[heavyset_go]

I'm still bitter that they've deprioritized results from SongMeanings.net in favor of garbage like Genius. The former is one of the only sources for lyrics from smaller acts, especially from the 90's to early 2010's. Since it's from the pre-Web 2.0 era, it's disappeared from Google's search results.

[shiftpgdn]

Same with Sheldon Brown’s website on bicycle maintenance. Much of the information on his site is still the best resource on the internet but instead Google would rather serve irrelevant results that show ads.

[stavros]

Same with all organic content. It's just all bullshit SEO spam now, I haven't landed on some dude's blog in ages, and some dude's blog is my favorite part of the web.

[hetspookjee]

It’s only a matter of time till it gets ripped and hosted on another ad filled website like all the fake stack overflow websites these days. So at least the material is not lost.

[gregmac]

> but instead Google would rather serve irrelevant results that show ads.

Does showing Google Adsense ads actually result in a higher ranking in organic search results?

It makes total sense for their business model, to the detriment of users. I've just never considered that before.

[vocram]

Gosh! It’s been a while that none of my searches ended up on that site. Now I know the reason.

[prox]

Same with images, I used to search for historical images, but it’s all a wave of stockimage this and that, and ofcourse flipping pinterest, which usually is just a link to real content anyway.

Google Search is aptly named, for finding something relevant and without ads plastering is almost impossible.

Anyway, I am happy with DDG now.

[Tenoke]

I get songmeanings from Google sometimes but I personally like Genius due to the annotated and upvote/downvoted comments and it is a more visited site so I get why it's ranked higher.

[llamataboot]

Maybe someday web 7.0 will remember than engagement doesn't equal quality and there's a long enough tail of people that would pay for a good search engine that they'd support your small company just fine, and the hockey sticks, venture capitalists, and the masses can go drown in adwords.

[tomatofrank]

Totally agree. Genius is such a great app. I remember being pretty upset when I read this article a few years ago, which shed light on Google's anti-competitive behavior against small companies that make a difference that Google can't make themselves.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius-law...

[lumost]

I don't know anything about google internals, but in many other applications the search engine is optimized on long-term engagement and profit data. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out google optimized page rankings based on the profit google earns from it's ad business on the page.

[tomatofrank]

The evidence supporting this is the 4 YouTube videos at the top of the list, followed by 3 of those 4 YouTube videos on page 2 (LOL).