Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by matheweis 2531 days ago
There’s a reason for this; click through rate on ads is higher on pages that don’t achieve the user goal.

I suspect that the AI models powering the search results develop a sort of symbiotic relationship with the spam - if the user actually finds what they are looking for by clicking through an ad on an otherwise spammy page, everyone “wins”; the user found what they were looking for with minimum effort, google got their ad revenue, and the spammy page got a little cut for generating content that best approximating the local minimum that links the users keywords to actual intent...