bias, but one of the main reasons I am working on a search startup is because Google's results are clearly getting worse.

The weird thing about these is that they blame Google's search results on spam. I work in SEO and I can tell you that they are much better at ignoring spam than they were in 2010, where a lot of these people quoted still have their heads at regarding SEO.

What's been going on at Google is reliance on neural nets to take care of various ranking algorithm tasks. We want better keyword matching to generate results, but Google is developing ways to match query vectors to document vectors using stuff like BERT. Google is looking at the knowledge graph of entities that emerges out of the content we write and is trying to figure out which relationships between entities are important to a query and which result set has the best coverage and diversity. This incentivizes publishers to write a lot of text that covers multiple related topics and bury the point inside of it.

The other major shift in Google is how they consider links. PageRank is still around in some form, but there could be other link-based algorithms that serve similar purposes. The last few years of core algorithm updates put a lot of importance on receiving links from news websites for any keyword with commercial intent. If you want to rank, go hard on public relations.

The result is a real loss of accuracy and a lot more false positives that are semi-related to the query.

>This incentivizes publishers to write a lot of text that covers multiple related topics

Is it accurate to call organisations that write text according to google's incentives 'publishers' or are they merely spammers trying to maximise their pageviews and conversions?

Yup. IMHO spam has become so good at mimicking genuine content, it's hard to recognize even for a human curator. There's so many websites in the top google results that I'm sure are entirely AI generated, which exist for the sole purpose to propagate affiliate links and ads.

Yes. It's like the results when people realized you could have a classifier trained to match a person's face, reversed to generate a new face based on the classifier. There are a few extra steps, but the web is just recipe sites and product reviews that look like what the google ranking algorithms idealized site looks like.

I wish you great luck and success. This just seems part of a long cycle to me (of course, the older I get, the more everything seems like a long cycle).

Google wasn’t the first search engine, and I expect it won’t be the last. Page Rank redefined search, and now that results are 95% advertising-driven, the underlying “search algorithm” means nothing at all. Someone with a “new” algo that isn’t so completely ad-driven (until they too succumb to the only existing model for revenue) could un-seat the giant, at least maybe in search.

This is the curse of the advertising model for all things. Though it can make a lot of money for a good long time.

Thank you! I think there are alternatives to ads that are worth trying.

A freemium model is viable. You can't have ads or ad-tech tracking, or you just end up another Google. But you can have free anonymous use, and paid pro or business plans (API use etc). And referral link attribution can be done anonymously and with no commercial influence on search results.

I also think you have to share any revenue with the people actually making content fairly. That's one of the worst things about Google, and it's one of the reasons the entire media landscape has become an ad-tech nightmare, because Google and Facebook take the lion's share of digital revenue.

It's worth trying other approaches. Ads are a corrupting influence. If you don't say a hard no to them, they eventually take over.

> until they too succumb to the only existing model for revenue

But it's not - if you're happy with your potential userbase being O(millions) instead of O(billions), charging for your service is completely fine.

> But Google's financial performance has been going from record to record. So there is a huge disconnect building in the market.

Of course. I used to get one ad on YouTube from time to another. Now for every 3 minutes videos, I have two forced ads at start and one ad at the end. Heck, the other day, I got an ad inside a 2 minutes video. The fall is going to be legendary.

I pay for YouTube premium and haven’t seen an ad the entire time. It’s worth $12 a month to me. Also get music streaming with it.

I think that Google tweaking prices until they find the most profitable ratio of ads-in-youtube to subscription-cost-of-ad-free-youtube is going to be at worst a slight dip. Certainly not a "legendary fall"

Tell HN: Google returning 'Untitled' results that redirect to malware/spam https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30117388

Still ongoing for me, not as bad, but an example from a couple weeks ago:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11O1_awYptJ9mKzn-w9T45fpNPj4...

I’m glad more and more people, from both here and on Reddit (similar discussions appear sporadically) are beginning to notice. I actually have most of these links already favorited haha.

I hope your startup pans out well. Thanks for doing your part to make the internet less terrible!

Hey thank you. I think one of the good things to come out of Google's decline is that there are now a lot more people working on the problem of search again. There is also the possible if faint promise of a different economic model for funding content online than advertising starting to show on the horizon, with a lot of the ideas around web3. Ad-tech truly does make the whole Internet awful.

Isn't strong financial performance what's masking slow decline in quality, then when competitors take marketshare everyone in Google would be pikachu face.

In the new economy, the numbers don't matter - only perceptions. Line goes up!

I'm always interested what people make or do, do you have some sort of link?

I didn't want to hijack the thread for self-promotion, but it is linked from my HN profile, and thank you for asking!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com