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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

Google captured the web with their search product. Then they monopolised it with Adsense.

And absolutely did not optimize for returning quality information.

Seems like less something that Google did and more just a natural consequence of the massive economic value of being at the top of the ranking and therefore tremendous incentive to hack the algorithm with advanced SEO.

I don’t agree. As soon as commercialisation of the web began, this massive incentive existed. The early search engines all fell victim to “algorithm hacking” (granted, these algorithms were far more primitive). Google won search in these years by having much more sophisticated algorithms that were resilient to such attempts.

Today - well, two possible things have happened. Either scamming search engines have become too effective for even a company with the resources of Alphabet to mitigate. Or, Google optimised for revenue rather than knowledge indexing. Which one seems more likely?

I wonder what makes you say that Google was more resilient to what you call “algorithm hacking” considering Google has quite literally auctioned off result placement for two decades. Do you think that selling result placement for keywords and search terms to the highest bidder had a higher resilience to search engine optimisation than other search engines? I’d argue that Google was simply good at turning search itself into a product. A lot of their early competition around the world didn’t really do “search” as much as they did a combination of web content in a “portal” sort of presentation.

Google is still better at it than their competition, but Google’s model is now being pressured by big money. Local businesses in Europe are simply losing any sort of search auction to the Chinese sites as an example.

Anyway, you can always pay for Kagi if you want a better experience on the internet.

> Google has quite literally auctioned off result placement for two decades

Adwords - clearly marked as ads. Or are you suggesting the results themselves could be bought and sold? This was definitely not the case.

> Do you think that selling result placement for keywords and search terms to the highest bidder had a higher resilience to search engine optimisation than other search engines?

Again, manipulating the actual results via financial inducement to google was not a thing. Quite the reverse.

> A lot of their early competition around the world didn’t really do “search” as much as they did a combination of web content in a “portal” sort of presentation.

I’m not sure why you have this impression. There were many competitors for search prior and concurrent with google that operated in the same fashion. As I said earlier, they were simply hacked into uselessness. The concept of adversarial knowledge indexing was at this time new; PageRank was a novel and revolutionary solution.

> Adwords - clearly marked as ads. Or are you suggesting the results themselves could be bought and sold? This was definitely not the case.

Ad words spending had clear manipulations on the organic search algorithm. More spending meant better organic search placement. This is officially denied, but I saw this take place.

It is entirely possible that this would happen without manipulating the ranking algorithm. buy adds -> higher traffic -> higher ranking

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6366577?hl=en

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/142918?hl=en

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. These pages talk about how the ordering of marked adverts appear in results, not non-advert search results.

Having said that, I think it's clear the quality of non-ad search results isn't great, but I don't know if that's due to perverse incentives on Google's side or just the increasing sophistication of SEO defeating Google's relevance ranking.

> I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. These pages talk about how the ordering of marked adverts appear in results, not non-advert search results.

It also describes the situation as it is now, not how it was when Google still cared about search results. The paid ads didn't use to be part of the search resuls list at all but instead were clearly delineated.

When google won, they were still having 2 text ads per page with a noticeable different font and style as the search results. It was trivial to point out the ad. All the ad growth, from the sensible to the massive, and the change to their relationship with SEO, all occurred after the competition had been sent down to, at best, the single digits

Yes, which is the point I was trying to make. I don’t think what we see is the cruel SEO victory over a valiant, but ultimately doomed defence by google. What we see is revenue optimization, that also happens to benefit SEO’s.

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

The world is all that much worse for their poor character.

Nothing personal, just business. Yes it sucks, but advertising is the business, not search. If it’s free, you’re the product.

over the really long term, it's poor business practices.

The "it's just business" people will double dip and still inject advertising and sell your data while also directly taking your money for a product. Cable TV is a paid product that does both. Cellular carriers sell your data about your location and the usage behaviors of the services you pay for. Car manufacturers sell your movement data for a car you paid for. Sellers of any financial services are all in cahoots about your debt, incomes, holdings, credit worthiness, etc. Even brick and morter stores pull shit with rewards programs to track your buying behaviors to optimize advertising to you.

And when those same companies make public some front end framework, or sponsor a major open source product, or create some novel distributed acid compliant database we (the HN community) rally behind them and say huzzah.

Yes. When.

> Nothing personal, just business

To be candid, this might be the problem.

If we treated people with humanity and respect, we might not be so keen to throw them under the bus for a buck.

> If it’s free, you’re the product.

For Google (and others) you are the product even if you paid for it (Android).

I disagree, their character does not matter, business incentives matter. Nothing would change, if other personalities were in charge, since profit maximization is still there.

To be clear, Google very much had and has a culture of optimizing for (a certain) quality. They definitely fought spam.

It just so happens that their culture and employees value a “quality” that is distinctly incongruent with the wider 6b-person public. And also they completely dropped the ball on spam 10 years ago when (among other things) Matt Cutts left.

Don’t write off Google. They are an important case study of their own flavor of greed.

They absolutely do not. Google has destroyed the promise of thr internet. In my experience the best resources on the internet no longer exist. They were hosted on some academics home page who retired or died 10 years ago. They could have spent their billions of dollars building a searchable internet archive that connects people to an organized library of the world's information. Instead they destroyed the internet and replaced it with affiliate marketing blog spam.

A lot of my favorite sites exist only as bookmarks and on the internet archive. If only there was software to explore the library. We could call it a 'search engine'. It would never catch on...

No doubt, but AI is already and will continue to make the web a true hellscape. The shitshow Google has created is nothing compared to what’s coming, sadly. Big tech is truly ruining everything.

In what sense did they monopolise the web with adsense?

I never thought I would pay for searching information; yet now that I do, it's decidedly not google exactly because of this. Adsense hot garbage.

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