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by CM30
3722 days ago
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Unfortunately, this is likely going to be a problem till strong AI becomes a thing, since there's no real way to judge content quality automatically without it. Also, popularity may not be tied to quality, but to some degree, it's tied to what people expect to get when they search. Which is its own problem, since someone like Microsoft or Apple could do anything, yet people would be suspicious if they didn't show up for obvious queries. So it's a balancing act between 'rank the sites that might be better but less obscure', or 'rank the ones people expect to find because they already know about them'. As for having reservations about SEO tactics... it should depend on exactly what they are. Something that hurts communities or users (like spamming forums or social media) is pretty damn sleazy, and is a quick way to commit business suicide. As is outright or borderline criminal behaviour for rankings. |
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While this is true in absolute terms, there are ways to improve that I don't really know of Google doing (not that they aren't, as I don't have information on their internal workings). Google's algorithms seem to consider linking supreme and they don't appear to do any of their own research. I think a research/polling program to get users to rate some content would greatly improve search results. Other signals like the average reading level of the page's text could also be used to surmise the type and quality of content.
Overall, we need more humanity in the search results and less blind belief in the academic theory. This is a lapse in judgment frequently made by academics and mathematicians; they refuse to accept the evidence of failure that lies in front of them (since their theory/model/whatever doesn't say it should exist) until the failure reaches catastrophic, impossible-to-ignore thresholds. We need more humanity in a lot of systems, in my estimation.