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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

There’s a bright side to all of this: as the bottleneck to essentially all internet ads, Google can prevent the slow decay of the internet into AI hell by simply de-listing such garbage. And in this case there is a huge winner takes all scenario where if Bing was able to do this, they would quickly own search. It’s a problem that’s been festering for a while, but Bing could end it.

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Google provides search that is always just slightly better than it's competitors, the better it is, the lower the revenue, they are incentivised to produce the worst (most profitable) results possible.

The fact that geeksforgeeks is more highly ranked than SO for any coding question I ask proves this to me.

Do programmers in Google not use Google to search questions? Do they not have self respect seeing the bad quality product they’re throwing up on billions of people every day? I can’t imagine working like that.

> Do programmers in Google not use Google to search questions?

Not really. Google has an excellent intranet search engine and mostly relies on in-house tools instead of commercial services (see https://github.com/jhuangtw/xg2xg). As a result its employees don't really need to rely on Stack Overflow, etc.

I have no idea how search rankings work, but GeeksForGeeks is massively popular in Indian tech colleges. This might be a reason for it’s high rank.

> Do they not have self respect seeing the bad quality product they’re throwing up on billions of people every day?

In the society I live in, self-respect doesn't pay the bills. I don't know where you're from.

If you would like to contend that the people at Google couldn't pay their bills if they had kept search more effective, I would like to see some serious numbers there.

Absent that, it sounds like the sort of excuse greedy people have always used to justify profitable harm.

Can't pay your bills without a job... They are constantly A/B testing things and running competitive teams. If profitability is the goal and you aren't the most profitable you can be on the table for the next round of layoffs.

People without a job can't pay their bills. I think it's pretty straightforward.

A Google engineer doesn't need to worry about paying bills unless their family has an incredibly expensive illness, they can switch jobs easily.

It's the oxymoron of their business: a perfect search engine would show you exactly what you need, exactly when you ask it. You would never be available for advertising, because the search engine would already find exactly what you were looking for if it's a product.

> Google can prevent the slow decay of the internet into AI hell by simply de-listing such garbage

Google has caused this problem by rewarding blogspam with high search rankings. Maybe they're trying to fix that, I don't know -- but if they are, they've already failed for at least a decade now.

For whatever reason, Google search is better than Bing, at least for "common'ish" searches. By "common'ish" the search has been done a few times before. While that remains true Bing isn't going to end anything.

I'd lay long odds Google stopped trying to rank pages themselves for those common searches long ago. Instead they look at what results users clicked on for a given search, and they are listed near the top. With a bit of randomness thrown in, so it can learn when new results become preferred. While saying it's a AI learning what to return for a search might be over the top, it's I doubt it's too far from the truth either. But you need a lot of people searching get the data to train the AI. Maybe Bing suffers from not having the users.

I'd also lay long odds that the search results are weighted by the ad revenue they generate for Google. Ie a site gets a boost if it is more likely to generate ad revenue for them if the user goes there. Competitors limit how far that can push that - they still have to be the best search engine. But as their primary goal is to earn money via ads they just need to be slightly better and use the remaining headroom to maximise ad revenue.

This is pure speculation on my part of course, and mostly evidence free. But I'm pretty sure Google engineers are smart enough to identify quite a bit of the SEO spam I see in the top of their search results - yet it remains there. This would be a quandary - if it wasn't in Google's interest for it to remain there because the spammy pages inevitably contain huge numbers of ads, and Google is at the end of the day an ad company that makes money from people clicking on ads.

They kinda do, at least in the sense that they no longer appear to index the entire web, instead cutting off the long tail for just the things they'll actually return results for.

Short of running every single page thru ChatGPT, how do you imagine they'll identify AI driven text vs human text?

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