Can there be any doubt that Google destroyed the old internet by becoming a bad search engine? Could their exclusion of most of the web be considered punishment for being sites being so old and stable that they don't rely on Google for ad revenue?
[1] https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800
But the vast majority are morons, grifters, and cargo culters.
The Google guidance is generally good and mildly informative but there’s a lot of depth that typically isn’t covered that the SEO industry basically has to black box test to find out.
The more Google helps you get ahead, the more you end up dominating the search results. The more you dominate the results, the more people will start thinking to come straight to you. The more people come straight to you, the more people never use Google. The less people use Google, the less revenue Google generates.
This is a possible outcome but there are people that type in google.com and then the name of their preferred news site, their bank, etc, every day.
The site with the name they search dominates that search but they keep searching it.
Google has a vested interest in creating a good web experience. Consultants have an interest in making their clients money.
Link building is a classic example where good consultants deliver value. (There are bad consultants than good ones though)
That's because websites' goals and Google's goals are not aligned.
Websites want people to engage with their website, view ads, buy products, or do something else (e.g. buy a product, vote for a party). If old content does not or detracts from those goals, they and SEO experts say, it should go because it's dragging the rest down.
Google wants all the information and for people to watch their ads. Google likes the long tail; Google doesn't care if articles from the 90's are outdated because people looking at it (assuming the page runs Google ads) or searching for it (assuming they use Google) means impressions and therefore money for them.
Google favors quantity over quality, websites the other way around. To oversimplify and probably be incorrect.
Perhaps what CNET really means is that they're deleting old low quality content with high bounce rates. After all, the best SEO is actually having the thing users want.
Sure, one page doesn’t matter, but thousands will.
[1] https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129...
https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689297947740295168
>Removing it might mean if you have a massive site that we’re better able to crawl other content on the site. But it doesn’t mean we go “oh, now the whole site is so much better” because of what happens with an individual page.
Parsing this carefully, to me it sounds worded to give the impression removing old pages won’t help the ranking of other pages without explicitly saying so. In other words, if it turns out that deleting old pages helps your ranking (indirectly, by making Google crawl your new pages faster), this tweet is truthful on a technicality.
In the context of negative attention where some of the blame for old content being removed is directed toward Google, there is a clear motive for a PR strategy that deflects in this way.
CNet is big enough that I’d expect Google to ensure the crawler has fresh news articles from it, but that isn’t explicitly said anywhere.
Apparently not if this SEO trick is really a thing...
EDIT : sorry my bad it's actually the opposite. One could expect that a site like CNET would include a timestamp and a unique ID in their URL in 2023. This seems to be the "unpermalink" of a recent cnet article.
Maybe the SEO expert could have started there...
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/samsung-galaxy-z-flip-5-rev...
It's not worded in any way intended to be parsed. I mean, I guess people can do that if they want. But there's no hidden meaning I put in there.
Indexing and ranking are two different things.
Indexing is about gathering content. The internet is big, so we don't index all the pages on it. We try, but there's a lot. If you have a huge site, similarly, we might not get all your pages. Potentially, if you remove some, we might get more to index. Or maybe not, because we also try to index pages as they seem to need to be indexed. If you have an old page that doesn't seem to change much, we probably aren't running back ever hour to it in order to index it again.
Ranking is separate from indexing. It's how well a page performs after being indexed, based on a variety of different signals we look at.
People who believe removing "old" content aren't generally thinking that's going to make the "new" pages get indexed faster. They might think that maybe it means more of their pages overall from a site could get indexed, but that can include "old" pages they're successful with, too.
The key thing is if you go to the CNET memo mentioned in Gizmodo article, it says this:
"it sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results."
Maybe CNET thinks getting rid of older content does this, but it's not. It's not a thing. We're not looking at a site, counting up all the older pages and then somehow declaring the site overall as "old" and therefore all content within it can't rank as well as if we thought it was somehow a "fresh" site.
That's also the context of my response. You can see from the memo that it's not about "and maybe we can get more pages indexed." It's about ranking.
If by pruning old content, CNET can get its new articles in the results faster, it seems this would get CNET higher rankings and more traffic. Google doesn’t need to have a ranking system directly measuring the average age of content on the site for the net effect of Google’s systems to produce that effect. “Indexing and ranking are two different things” is an important implementation detail, but CNET cares about the outcome, which is whether they can show up at the top of the results page.
>If you have a huge site, similarly, we might not get all your pages. Potentially, if you remove some, we might get more to index. Or maybe not, because we also try to index pages as they seem to need to be indexed.
The answer is phrased like a denial, but it’s all caveated by the uncertainty communicated here. Which, like in the quote from CNET, could determine whether Google effectively considers the articles they are publishing “fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results”.
No. Google has their own motivations here, they are a player not a rule maker.
Don’t trust SEOs as no one actually knows what works, but certainly dont think google is telling you the absolute truth.
Unreadable source code is a crime against humanity.
If we wanted browsers to be fed code that for performance reasons isn't human-readable, web servers ought to serve something that's processed way more than just gzipped minification. It could be more like bytecode.
About the byte code: You mean wasm? (Guess that's what you're alluding to.)
Isn’t this essential what WebAssembly is doing? I’ll admit I haven’t looked into it much, as I’m crap with C/++, though I’d like to try Rust. Having “near native” performance in a browser sounds nice, curious to see how far it’s come.
Worth keeping in mind that "performance" here refers to saving bandwidth costs as the host. Every single unnecessary whitespace or character is a byte that didn't need to be uploaded, hence minify and save on that bandwidth and thus $$$$.
The performance difference on the browser end between original and minified source code is negligible.
What really adds to the source code footprint is all of those trackers, adverts and, in a lot of cases, framework overhead.
I'm actually all for binary HTML – not just it's smaller, it can also be easier to parse, and makes more sense overall nowadays.
For me I guess what I was getting at is that I consider source the stuff I'm working on - the minified output I won't touch, it's output. But it is input for someone else, and available as a View Source so that does muddy the waters, just like decompilers produce "source" that no sane human would want to work on.
I think semantically I would consider the original source code the "real" source if that makes sense. The source is wherever it all comes from. The rest is various types of output from further down the toolchain tree. I don't know if the official definition agrees with that though.
Plus I suspect minifying HTML or JS is often cargo cult (for small sites who are frying the wrong fish) or compensating for page bloat
You can always open dev tools in your browser and have an interactive, nicely formatted HTML tree there with a ton of inspection and manipulation features.
Not to mention, there is no need to "minify" HTML, CSS, or JavaShit for a browser to render a page unlike compiled code which is more or less a necessity for such things.
> The program must include source code [...] The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor [...] are not allowed.
By your logic, there's actually no reason to use compiled code at all, for almost anything above the kernel. We can just use Python to do everything, including run browsers, play video games, etc. Sure, it'll be dog-slow, but you seem to care more about reading the code than performance or any other consideration.
Glad to see the diversity of HN readers apparently includes twelve year olds.
Anyway, you do realise plenty of languages have compilers with JS as a compilation target, right? How readable do you think that is?
The abuse of JavaScript does not deserve the respect of being called by a proper name.
>Anyway, you do realise plenty of languages have compilers with JS as a compilation target, right? How readable do you think that is?
If you're going to run "compiled" code through an interpreter anyway, is that really compiled code?
If you dislike unreadable source code I would assume you would object to minifying JS, in which case you should ask people to include sourcemaps instead of objecting to minification.
And some are the most data-driven people you'll ever meet. As with most people who claim to be experts, the trick is to determine whether the person you're evaluating is a legitimate professional or a cargo-culting wanna-be.
Excellent quote. It's counterintuitive but looking at what is most likely to happen according to the datasets presented can often miss the bigger picture.
or just plain numerology
Right for the wrong reasons is still right.
The yandex source code leak revealed that keyword proximity to root domain is a ranking factor. Of course, there’s nearly a thousand factors and “randomize result” is also a factor, but still.
SEO is unfortunately a zero sum game so it makes otherwise silly activities become positive ROI.
I assume Google is turning all the site's pages, js, inbound/outbound links, traffic patterns, etc...into large numbers of sometimes obscure datapoints like "does it have a favicon", "is it a unique favicon?", "do people scroll past the initial viewport?", "does it have this known uncommon attribute?".
Maybe those aren't the right guesses, but if a page has thousands of derived features and attributes, maybe they are on the list.
So, some SEO's take the idea that they can identify sites that Google clearly showers with traffic, and try to recreate as close a list of those features/attributes as they can for the site they are being paid to boost.
I agree it's an odd approach, but I also can't prove it's wrong.
It reminds me of Apple's "don't run to the press" advice when hitting bugs or app review issues. While we'd assume Apple knows best, going against their advice totally works and is by far the most efficient action for anyone with enough reach.
Nope. It says that Google does not ding you for old content.
"Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing!"
I guess that Googler never uses Google.
It's very hard to find anything on Google older than or more relevant than Taylor Swift's latest breakup.
This is not the same as saying that it doesn't prioritize newer pages over older pages in the search results.
The way it's worded does sound like it could imply the latter thing, but that may have just been poor writing.
With archive search, the News section floats links like https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/arts/music/09cara.html
Our ranking system with freshness is explained more here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking...
But we do show older content, as well. I find often when people are frustrated they get newer content, it's because of that crossover where there's something fresh happening related to the query.
If you haven't tried, consider our before: and after: commands. I hope we'll finally get these out of beta status soon, but they work now. You can do something like before:2023 and we wouldn't show pages from before 2023 (to the best we can determine dates). They're explained more here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272
-George Orwell, 1984
My bet is that they don't. My bet is that there is so much old code, weird data edge cases and opaque machine-learning models driving the search results, Google's engineers have lost the ability to predict what the search results would be or should be in the majority of cases.
SEO experts might not have insider knowledge, but they observe in detail how the algorithm behaves, in a wide variety of circumstances, over extended periods of time. And if they say that deleting old content improves search ranking, I'm inclined to believe them over Google.
Maybe the people at Google can tell us what they want their system to do. But does it do what they want it to do anymore? My sense is that they've lost control.
I invite someone from Google to put me in my place and tell me how wrong I am about this.
Once upon a time, Matt Cutts would come on HN give a fairly knowledgeable and authoritative explanation of how Google worked. But those days are gone and I'd say so are days of standing behind any articulated principle.
In addition, if you want an explanation of how Google works, we have an entire web site for that: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/
So there's zero machine learning or statistical modeling based functionality in your search algorithms?
if CNET deletes all their old articles, they're making a situation where most links to CNET from other sites lead to error pages (or at least, pages with no relevant content on them) and even if that isn't currently a signal used by google, it could become one.
It's not that we discourage it. It's not something we recommend at all. Not our guidance. Not something we've had a help page about saying "do this" or "don't do this" because it's just not something we've felt (until now) that people would somehow think they should do -- any more than "I'm going to delete all URLs with the letter Y in them because I think Google doesn't like the letter Y."
People are free to believe what they want, of course. But we really don't care if you have "old" pages on your site, and deleting content because you think it's "old" isn't likely to do anything for you.
Likely, this myth is fueled by people who update content on their site to make it more useful. For example, maybe you have a page about how to solve some common computer problem and a better solution comes along. Updating a page might make it more helpful and, in turn, it might perform better.
That's not the same as "delete because old" and "if you have a lot of old content on the site, the entire site is somehow seen as old and won't rank better."
But lying on the internet isn't a crime. I work for Google on quantum AI solutions in adtech btw.
Your job is not to disseminate accurate information about how the algorithm works but rather to disseminate information that google has decided it wants people to know. Those are two extremely different things in this context.
I work on these kind of vague "algorithm" style products in my job, and I know that unless you are knee deep in it day to day, you have zero understanding of what it ACTUALLY does, what it ACTUALLY rewards, what it ACTUALLY punishes, which can be very different from what you were hoping it would reward and punish when you build and train it. Machine learning still does not have the kind of explanatory power to do any better than that.
He was the guy who replaced Matt Cutts.
But who knows, really? They run things to extract features nobody outside of Google knows that are proxies for "content quality". Then run them through pipelines of lots of different not-really-coordinated ML algorithms.
Maybe some of those features aren't great for older pages? (broken links, out-of-spec html/js, missing images, references to things that don't exist, practices once allowed now discouraged...like <meta keywords>, etc). And I wouldn't be surprised if some part of overall site "reputation" in their eyes is some ratio of bad:good pages, or something along those lines.
I have my doubts that Google knows exactly what their search engines likes and doesn't like. They surely know which ads to put next to those maybe flawed results, though.
It's really hard to not create perverse incentives with KPIs. Targets like "% of tickets closed within 72 hours" can wreck service quality if the team is under enough pressure or unscrupulous.
Generaly speaking, an easy solution is to attach another target to either the nominator or denominator, a target that requires people to move that in value in acertqin direction. That might even be a different team thanthe one having goals on the ratio.
These are good in that they’re directly aligned with business outcomes but you still need sensible judgement in the loop. For example, say there’s an ice storm or heat wave which affects delivery times for a large region – you need someone smart enough to recognize that and not robotically punish people for failing to hit a now-unrealistic goal, or you’re going to see things like people marking orders as canceled or faking deliveries to avoid penalties or losing bonuses.
One example I saw at a large old school vendor was having performance measured directly by units delivered, which might seem reasonable since it’s totally aligned with the company’s interests, except that they were hit by a delay on new CPUs and so most of their customers were waiting for the latest product. Some sales people were penalized and left, and the cagier ones played games having their best clients order the old stuff, never unpack it, and return it on the first day of the next quarter - they got the max internal discount for their troubles so that circus cost way more money than doing nothing would have, but that number was law and none of the senior managers were willing to provide nuance.
My organization tracks how many tickets we have had open for 30 days or more. So my team started to close tickets after 30 days and let them reopen automatically.
Of course the actual behavior in the article is highly disturbing.
https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129
My understanding is that if you have a very large site, removing pages can sometimes help because:
- There is an indexing "budget" for your site. Removing pages might make reindexing of the rest of the pages faster.
- Removing pages that are cannibalising on each other might help the main page for the keywords to rank higher.
- Google is not very fond of "thin wide" content. Removing low quality pages can be helpful, especially if you don't have a lot of links to your site.
- Trimming the content of a website could make it easier for people and Google to understand what the site is about and help them find what they are looking for.
There is no way the PR team making that tweet can say for sure that deleting old content doesn't improve rank. Nobody can say that for sure. The neural net is a black box, and it's behaviour is hard to predict without just trying it and seeing.
Words without action are useless.
People discovered that Google measures not only how much time you stay on a webpage but also how much you scroll to define how interesting a website is. So now every crappy "tech tips" website that has an answer that fits in a short paragraph now makes you scroll two pages before you get the thing you actually wanted to read.
I know you came here looking for a recipe for boiled water, but first here's my thesis on the history and cultural significance of warm liquids.
Water boils in pots with different metals because only temperature matters for boiling water. If the water is 100c at sea level, it will boil.
Surely Google is too afraid of our vigorous pro-competition regulatory agencies and would never do such a thing.
I search for "how to do X", and instead of just showing me how to do it, which might take 30 seconds, they put a ton of fluff and filler in to the video to make it last 5 minutes.
Typical video goes something like:
0 - Ads, if you're not using an ad blocker
1 - Intro graphics/animation
2 - "Hi, I'm ___, and in this video I'm going to show you how to do X"
3 - "Before I get in to that, I want to tell you about my channel and all the great things I do."
4 - "Like and subscribe."
5 - "Now let's get in to it..."
6 - "What is X?"
7 - "What's the history of X?"
8 - "Why X is so great."
9 - finally... "How to do X"
Fortunately you can skip around, but it's still a bunch of useless fluff and garbage content to get to the maybe 30 seconds of useful information.
They're probably reaching some YT threshold to have more ads show on it
(The converse is; whenever I turn on a Hololive stream I'd say that I pick up 20% of what they're saying. If they talked slower, I would probably watch more than every 3 months. But, they rightfully don't feel the need to optimize for non-native speakers of Japanese.)
100%, and you can skim it so that your pace subconsciously varies depending on how relevant or complex that section is.
I wish more stuff were available in just text + screenshots..
That said, tinkering before and after youtube has been two different worlds. I really like having video to learn hands-on activities. I just wrapped up some mods to a Rancilio Silvia, and I noticed my workflow was videos, how-to guides and blog posts, broader electrical information documentation, part specific manuals / schematics, and my own past knowledge. I felt very efficient having been through the process before, and knowing when to lean on which resource. But the videos are by far the best resource to orient myself when first jumping in to the project, and thus save me a lot of time.
As someone who learns best by reading, I'm already at a disadvantage with video to begin with. To make it worse, instructional videos tend to omit a great deal of detail in the interest of time. Then when you add nonsense like you're pointing out, it makes the whole thing a frustrating and pointless activity.
Do you have an example of a video that does this? Seems like an interesting problem to solve.
I definitely write super long things when I consciously make the decision to not spend much time on something. Meanwhile, I've been working on a blog post for the better part of 2 years because it's too long, but doesn't cover everything I want to discuss. If you want people to retain the content, you have to pare it down to the essentials! This is hard work.
I think the situation that people run into is something like "how do I install a faucet" and they are getting someone who does it for a living explaining it for the first time. Explaining it for the first time is what makes it tough to make a good video. Then there are other things like "top 10 AskReddit threads that I feel like stealing from this week" and those are too long because they are just trying to get as much ad revenue as possible. The original comment was about howtos specifically, and I think you are likely to run into a lot of one-off channels in those cases.
Making a long video isn't like writing a rambling letter. It takes work to make 10 minutes of talk out of a 1-minute subject. And mega-popular influencers do this, not just newbs who haven't learned how to edit properly yet.
This is something that happens a lot. I'll Google a narrow technical question that can be answered in three lines of text--there's literally nothing more of value to say about it--and all the top hits are 5+ minute videos. That doesn't happen by accident.
You get no random ad content which just cut into the feed at will, which makes for a somewhat better experience. But there's the inevitable "NordVPN will guarantee your privacy", "<some service here which has no ads and was made by content creators so you don't have to look at ads if you subscribe but hey all our content is on YT but with ads and here is an ad>" ad.
There is no escape. I actually pay for YT premium and it's SO much better than being interrupted by ads for probiotic yoghurt or whatever. I know there are a couple of plugins out there which I have not tried (I think nosponsors is one of them) but I really don't think there is any escape from this stuff.
I want the most succinct result possible when I search the web.
We have no guidance telling publishers to get rid of "old" content. That's not something we've said. I shared this week that it is not something we recommend: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800
This also documents the many times over the years we've also pushed back on this myth: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-delete-older-helpfu...
There's no denying Google encourages long rambling nonsense over direct information
You're financially rewarding people for hiding information.
That includes self-assessment questions, including this:
"Are you writing to a particular word count because you've heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don't.)"
That's not telling people to write longer. Our systems are not designed to reward that. And we'll keep working to improve them.
I would assume they didn't answer this because the answer is either "No" because echo chamber or "Yes" but they don't want to say that publicly.
To be more explicit, yes, we're aware that there are complaints about the quality of search results. That's why we've been working in a variety of ways, as I indicated, to improve those.
We have continued to build our spam fighting systems, our core ranking systems, our systems to reward helpful content. We expanded our product reviews system to cover all types of reviews, as this explains: https://status.search.google.com/incidents/5XRfC46rorevFt8yN...
We regularly improve these systems, which we share about on this page: https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2Gw...
The work isn't stopping. You'll continue to see us revise these systems to address some of the concerns people have raised.
So it seems the search quality team exists but gets locked on in the closet by advertising periodically.
I know you can't verify anything directly but maybe we could set a system of code for you to communicate what's really happening...
If you think I am exaggerating, try to prompt him to see if you can get him to acknowledge that Googles current systems incentivize SEO spam. See if he passes the Turing test.
"your actions", give me a break. The parent commenter doesn't own Google, and you aren't forced to use the platform.
Are people on this site really convinced that an L3 Google engineer can flick the "Fix Google" switch on the search engine?
No, it's just when someone speaks on behalf of the company with the terms "we," they are typically addressed with "you." That doesn't mean we think they're the CEO. Are you unfamiliar with this concept? I can send you an SEO guide on it.
And anyways, the sentence "Take responsibility for the results of your actions like an adult" actually does imply he has some personal responsibility here. It's not helpful to the discussion and it's rude.
"a company doing dumb things"
"insult everyone's intelligence"
"lying to them"
That's a little hyperbolic, don't you think? Do you even hear yourself? I fully understand Google hate but directing it at one person who is literally just doing their job (and hasn't lied to anyone despite your allegation) is childish and counterproductive. Save that for Twitter.
Danny has been here since 2008. Your account was created in 2022.
And also, "people" aren't being rude, you are. Own your actions.
How long I've been here is irrelevant.
That wasn't me. Maybe pay closer attention?
>reward longer articles
The age of articles was being discussed, not article length. Maybe pay closer attention?
Actually... you know what, never mind.
You did that, not me. It's you who seem to be having a problem with understanding the thread.
I mean, saying that you should design pages for people rather than the search engine clearly hasn't shut down the SEO industry.
These are all the sites (like CNET) that Google indexes which are the entire reason to use search. They are having their rankings steadily eroded by an ever-rising tide of SEO spam. If they start dying off en masse and if LLMs emerge as a viable alternative for looking up information, we may see Google Search die along with them.
As for why their revenues are still increasing? It's because all the SEO spam sites out there run Google Ads. This is how we close the loop on the "killing the golden goose" theory. Google uses legitimate sites to make their search engine a viable product and at the same time directs traffic away from those legitimate sites towards SEO spam to generate revenue. It's a transformation from symbiosis/mutualism to parasitism.
Edit: I forgot to mention the last, and darkest, part of the theory. Many of these SEO spam sites engage in large-scale piracy by scraping all their content off legitimate sites. By allowing their ads to run on these sites, Google is essentially acting as an accessory to large-scale, criminal, commercial copyright infringement.
[Disclosure: Google Search SWE; opinions and thoughts are my own and do not represent those of my employer]
Why do you assume malicious intent?
The balance between search ranking (Google) and search optimization (third-party sites) is an adversarial, dynamic game played between two sides with inverse incentives, taking place on an economic field (i.e. limited resources). There is no perfect solution; there’s only an evolutionary act-react cycle.
Do you think content spammers spend more or less resources (people, time, money) than Google’s revenue? So then the problem becomes how do you win a battle with orders of magnitude less people, time, and money? Leverage, i.e., engineering. You try your best and watch the scoreboard.
Some people think Google is doing a great job; some think we couldn’t be any worse. The truth probably lies across a spectrum in the middle. So it goes with a globally consumed product.
Also, note, Ads and Search operate completely independent. There’s no signals going from Ads to Search, or vice versa, to inform rankings; Search can’t even touch a lot of the Ads data, and Ads can’t touch Search data. Which makes your theory misinformed.
That’s the mistake. They should be talking. Sites that engage in unethical SEO to game search rankings should be banned from Google’s ad platform. Why aren’t they? Because Google is profiting from the arrangement.
Not GP, but to me, admittably a complete non-expert on search, there are so many low-hanging fruits if search result quality was anywhere on Google's radar that it is really difficult not to assume malicious intent.
Some examples:
- why pinterest is flooding the image results with absolute nonesense? How difficult it would be to derank a single domain that manages to screw google's algorithm totally?
- why there is no option for me to blacklist domains from the search result? Are there really some challenges that can't be practically solved in a couple of minutes of thinking?
- Does google seriously claim they can't differentiate between stackoverflow and the content copying rip-off SEO spam sites?
You might already be aware of this, but you can use uBlock Origin to filter google search results.
Click on the extension --> Settings --> My Filters. Paste in the bottom
google.*##.g:has(a[href*="pinterest.com"])
There doesn't have to be any malicious intent, just an endless chase for increased profit next quarter. SEO spam has more ads, thus generates more income for Google. Even if Ads and Search operate "completely independently", there must be a person in the corporate hierarchy which has control over both and could push the products to better synergize and make that KPI tick up.
Actually deranking sites which feature more than three Google Ads banners would improve search quality (mainly by making sites get to the point rather than padding a simple answer into an essay like an 8th grader at an exam) - but it would reduce Ads income so you cannot do it, no matter how independent you claim to be.
Unless you have a clear view by leadership of what they desire the web should be and are willing to disclose it in detail, then there's not much to add by saying you work in Search.
At one time both buggy whips and Philco radios had hockey stick growth charts, too.
You must not bet old enough to remember when people thought MySpace would always drive the internet.
You know there's a difference between "people thought" and dollars.
Some people think the earth is flat. Opinions can change very quickly - like 5 years ago, people thought elon musk was the hero of the internet.
Here's the stats on MySpace revenue: It generated $800 million in revenue during the 2008 fiscal year.
Google could be generating $27 billion in revenue in 2038 and be considered a massive failure compared to what it is now.
I fail to see the point you are trying to get at?
At some point a competitor will emerge. The tech crowd will notice it and begin to use it. Then it will go widespread.
I don't think Google dying would be good (lots of things would have to migrate infra suddenly), but the adtech being split off into something else would certainly be a welcome turn of events, IMO. I'm tired of seeing promising ideas killed because they only made 7-figure numbers in a spreadsheet where it'd have been viable on its own somewhere it wasn't a rounding error.
Not sure if the kagi folks are willing to share, but I get the impression that pagerank, tf-idf and a few heuristics on top would still get you pretty far. Add some moderation (known-bad sites that e.g. repost stackoverflow content) and you're already ahead of what google gives me.
False. Google Directory (and many other major name, mostly now defunct, web directories) were powered by data from DMOZ which was crowdsourced (and kind of still is, through Curlie [0] and while some parts of the website show updated as recently as today, enough fairly core links are dead or without content that its pretty obviously not a thriving operation.) Also, it was not pre-Wiki: WikiWikiWeb was created in 1995, DMOZ in 1998. It was pre-Wikipedia, but Wikipedia wasn’t the first Wiki.
That said, in NL a lot of people's home pages for a long time was set to startpagina.nl, which was just that, a cool directory of websites that you could submit to the website. It seems to exist still, too.
Wasn't the point of them tracking us so much to customize and cater our results? Why have they normalized everything to some focus group persona of Joe six-pack?
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Let's try an experiment
Type in "Chicago ticket" which has at least 4 interpretations, a ticket to travel to Chicago, a citation received in Chicago, A ticket to see the musical Chicago and a ticket to see the rock band Chicago.
For me I get the Rock band, citation, baseball and mass transit ticket in that order.
I'm in Los Angeles, have never been to Chicago, don't watch sports, and don't listen to the rock band. Google should know this with my location, search and YouTube history but it apparently doesn't care. What do you get?
Where you'll see integrations like this used to be assistant, but is now bard. Both of which have lawyer boggling Eulas and a brand they can sacrifice if need be.
My ads are:
- Flights - Chicago the Musical - Flights - More Flights
My search results are:
- Citation - Citation payment plan - News report on lawsuit regarding citations in Chicago - Baseball
I also live very far from Chicago, and the only time I was there was for a connecting flight some time in the '90s.
It knows you're in LA and did not look up "Chicago flight", so you probably aren't looking for flights there.
Chicago musical isn't playing in LA so probably not the right kind.
Probably why most people get parking ticket listed higher. It would be interesting to see the results in a city where the band, team or musical has an event soon.
I suspect this is a long-term play for Google to phase out this search and replace with Bard. Think about it all these articles are doing now is writing a verbose version of what Bard gives you directly unless it’s new human content.
Google has in essence stolen all their information by scraping and storing in a database for its LLM and is offering its knowledge of this directly to users, so in a way, this is akin to Amazon selling its own private label products.
Also, it will slow down the crawl frequency if you noindex it
So it's a non problem
You know, like a news website that's been on the internet since the 90s
Eventually Google stops crawling noindexed pages.
People have been committing horrifying atrocities in the name of SEO for years. I've seen it firsthand. And it spectacularly backfired each time.
This can very probably be yet another one of such cases.
This is such terrible, low-quality, manipulative content. It does not belong on HN.