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Comment by strict9 | Hacker News Reader

How much of this is google getting worse vs how much of this is the fact that people aren't creating content on the open web anymore?

People complain that you used to get forum posts, blog posts, and guides for specific questions. But most of those have long since migrated to reddit or other social media.

Not a fan of google but think we should examine the other side of the coin on this one.

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I follow many websites with my feed reader, the web is still very active if you're willing to go out of your social media bubble.

People still publish on the web, the problem is that the noise is unbearable due to the SEO crap. I predict a return of curated website directories and of "blog rolls".

Google could start banning SEO spammers to drive the cost and the risk up. The fundamental problem of the web is that spam is cheap, and the other problem is that Google's incentives are more aligned with the SEO spammers than they are with users.

> Google's incentives are more aligned with the SEO spammers than they are with users

100% this. Let's see a chart of Google search revenue vs result quality. My guess is that it would be an inverse relationship.

Why can’t it show me the good old content on the internet instead of pages of blog spam made by AI? Obviously they used to show me the old content but apparently users only want new content now…

Its the Signal to Noise Ratio problem. AI generated spam is easier than ever to create and harder to algorithmicly detect. This results in a rapid increase in the volume of webspam.

This does not excuse the fact that search results show me things that are unrelated to my search. Not ads, just pages that do not even contain any of my search terms anywhere on the page

This isn’t a SNR issue at all.

Go to google. Enter search for something very specific like "red baby buggy bumpers." Google decides for some reason that I didn't really mean "red" so it excludes it from the search. Now all my results are randomly relevant. I have to find the little link that says "Include Results with 'red'."

Which.. to the google engineers, why do you think I typed that in the first place? Just to waste my own time? Who are you to drop words from my query? I'm not interested in a page of results, I'm interested in ONE RELEVANT thing.

They've intentionally made choices that make the product worse. This is just one, I could type up a whole chapter on this anti-pattern nonsense. All they care about is worthless KPIs that don't correctly measure "quality."

When Google decided that all user supplied search terms were optional, result quality fell off a cliff.

I don't think that's going to change the fact that every time I search for some basic thing there is a GitHub repository for it somewhere and Google almost always shows me two to three pages of blog spam garbage and stack Overflow copy sites before I can get to it.

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