Hacker News Reader

Comment by whatevertrevor | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this position, do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse? Before I'm misunderstood I do want to clarify that IMO, the end user experience for web searching on Google is much worse in 2025 than it was in say 2000. But, the web was also much much smaller, less commercial and the SNR was much better in general.

Sure, web search companies moved away from direct keyword matching to much more complex "semantics-adjacent" matching algorithms. But we don't have the counterfactual keyword-based Google search algorithm from 2000 on data from 2025 to claim that it's just search getting worse, or the problem simply getting much harder over time and Google failing to keep up with it.

In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".

View on HN

>do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse?

sure. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

>These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.

Of course, it's hard to "objectively" prove that they literally made search worse, but it's clear they were fine with stagnating in order to maximize ad revenue.

I see it as the same way Tinder works if you want the mentality. There's a point where being "optimal" hurts your bottom line, so you don't desire achieving a perfect algorithm. Meanwhile, it can be so bad for Google that directly searching for a blog title at times can leave me unsuccessful.

> I see it as the same way Tinder works if you want the mentality. There's a point where being "optimal" hurts your bottom line, so you don't desire achieving a perfect algorithm

Yes, in the case of Google:

- They make more money from ads if the organic results are not as good (especially if it's not clear they're add)

- They get more impressions if you don't find the answer at the first search and have to try a different query

This is entirely because "we" insist on search being free. This means Google needs to find other ways to pay for it, which creates a different set of incentives.

If we somehow paid directly for search, then Google's incentives would be to make search good so that we'd be happy customers and come back again, rather than find devious ways to show us more ads.

Most people put up with the current search experience because they'd rather have "free" than "good" and we see this attitude in all sorts of other markets as well, where we pay for cheap products that fail over and over rather than paying once (but more) for something good, or we trade our personal information and privacy for a discount.

When I get a full time job, Kagi is the first thing I'm buying a subsciption for. It's not perfect, but I want to at least show a demand. I'm willing to contribute premiums for proper services that won't mine all my data and is actually beholden to customers

> In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".

"SEO" is not some magic, it is "compliance with ranking rules of the search engine". Google wanted to make their lives easier, implemented heuristics ranking slop higher, resulting in two things happening simultaneously: information to slop ratio decreasing AND information getting buried deeper and deeper within SRPs.

> do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse?

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10286719?hl=en-... Google is literally rewriting the queries. Not only results with better potential for ads outrank more organic results, it is impossible to instruct the search engine to not show you storefronts even if you tried.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com