What is preventing Bing or Google to copy the techniques marginalia or kagi uses
Both google and bing seems to be having a hard time to serve good results especially bing so what are they doing ?
The reason Google shows you search results is to serve you ads, but the presence and volume of ads is an inherently negative quality of those search results. So Google is incentivized to show you lower quality search results, as long as those results don't become so bad that you stop using the service.
Endless terribly formatted clones of Stack Overflow or GitHub issues don't provide any value to the world, but they do show Google's ads, so they weren't banned from all results after the first person at Google noticed them.
Empty results pages don't lead you to ads, but ad spam that doesn't answer your query does, so over the years the "no results" page has more and more been replaced with useless results. Some of us spend some mental energy looking at the SRP to determine they're useless, many more probably click the first result and are served ads.
Google's founders knew this, wrote it into their paper, then ignored it and made it their business model anyway.
If market share starts to decrease we should see an improvement in results, the problem is that's gonna be too late.
It would not be simple to integrate another algorithm in a revenue neutral way. The signals may be missing, and the new algorithm may overlap or interfere with several other rules, either negating or over promoting their effects.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ & Ctrl-F for "3 percent more" in the transcript.
...Although I think those results are open to some interpretation. Perhaps people who got ads did 3% more searches not because Google was so good, but because they got tricked into clicking an ad instead of a real result 3% of the time so had to come back and search again.
You could also say that the reason Google serves you ads is so it can show you search results.
Sometimes things are really simple.
This has not really happened during the last decade of enshittification of Google, but who knows, maybe it will happen in the future.
But this is a general trend, the whole open source software has been in an ensh*tification process for a good decade.
Written by human brain
Big context window will make them even more toxic.
An established company often does not want to cannibalize its own products, and an incumbent does.
not anymore, but when they first started out they certainly were much better than everything else available at the time
Had AV addressed spam sooner, Google would not have grown as fast. And we wouldn't see them as the single dominant pretend-benevolent player they are today.
There is no competition in search from multiple reasons, many of them from Google anticompetitively paying to be the default.
Kagi and Marginalia are growing within their respective niches so they can care about these "weird" users as they are at a scale where it makes a difference for them. At some point they would need to start catering to mainstream users as well though in order to keep growing.
Now read the first 10 'articles' which are all articles written solely for SEO purposes to sell you a service. You need to read through a lot of useless text before you find a line that says 'check your manual for how to enable flat towing in your transfer case and transmission'.
So it's like a long tease and at the end you're still not getting a satisfactory answer.
And overall the more your search terms are related something the average American searches for, the more junk there is.
Seems good enough? Short instruction and some helpful comments.
And if you think that some random HN user has the answer to “how do you get a large org to continue innovating”, and is going to share it instead of make literal trillions of dollars with it, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Most people don't want a more limited set of results. Most google users want more results not less.
Most google users are looking for the results that are often complained about, cheap holiday deals, voucher codes, ten best of, etc.
Google are doing their job.
I don’t think that’s true. I’ve been using kagi for a few months now, and I get plenty of results with ads and affiliate links. I’m not complaining about that because sometimes those are the best results for my query.
Those listicles exist because Google became stricter about a different type of content- product reviews. https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/
The business model of the listicles is: clicks from Google + commission from Amazon/similar = revenue for the website
"In 2022, e-commerce accounted for nearly 19 percent of retail sales worldwide." So imagine if 19% of all retail decided they needed to rank highly on Kagi to get a slice of that huge revenue. Kagi's team wouldn't stand a chance against what they thought up.