[jefftk]

This would predict that a query that has no advertising income will return no results, which is clearly not the case.

Having a search engine that people go to whenever they want to search for things is incredibly valuable, because they will come to you when they want to buy things and you can sell ads. But unless you consistently give the best results for all queries, people will go whenever does. It's worth investing strongly in all queries, not just highly monetizable ones.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

[6510]

> This would predict that a query that has no advertising income will return no results, which is clearly not the case.

I was about to say there are no such queries but then I remembered having to type a captcha for seemingly automated queries. The captcha page has no results on it obviously. This is because automated queries do not produce advertising revenue. You have to buy them.

I've typed an insane number of queries since the beginning. A decade ago I use to be able to find truly exotic articles, I could find every obscure blog posting on every blog with 3 readers and I was pretty sure google delivered all of it. The tiny communities that came with the supper niche topics rarely produced a link I didn't already find. If they did it was new and I didn't google for a while.

Today google feels like it is a pre-ordered list from which it removes the least matching articles. Only if the match is truly shit will it be moved slightly down the page. The most convincing in this is typing first name + last name queries in imagines and getting celeberties who only have the first or the last name.

People wont go, it has to get much worse before they do.

edit:

With humans an pets a good slap over the head or a firm NO! will usually do the trick.

[jefftk]

> I was about to say there are no such queries

There are very clearly many queries with no advertising revenue, because there are many queries that show no ads. Trying some searches off the top of my head that I expected wouldn't have ads, I don't get any ads on [cabbage], [who is the president], [3+5], or [why is the sky blue]. On the other hand, if I search for a highly commercial query like [mesothelioma] the first four results are ads.

> A decade ago I use to be able to find truly exotic articles, I could find every obscure blog posting on every blog with 3 readers

My model of what happened is that SEO got a lot better. When Google first came out it was amazing because Page Rank was able to identify implicit ranking information in pages. Once it's valuable to have lots of backlinks, though, this gets heavily gamed. Staying ahead of efforts to game the algorithm is really hard, and I think a lot of times people's experience of a better search engine comes from a time when SEO was much less sophisticated.

> The most convincing in this is typing first name + last name queries in imagines and getting celebrities who only have the first or the last name.

This hasn't been my experience, so I tried an image search for [tom cruise], curious if I would get other Toms. The first 45 responses were all of the celebrity, and image 46 was of Glen Powell in https://helenair.com/people/tom-cruise-helps-glen-powell-lea... which is a different kind of mistake. Do you remember what query you were seeing this on?

[alister]

> This hasn't been my experience, so I tried an image search for [tom cruise]

I believe what he means is that searching for first name + last name of someone who isn’t a celebrity gets you celebrities who match either the first name or last name.

Searching for Tim Neeson gets you a wall of photos of Liam Neeson: https://www.google.com/search?q=tim+neeson&tbm=isch

Searching for Tim Cruise blankets you with pictures of Tom Cruise, but it at least says “Showing results for tom cruise“ so you know it did an autocorrect. When I tried other first names + Cruise, the effect is less pronounced than with the Neeson example. Maybe it’s because cruise is a more common name as well as an English word.

[spunker540]

Thanks for clearly articulating what many people on HN seem to fail to grasp. It’s not that Google got worse over the years at surfacing the obscure content they used to so easily find. That obscure content has gotten completely buried under the mountain of content being published every day, and the cat and mouse game of SEO has evolved so rapidly that the problem space of generalized search is so much harder these days than it was 10-15 years ago. Not to mention the broader user base that they have to serve as well.

[6510]

It is the same thing! The mistake is obvious. For-profit content is prioritized. Google is the driving force behind the for-profit internet but sadly for google: you cant do organic ranking on commerce. ahhhh The index is now a [very limited] snapshot of the glory days.

You don't have to bother creating anything new unless you have something to sell and are willing to invest (big).

Facebook is actually a pretty pathetic implementation where we can still find content created by normal people. If people made traditional websites in stead of facebook groups and facebook pages NO ONE would be able to find it.

We've witnessed the great obliteration of what was once a nice place and now we have to hear google was not to blame?? The death by a thousand cuts is actually well documented.

We tell you what your site must look like or we'll gut it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin Google Penguin is a codename[1] for a Google algorithm update that was first announced on April 24, 2012. The update was aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines[2]

There, this is what the entire internet must look like. We went from indexing to engineering here.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

  rel="ugc"  

We recommend marking user-generated content (UGC) links, such as comments and forum posts, as ugc.

If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you might remove this attribute from links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time. Read more about avoiding comment spam.

Before this those elaborately contributing got actual credit for it. Do you think you got a choice in it? Google clearly demands you ban credit for comments. OR ELSE!

  rel="nofollow"  

Use the nofollow value when other values don't apply, and you'd rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site. (For links within your own site, use robots.txt, as described below.)

Woah association! How did we go from linking-to to association? It was important enough for readers but be careful to hide it from google. Such little unimportant websites simply shouldn't exist in our index. We command you to help keep our index clean of such filth!

Then the magical: We wont actually tell you what is wrong with your website! Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 39 "Don't tell customers more than they need to know." Get a budget and hire someone to do SEO. Deal with it, we don't care. No, you don't have any feedback.

[6510]

> There are very clearly many queries with no advertising revenue, because there are many queries that show no ads.

Queries without ads do produce revenue. They are an essential part of the formula.

Think of people standing around in bars. We cant argue that just standing there doesn't produce revenue.

The flowers on the table in a restaurant produce revenue.

Free parking produces revenue.

If queries without adds didn't produce revenue they wouldn't exist. More often enough it doesn't even take an extra query, the adds will sit behind the links.

[jefftk]

I don't think we disagree? Above I wrote: "Having a search engine that people go to whenever they want to search for things is incredibly valuable, because they will come to you when they want to buy things and you can sell ads."

[nailer]

> This would predict that a query that has no advertising income will return no results, which is clearly not the case.

No, it would predict that a query that has no advertising income will poor results. You can determine on your own whether that is the case.