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Comment by karterk | Hacker News Reader

Any algorithm is going to get gamed sooner or later. The biggest problem I've with Google ranking is this:

1. Everyone now knows that Google favors long content pieces which covers the topic in depth (what, why, when, etc.)

2. So an army of content marketing firms are writing 2000 word posts for simple topics that can be covered in 200 words.

3. As the user gets lost in the 2000 word article, trying to find what they really need, Google treats this as a positive "lots of time spent on page" signal and rewards this behavior further.

The result is people trying to now write 3000 word articles to "one up" the other already long posts dominating the first few results.

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What Google needs is to do is start taking explicit user feedback. If I click on something and it's a major waste of time, I want to be able to tell Google to never show me this result or the whole domain. Why can't I do this? They are happy to hoover all of my data in the name of "personalization", but there's zero way I can personalize the results myself without resorting to insecure 3rd party extensions.

Back in the early 2000s there was a browser toolbar from Google that allowed you to do exactly that. Maybe such a tool today would be too easy to abuse?

Indeed, why does Google not use their full stack? Other competitors have the problem that SEO agencies can flood the feedback with manipulated data. However, with Android, Google knows the identity of enough people that they can identify the genuine feedback.

There is already a search engine for feedback: Whaleslide.com [1] seems to let users curate content with collections. However, I haven't seen a link to a collection on their results pages.

[1] https://whaleslide.com/info/collections

*edit:

also: https://ninfex.com

>There is no crawler, our index is built solely by users submitting interesting and useful links. There is no complex search algorithm.

> Why can't I do this?

You can answer this yourself: just think about whether Google is incentivised by the quality of search results, or by something else.

That is the main value proposition for the new search engine https://kagi.com/ Each result has a menu to block or boost the domain, to remove SEO spam, and pin relevant domains (the online documentation for that framework that always ranks below stackoverflow) to the top. So far I am loving it.

This would be fine on a per user basis, but if your "downvote" informs baseline results, it can also be gamed, with people burying each others' sites by sending malicious negative signals to google about them.

>The result is people trying to now write 3000 word articles to "one up" the other already long posts dominating the first few results.

It's like youtube clips of type "10 Best XYZ for beginners" which take 30 minutes while 1 minute is more than enough. Content dilution at its best.

I nearly wept when I looked up some video editing techniques for Shotcut, and saw some from a channel with titles like "Fade in/out Audio in Shotcut in 1min" and the length of the vid was genuinely 1:08 or something.

So many tutorials on Youtube are front-loaded with a long ad advertising the creator's paid courses.

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