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Comment by math-dev | Hacker News Reader

Google is optimising for ad revenue.

Is it possible to take the google results and apply a domain score overlay on it to get rid of the spammy SEO sites? ie a community curated whitelist of sites that get preferential treatment

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Theyre optimizing for ad revenue by having their search results be good enough that ads are worth looking at.

For example, they may show a copy of stack overflow because it has more ads - for many users they will still click through and deem the copy site sufficient.

Same thing with other SEO sites that blatantly copy other websites

Stack Overflow has its own ads, it doesn’t appear to use Google. Why would they optimise for those clicks?

That’s the point - people are saying google is promoting the SEO sites that copy content from stack overflow and use googles ad system

Do you have any evidence of this? It would be a huge scandal if Google was found to be boosting organic SERP rankings/placement based on the site's use of Google Ads and I have no reason to believe this is true.

No evidence, just conjecture.

No ads are worth looking at.

If a person had the knowledge/skills to get a spammy SEO site to rank high in Google, they would likely have the knowledge/skills to manipulate a community curated whitelist/blacklist.

You could have a group of humans vote on whether sites can be included in the whitelist and a main criteria is that sites nexus to an actual human involvement. Could that work?

The search algo is just a community curated whitelist, it's just more efficient than a human maintained one, using more metrics and optimising for relevance instead of ban/don't ban a site.

The problem Google has now is either: it's algorithm is broken and it isn't showing relevant or quality results, or, maybe, the majority of the web is just trash and there are lots of relevant but very few "quality" results

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