I never said it was useful.

But it used to work as advertised and you might actually get lucky if you tried.

In my opinion, it's not going to be as simple as someone outcompeting them at the existing game. It's that someone will beat them at the next iteration of the game, at a new paradigm of information discovery and distribution.

The analogue here is Microsoft losing its software dominance not due to a desktop competitor overthrowing them, but through failing to play the Web and mobile games as effectively as the new dominant players.

I don’t think it’s possible. SEO is targeted at google because that’s what the users use. If another engine became top, seo spammers would redesign around that.

It’s almost similar to how GANs work. Google tries to filter crap from content and the SEO spammers try to generate crap that is indistinguishable from content. And we settled at a point where seo spammers have won and their content looks like real valuable content but without real substance that ML can’t identify yet.

Let me very slightly push back: Google can't improve their search results without changing how they approach the problem. Now, it's Google, so the odds of them changing their approach is basically zero. But, it's my belief that for instance, a review team of 50 employees whose only job is to look at common searches and the results and hunt down ... let's call it low quality links... and manually blacklist them and pass aggregated results along to the machine learning teams that run the normal algorithm, could absolutely improve their quality. But, it's Google, and manual intervention is impossible (in their world view), so yes, in reality it will never be fixed.

There were days where seeing a unique doodle makes your day. And then one day you realized that there is an official page for all doodles and you spend a good time on it. Now it is just PR department yelling: we didn't forget it's international trans-women day etc.