[samwillis]

Most of these spam content farms are covered with ads supplied by Google. The incentive isn't necessarily there to remove them.

On top of that the worse the search results, the more likely the user will click an ad rather than an organic result. The Google of old wouldn't have been tempted by that incentive, but that Google is long dead.

Bad search result = more revenue from ads.

Obviously it's a fine balance, they don't want to loose users, but they will have the metrics to (religiously) work from.

As someone who used to run ad campaigns on Google until a couple of years ago, they are doing the same to advertisers. Users will happily click an ad, go back to the result and try another, many many times. Google have systematically made the advertising on search results worse, showing ads more regularly for poorer placements, removing control and visible auditing. It's all so they can extract more revenue from the advertisers.

[superasn]

This is such short term thinking imo but then what do i know. People who are paid millions of dollars are making these decisions at Google so maybe that's how the game is played. I still think treating your customers like the way they're doing it now eventually never always works out.

[samwillis]

When you have a metric driven company, where peoples career progression and bonuses are tightly tied to revenue numbers in a database, you incentivise this sort of thinking on an employee level. The visibility of the impact isn't necessarily there at the top.

[jtriangle]

Not just a metric driven company, but one that's so large the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing and neither of them could optimize their jobs for the other even if the incentives were for them to do so.

[gipp]

> This is such short term thinking imo but then what do i know.

That's because it's completely inaccurate. It's just a meme propagated by HN and some others, with essentially zero correlation to how decision-making and prioritization actually happens over there.

The idea that clickbait is somehow good for Google's bottom line is absurd on its face, before we even tackle the idea that ads' interests are controlling search ranking

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

> The idea that clickbait is somehow good for Google's bottom line is absurd on its face

I guess I am simply unable to see so I will ask: why do you think the idea as outlined in the GP is so illogical?

[hospitalJail]

>The incentive isn't necessarily there to remove them.

There is a reason people are using chatgpt as a replacement for google, or appending results with Reddit or Wiki

[drdaeman]

I'm waiting for a day there will be a capable LLM agent that would be able to crawl hundreds of results, read them all (working around all the obstacles, not spewing "reading content failed"), filter the marketing noise/SEO copypasta bullshit, find the meaningful bits, and present a nice summary.

[skinner_]

Current LLMs can go crazy just by seeing a single well-chosen word, see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPeJE8bSo6rAFoLqg/solidgoldm... for an amusing exanple. I think we need some breakthrough in adversarial training before LLMs can survive the very adversarial environment of SEO.