[hombre_fatal]

Punishment/vengeance is a popular idea around here, but you have to also remember that a search engine is supposed to bring you the most relevant results.

Filtering out, say, Stack Overflow or Reddit because it has ads doesn't help you when it answers your question and is perhaps the only thing on the internet that truly does.

People seem to think there's this ad-less replica of the internet, sitting right behind our ad-riddled internet, where everything they want exists for free, it's just hidden. In reality, the websites making money are the ones providing the vast majority of things people are looking for.

Use https://search.marginalia.nu if you want to severely punish ads.

[nvrspyx]

Maybe instead of heavily punishing websites with ads, a search engine could instead punish heavily ad-driven websites. A lot of the SEO-exploiting blog mills are filled to the brim with ads where the goal is to get you to visit to view as many ads as possible, not provide good content that's funded by ads.

[function_seven]

Some sort of ratio algorithm would be nice.

Does this site (in general, not just this page) have more than 5 advertisements per page? Between 2 and 4?

Does this site attempt to load 12 trackers? "Only" 4 trackers? Just 1?

Does an AI text analysis of the first few paragraphs match on this nonsense?:

> Fixing your gadget is important. Many people find that their gadget sometimes breaks. Gadget helps us do action easier, and improves our lives. We all hate it when our Gadget doesn't work the way we expect it to. It can be frustrating. Read below for tips on how to fix your gadget. (Followed by 3 more paragraphs of filler before getting to regurgitated gems like "reboot it".

I'm sure we have the AI tech now to semantically see this bullshit and downrank it. Right? (Ok, maybe I overestimate how easy this would be. Forgive me, I'm just ranting here)

[gregmac]

Do you mean the advertising company that runs a search engine should punish pages in the results that... show their ads? Or just when it's a "lot" of their ads? Or should they only do that if the pages are showing ads from their competitors?

[derefr]

I’m honestly surprised that Google thinks that a page with N ads deserves N times the CPM. The more ads, the less attention each ad can grab, no? I wonder whether just treating ads as zero sum (regardless of ad provider) — such that a page with 5 ads, 2 of which are Google ads, gets a payout of 2/5 the CPM of a page with one Google ad and no other ads — would basically drive all these SEO mills out of business. While also not really impacting honest ad-sponsored sites (like Reddit), that only tend to run one ad per page.

[nvrspyx]

I mean when it's a lot of ads. It could perhaps be an ad to content ratio? It seems SEO spam contains more ads than content most of the time.

[kelnos]

Or maybe the search engine shouldn't care about ads at all, and just figure out what is good content and what is bad content, and what actually answers queries well.

[ajmurmann]

When I said "punish", I meant that the ranking algorithm should do that. It's not about vengeance, it's about filtering out SEO spam. The problem with filtering out SEO spam by detecting it as such is that it's by definition an arms race. That's why I propose to instead of looking for the symptom (SEO spam) pull it out at the wrong incentive structure that's causing it (ads).