[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.

[cosheaf]

That's reasonable. Substitute "corruption" wherever I used "gaming" when referring to maximizing profits at the expense of serving useful search results.

[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.