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Comment by is_true | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem is google losing the fight with spammers. It's being a while for me that I have to put "stackoverflow" in the search query to avoid sites with scraped content

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Google is not "losing" any fight. Google is deliberately letting spam thrive because that spam may contain Google Ads/analytics and increases engagement on the SERP page as people who click on the spam go back to try something else (potentially one of the sponsored results). All these contribute to Google's bottom-line.

Yep. It will also will push companies into paying for Ads in order to beat the spam itself.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. --Upton Sinclair

Problem is that in addition to people whose salary depends on it, there seems to be plenty of people out here defending Google and spreading misinformation despite having no obvious profit motive.

That's my guess too; I'm sure Google drives the overwhelming majority of SO traffic.

A few years ago, my programming-related queries would hit Stack Overflow as the first or second result. Now it's very frequently spammy garbage in the top 2-3 slots.

What kind of spam do you get when searching something specific and technical? Who is trying to SEO their way to the top for "how to set redis max memory"? A lot of comments here saying the spam is beating out SO, but what spam and from who and why??

There are many websites that scrape Stack Overflow's content and serve it up again with their own ads.

I don"t see those on google but then again I use a search blocker mainly for those sort of sites.

>to avoid sites with scraped content

especially YouTube links. sadly, it would not surprise me if these people are earning a decent enough money from ads to make it worth their while to be "content creators" solely from search results from Googs

And, IME, these scraped sites often manage to rank above the canonical source.

It is both infuriating and sad that Google can‘t figure out a way to compensate for this SEO spam. Is there an easier problem than doing it for SO (and yes, coding is a big enough problem for Google imho to be worth investing a little here).

Which means they aren't applying any sort of primacy to the information.

If three segments of the internet think the same piece of information is relevant, that should affect the score of all 3 copies, not just the largest segment.

I'm not sure I'm reading you right--you're suggesting it should work this way?

When content republished on some bizarre/sketchy/unaccountable ~adfarm outranks the site where it first appeared, users of Google's search service end up at higher risk of getting phished or infected with malware.

Is there some benefit you see here that outweighs this downside risk?

Applying SEO to a copy of someone else's content gets you highly ranked on Google. I'm saying that at this point Google is doing enough processing that they should be able to detect duplicates after a fashion, and weight the oldest copy more heavily than duplicates.

As soon as you consider google no longer does search but instead is a "suggestion engine" it all makes a lot more sense. Sadly.

Could it be that Google prefers their own AI-provided answers over SO?

Those answers are >50% total junk though.

Well if they served up a high quality site it you'd just go there and might not have ads even. Where the dozen SEO garbage sites they do serve up are all hosting ads google gets a cut of.

That's a very short sighted business strategy if true. Simply liquidating their reputation. Those junk AI results have certainly led to me using Google less.

> That's a very short sighted business strategy if true. Simply liquidating their reputation.

Why should they care? They're too big to fail…

Google controls almost the whole end-user realm through Chrome & clones, and Android, the dominating end-user OS by a wide margin.

At the same time end-users are completely helpless and can't do anything against Googles liking because they don't understand anything about IT tech.

Computers are black magic to most people so they're trapped. This never changed! Especially millennials and gen-z are completely clueless as they didn't had the chance to use personal computers ever, where you had at lest some control over the device and needed to know at least some basics about its inner working. All the younger people know are the tightly sealed black-box devices you don't have any control over, called mobiles, which are fully operated by big-tech. Google search + Android apps are "the internet" for most people. They mostly don't even know there is something else beyond that, so Google can do whatever they want, and this will have exactly zero consequences for them by now.

Google's move regarding rolling out "browser DRM", the next "trusted computing" initiative, regardless of what anybody thinks about is is very telling.

Now they will violently reap the fruits of their monopoly, and likely nobody will be able to stop them in the next decade. People where warned about the consequences of this monopoly for many many years. Nobody cared. Now it's payout day for Google.

When do you think millennials were born? The very youngest millennials were in their tweens when the first iPhone came out, and the oldest were pushing 30. They definitely experienced pre-smartphone computing. In fact, it's probably the defining characteristic of the generation: millennials grew up with modern computing, but before the smartphone. Gen Z grew up in a world were smartphones were ubiquitous.

There's a ublock for those spam sites IIRC

I think we're rapidly approaching a point where any content that come with ads is suspect. The fact that only Wikipedia has managed to largely escape deterioration (or as some call it, "enshitification") is testament to this. A search engine that can selectively search non-sponsored content or soft-paywalled content would be potentially quite popular. However, monetising such a service without ads will be a challenge.

What’s interesting is that Google was known for how hard it was to figure out the Google algorithm.

Remember, when people were hired because they knew the secret sauce on how to get the best Google ranking. Google experts?

Well, it turns out that the person at Google that was responsible for keeping the algorithm fresh and the search results fresh retired and everything went to shit when they left.

Actually, I’m betting that person did leave the company, but the real damage happened when someone came along and convinced everyone they knew the real trick to better search results and we have the shit that is now Google. Nice work new guy! Let me rephrase that. Nice work to the guy that thinks they are smarter than everyone else and still thinks their approach is the best, yet evidence to the contrary.

Really sounds as if your made up story is deeply rooted in your own experience. I am sorry if something like a new guy taking your position and claiming to be smarter has happened to you but creating imaginary stories is not quite what this comment section needs and you'd probably be better off dealing with this in a different way

Not at all. Nothing personal. Although, it looks like you are the one self-projecting here.

It’s simply how times change and people with it. Knowledge is lost when people move on and the reasons why certain decisions were made are not transferred.

At any rate, I imagine people at Google are trying to figure out why there is such a negative opinion on their search results lately.

My bet is revenue went up for google with the second guy, so who is smarter is a matter of perspective.

Matt Cutts was instrumental in community outreach and helping SEO differentiate from spam. When he left, Search pivoted to stuff like using Twitter data and lifting content directly from websites into results. While it’s probably hard to attribute all the changes to one person, Matt Cutts made a huge impact on the product.

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