Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by spaceman_2020 979 days ago
My biggest gripe with Google is how the ranking algorithm has essentially killed any innovation on the content and user experience part of the web.

I was searching for some poems by Pablo Neruda. The first few results all had awfully designed pages filled with ads, pop ups, bad fonts - things you don’t want to see when reading a poem.

Yet, these awful sites continue to dominate the SERPs for queries like these because they are all ancient, have tons of backlinks from ages ago, and thus in the eyes of Google, are “authoritative”.

No one wants to put in the effort to create a website that collects, say, poems with a better user experience because they know that most traffic will come from search and they can’t really rank against these ugly old dinosaurs.