[marginalia_nu]

I honestly don't think this is the problem, like at all. There are human websites made by humans, still. There's more crap, sure, but the good stuff is largely still out there.

The problem begins and ends with the conflict of interest that Google both sells ads and selects search results. If they didn't have a vested interest in people visiting sites with their ads on them, they could decimate the number of spam results.

[_cs2017_]

Which websites are shown in the search results is not influenced by whether Google has ads on them.

The only thing that influences Google search results is Google's desire to keep as many people using Search as often as possible, since nearly all of Google's money comes from showing those text ads at the top of the Search results. This is all public information, you can read it in the 10K etc.

So if Search sucks, it's not because Google has the wrong incentives but because they can't solve the problems Search faces.

[ajmurmann]

Hard to proof this but anecdotally lots of energy that used to go into people's hobby or passion websites now is going into digital platforms like reddit, pinterest or Twitter, or if lucky substack or Medium. Some of those are walled gardens and Reddit as discussed here is where people now search. Much less out on the actual net

[marginalia_nu]

Well, since I actually run a search engine looking for this sort of stuff, I think I'm able to demonstrate that a lot of what was out on the net is still there, just exceptionally hard to find on Google.

Admittedly more in some areas than others.

[ajmurmann]

Hah, I didn't catch that I was responding to you. Definitely would defer to your experience. Love your search engine btw. It brings the fun back to the web!

[marginalia_nu]

If anything I think I'm only scraping the surface, since a lot of my methods involve ruthlessly discarding data that doesn't live up to a fairly blunt set of criteria. I think with something like a headless browser (and a lot more processing power), I could probably use laxer standards and find even more good stuff.

[cosheaf]

Show me a site made by people with manually instead of algorithmically curated links and content.

[marginalia_nu]

I'm not quite sure what you are asking, but this maybe one of these?

https://simplifier.neocities.org/

https://cheapskatesguide.org/

https://indieseek.xyz/

https://www.gameboomers.com/

https://sadgrl.online/

[xanaxagoras]

Hello, I have never heard of cheapskatesguide.org before and I am loving it so far. Thanks for sharing, I will check out the rest as well.

[cosheaf]

Great, now compare this to all the content generated on content farms for selling ads and gaming search engine rankings.

[marginalia_nu]

Right, but that's pretty trivially identified. I've had great success doing that with my search engine. Here's a thousand domains that are low in farmed contents in no particular order:

https://downloads.marginalia.nu/good-domains.txt

[cosheaf]

So why do you suppose Google doesn't surface the domains and results you presented? For example, I searched for "game reviews" and gameboomers was nowhere to be found.

[marginalia_nu]

I have no insight in their search engine, but I do know it would hurt their ad revenue to surface results that have no ads. Lends itself to speculation. But it could just be some confluence of other factors, of course. They seem to aggressively favor recent content (I do the opposite).

[mark_mcnally_je]

https://goodwebsites.org