I'm going to share an unpopular response to one of the points in the article: For explicitly commercial terms, ordering results by who will pay the most (i.e. putting ads at the top) isn't any worse than the organic algorithm's ordering. That's because the organic algorithm doesn't really have a way to distinguish between different commercial offerings.
Take a search for "apartments in denver". There are ~10 online rental listing websites, all with roughly the same buildings on them and approximately equivalent user interfaces. In other words, it's hard to distinguish between them on the basis of content. Those ten sites are going to fill the first page of results, so the question is which ones get the top couple spots (and the bulk of the traffic.) Now, one of these may be the "best" result for you, but even you probably can't tell that in advance, and it's hard to imagine how Google's algorithms could discern whether apartments.com or forrent.com will have the perfect 1-bedroom with granite counters in your desired neighborhood.
All of those websites want to be in the top spot, so they spend a lot of money generating SEO-oriented content and trying to earn links from high quality sources. People talk about SEO as "free" traffic, but believe me -- for a competitive commercial term, you're paying for that traffic. You're just paying for it in an indirect, obfuscated way.
With that in mind, why not just have people pay for traffic directly? SEO lets sites spend (say) $1 million in an incredibly laborious way to earn the top spot on a bunch of terms and get 1 million clicks a year on those terms. Why not just let them spend that million with Google directly? The net result is less wasted effort.
Note that I'm only talking about clearly commercial terms.
If the ranking algorithm tries to maximize "value for the searcher", then SEO could actually mean "produce value for the searcher". Although that might often not actually be the case, it is probably still better than paying Google directly. That would translate ranking to "maximize the value for Google".
I hate google censorship but having the government control what you can see would be much worse. This is a situation where because Google has an information filter monopoly it should not be Federalized. If it were a niche player, like NPR, then it's a different story.
> Essentially, a non-profit search engine would allow users to drive improvements to the algorithm by reporting bad results or collaborating on improvements. [...] I would envision a core team with many contributors - much like open-source projects hosted on Github.
I am absolutely sure that this will be abused. The (black hat) SEO is a huge industry, and it is continuously fighting to make search results worse for users. They did it before -- keywords meta does not work, simple pagerank no longer works, blog comments have NOFOLLOW and so on. It will be much worse in the proposed system -- the user votes will be faked, the good-looking commits will "by accident" drive up the position of specific websites, and so on.
Over the past two years it seems spam operations have really scaled up their business. I often find fresh domains, recently expired domains, and automatically generated sub-domains dominating the second page and creeping into the first page for many long tail terms.
I am surprised this article doesn’t focus on the poor quality of organic results.
Yeah definitely agree with this sentiment. Ads will be ads, but the organic results getting worse is the real issue.
Of course, I wouldn't exactly say they've gotten "worse" because those 2011 results looked pretty terrible...but certainly they've gotten much more "commercial".
I'm going to share an unpopular response to one of the points in the article: For explicitly commercial terms, ordering results by who will pay the most (i.e. putting ads at the top) isn't any worse than the organic algorithm's ordering. That's because the organic algorithm doesn't really have a way to distinguish between different commercial offerings.
Take a search for "apartments in denver". There are ~10 online rental listing websites, all with roughly the same buildings on them and approximately equivalent user interfaces. In other words, it's hard to distinguish between them on the basis of content. Those ten sites are going to fill the first page of results, so the question is which ones get the top couple spots (and the bulk of the traffic.) Now, one of these may be the "best" result for you, but even you probably can't tell that in advance, and it's hard to imagine how Google's algorithms could discern whether apartments.com or forrent.com will have the perfect 1-bedroom with granite counters in your desired neighborhood.
All of those websites want to be in the top spot, so they spend a lot of money generating SEO-oriented content and trying to earn links from high quality sources. People talk about SEO as "free" traffic, but believe me -- for a competitive commercial term, you're paying for that traffic. You're just paying for it in an indirect, obfuscated way.
With that in mind, why not just have people pay for traffic directly? SEO lets sites spend (say) $1 million in an incredibly laborious way to earn the top spot on a bunch of terms and get 1 million clicks a year on those terms. Why not just let them spend that million with Google directly? The net result is less wasted effort.
Note that I'm only talking about clearly commercial terms.
If the ranking algorithm tries to maximize "value for the searcher", then SEO could actually mean "produce value for the searcher". Although that might often not actually be the case, it is probably still better than paying Google directly. That would translate ranking to "maximize the value for Google".
Google is the new Yellow Pages.
I've shared this opinion before. It's great for looking up services, companies and big websites, news articles, etc. "official content" you might say.
It's absolutely shite if you need to find a small blog or a tech article you read 5 years ago, whereas that used to be the thing it excelled at.
I find Bing and Yandex to be better for "uncommon" content.
I'd like to see Google get broken up and search even get turned into a nonprofit or public utility, personally (https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/a-proposal-for-non-profit-...).
I get that it's not a perfect solution, but barring something major changing, I don't see how another search engine will ever honestly compete.
I hate google censorship but having the government control what you can see would be much worse. This is a situation where because Google has an information filter monopoly it should not be Federalized. If it were a niche player, like NPR, then it's a different story.
> Essentially, a non-profit search engine would allow users to drive improvements to the algorithm by reporting bad results or collaborating on improvements. [...] I would envision a core team with many contributors - much like open-source projects hosted on Github.
I am absolutely sure that this will be abused. The (black hat) SEO is a huge industry, and it is continuously fighting to make search results worse for users. They did it before -- keywords meta does not work, simple pagerank no longer works, blog comments have NOFOLLOW and so on. It will be much worse in the proposed system -- the user votes will be faked, the good-looking commits will "by accident" drive up the position of specific websites, and so on.
Wouldn’t it then make sense for this utility to follow up by launching a better non-profit Yelp to address all the problems with Yelp?
Over the past two years it seems spam operations have really scaled up their business. I often find fresh domains, recently expired domains, and automatically generated sub-domains dominating the second page and creeping into the first page for many long tail terms.
I am surprised this article doesn’t focus on the poor quality of organic results.
Yeah definitely agree with this sentiment. Ads will be ads, but the organic results getting worse is the real issue.
Of course, I wouldn't exactly say they've gotten "worse" because those 2011 results looked pretty terrible...but certainly they've gotten much more "commercial".
When is someone going to start a paid search engine? I'd pay for a search engine that catered to my needs, instead of advertisers.
Brave is working on their own (eventually paid) search engine https://brave.com/brave-search/
I've been using DDG for many years now.
Sometimes I can't find what I'm looking for, and try Google. Every time, the results are SO BAD, I'm amazed people still manage to find stuff via it.
Google is still the best way to search Google properties.
The irony of an article about google search results is that the article is littered with ads that makes it so I have to scroll to read the good parts!
>>Google’s search results have gotten worse
Click on ads. That's the point, no?