The problem is really not that google is doing a bad job, it’s that the incentives to get views on pages ruins the internet.
Site offers extra paid content or services, or takes donations? Rank up. Ads? Neutral or rank down based on type of ads. Affiliate links? Rank way down.
Those are more and more the same person - especially when it comes to online ventures.
But this does not sustain the chocolate factory.
They're already pushing out content to replace it with more fucking ads!
There is legitimately nothing good about them. At all.
But I don't want to "consume content", I want to "get information". Most "content creators" don't provide any info. Or at best there is some info there but you have to watch an hour worth of video for the 20 useful seconds.
People who don't have enough intrinsic motivation to create regardless of financial reward probably aren't producing anything of value. That basically excludes every for profit website out there that would be "killed" by less monetization. Killing them off is a good thing.
If you put the cart (making money) before the horse (creating value) then you are not really a productive member of society. Takers are like irresponsible children, they take without any awareness of the ramifications their behavior has on society.
This kind of attitude is similar to colonialism, an attitude representative of most of commercial enterprises today. Givers give value knowing that when they give, they receive, without any need to unnaturally focus on the end result.
If you want to live in that world, you can today by running an adblocker. All major browsers enable you to use one. Even on mobile, vast majority of ads are easily defeated with a simple DNS-based blocking. I only see a handful of ads on Tik Tok and mobile Twitter. They're still mostly bad.
That misses the entire point: Google search results will still be manipulated to push those low quality results higher because even if you don't see the ads enough people do that investing in SEO is worth for those sites.
As long as there are any ads, the incentives stay the same. You're saying an internet completely free of monetary incentives would be better. I doubt that's true but it really doesn't matter, because it won't be happening.
So ‘How to unclog a toilet’ is always going to get SEO optimized spam. However, most topics don’t get that many views making them less viable for this business model.
That assumption is worth reconsidering. It may be that fewer ads would just be more expensive to run and would work out similarly revenue-wise in the long run. The value of lots of ads may be diversification and smoothing out revenue, not increasing net.
- to gather compressed information quickly
- to navigate the web
The first point is best served by sources that I like and trust, often authoritative to some degree. If they already have a good search (like MDN or Wikipedia) I will often use that directly or go via DDG: !mdn keyords..., !wiki keywords... If not, I type the name of the website as a keyword in front (like reddit...)
The second is really more about finding specific types of websites. For example John Smith's blog that I don't remember etc.
What I'm saying is that to fix the web, we need more sites that can act as the first point above. Whether they are wikis or not is more of a practical consideration. The point is that they don't suck and that there's not enough of them IMO.
I've found that a mix of search engines give me the best results, I'm trying my best to incentivize competition. If I want super local results anywhere outside the US, I'll use Google+uBlock because that's what it works, but everything else I use Kagi or DDG.
Or boost or even pin sites that I feel are extra valuable.
Back in the old days I had a txt-file on my desktop containing domains with a minus in front, llke -example.com -example.org for all the worst offenders, so that I could post them on the end of every contested search.
After a while I think Google found a way to ignore those as well as every other filter I had - at least I gave it up.
Well startpage has the same results as google, but i stopped using it for reasons I forgot.
What made you chose Kagi?
That was it.
And the first time I saw a reported bug in the search results getting serious attention and a fix I was sold.
That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a "good result" looks like. I imagine that's dependent on a lot of factors, from the context of why the user is searching, their demographic, and their biases. When I search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe" I want straight facts - ingredients and bullet point steps and nothing else. My mother would want some background about the recipe, where it's from, and what makes it different. You can't get that from the search term alone. You need a lot more context.
It's exactly what the promise of 'personalized search' based on tracking everyone around the internet told us it would give us but it doesn't seem to work very well.
Maybe we can't agree on what people want, but what I'm sure we can agree on is what people don't want. I don't recall anyone ever saying "I wish there were more ads in the content I'm consuming".
So we could at least start with that.
At first it was click-through rate, but that turned SEO into sites into clickbait to get high click scores. Then they switched to time spent on the site, and as a consequence we get recipes that are filled with 2h of prose above them just so people stay longer on the site.
Baking is a science, not art... so recipes calling for a cup of flour and two teaspoons of butter are useless to me, while recipes with ingredients in grams are useless to many american grandmas.
On the other hand, a pinterest page with a photo and a large overlay asking me to register is useless to both of us.
And once you start measuring some things by weight, you quickly realize that most things are easier to measure out by weight than volume (particularly sticky ingredients like honey), so you start wanting to measure everything that isn't a tiny amount by weight.
I convert all of the recipes I collect to gram measurements for this reason.
That is true to the extent that the "anything" is only a proxy for quality. Keywords, reputation, etc are all proxies.
But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page. Does it provide useful information? In what area? Etc. Then invert that in order to answer queries. I really hope this is where page ranking is headed.
That'd be nice, but I am skeptical for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that where Google has already applied AI, it has seemed to make things worse, not better.