[AnimalMuppet]

This sounds almost like Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Google made links on the web the measure of how good a page was. That became the target of everyone trying to do SEO. As a result, it stopped being a good measure of how good a page was.

But in the long run, nothing will work in that environment, because every measure will be gamed as soon as people figure out that Google is using it. Google's only choice is to try to stay ahead of the SEO crowd, and I'm not sure they can do that (well) for too much longer. In fact, if the article is to be believed, they're already starting to fail.

[cosheaf]

Yes, it's very similar with the added caveat that Google has an interest in serving results that have ads from their own network. This is why Google's metrics can be hacked. Anything that is barely above being classified as spam but serves ads from Google's ad network will be prioritized over other results simply because they have to hit their quarterly revenue targets. SEO hacking is not possible if a search engine is just a search engine but Google is also an ad network so they will always be susceptible to being gamed.

This is also the case for social media platforms. They're incentivized to surface content that generates engagement and ad revenue. Basically ads are at the root of all problems when it comes to the internet and the content on it.

[gundmc]

Here and further down this thread you repeatedly allege Google upranks pages if they participate in their ads program. Google explicitly says they do not do this [1]. Do you have evidence to contradict this?

[1] - https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9717?hl=en

[cosheaf]

You should sit down and think about how Google makes money instead of reading whatever is on their support page.

[gundmc]

Okay, so it's an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory. Got it.

[cosheaf]

Maybe I'll make a support page and then you'll read it and believe it.

[Lascaille]

> SEO hacking is not possible if a search engine is just a search engine

Uh, yes it is. If the owner of the site being searched is generating profit from that site being searched then they will game the search engine's algorithm to get them the most clicks.

[cosheaf]

I'm not interested in a pedantic argument. If you didn't understand what I meant then you should have asked for clarification. A search engine designed to surface useful information is not gameable if it is not in the business of generating quarterly profits from its own ad network. A site designed to drive traffic to itself can still try to hack the system by generating spam but without Google's incentives for surfacing such content because it serves ads from its own network there will be fewer such sites and useless content to go along with it.

At the moment Google is incentivized to uprank spam because the spam comes with ads from its own ad network.

[AnimalMuppet]

Of course it's still hackable.

A search engine finds 50 pages that are exact matches for the search. Which one does it present as the top of the list? How does it decide? Unless it decides literally by a random number generator, however it decides, someone will try to discover the algorithm, and exploit it. This is true whether or not the search engine allows or displays ads.

> I'm not interested in a pedantic argument. If you didn't understand what I meant then you should have asked for clarification.

I don't think it was a pedantic argument or a misunderstanding. I think Lascaille understood your position and disagreed with you, not just pedantically but over the substance.

[cosheaf]

This is actually what google does. They find the 50 sites for your query and then do a multi-armed bandit test to see which one gets the most clicks but with a bias towards sites that serve ads from the Google ad network. A search engine without that bias is not gameable because it will converge on the results that is most popular for a given query and not because it also serves ads that affect the search engine's bottom line.

Popularity is gameable but not the same way as Google is currently gameable because as soon as a site becomes popular and starts exploiting its ranking it will be easy enough to add a decay factor to prevent such sites from dominating the top results during the multi-armed bandit stage of ranking.

In any case, the logic of why Google is going to shit is obvious. Arguing about fixes is not going to change their underlying business model and why spam is dominating their results. As long as they are a search engine, an ad network, and a corporation that must maximize profits their results will continue to deteriorate until the top results are all just spam.

> I don't think it was a pedantic argument or a misunderstanding. I think Lascaille understood your position and disagreed with you, not just pedantically but over the substance.

Then that wasn't clear and seemed like a pedantic point since it's obvious that any algorithm is gameable and I should have made it clear that I wasn't talking about a perfect search engine but one that was not susceptible to profit driven spam (which is currently the reason that Google results are going to shit).

[AnimalMuppet]

May I suggest a term?

In my mind, if the web page tries to exploit knowledge of the search engine's algorithm, that's "gaming". This is done by the web page, without the deliberate co-operation of the search engine.

If the search engine is the one doing the funny business, to increase their own profit, to me that's beyond "gaming". That's... "corruption" might be the right word.

[Lascaille]

>I don't think it was a pedantic argument or a misunderstanding. I think Lascaille understood your position and disagreed with you, not just pedantically but over the substance.

Yes, I was a bit disappointed with the reddity response. The sites admin has an incentive to have their site appear first. The quality of their content may not suffer but they will additionally try to identify how the algorithm works and 'game' it.