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by ssl-3 750 days ago
Web pages are optimized for the most popular search engine.

If any of Ask Jeeves or Lycos or Webcrawler or AltaVista had risen to the top of the heap instead of Google, then web pages would have been optimized for that respective bot instead.
1 comments
the_snooze 750 days ago
What you say is true, but it doesn't excuse Google for failing to take steps that mitigate what we're seeing today. All it would have taken was some restraint: some combination of being less dominant in the market (i.e., optimizing for a 90%-market-share search engine is different vs. 60%-market-share) and giving users more control over search results (e.g., allowing users to blacklist entire domains for themselves).

We have a garbage Google-specific web because websites didn't have to satisfy anyone else; not other search engines, and not even the users themselves. Instead of Google delivering customers to websites, Google positioned itself to be the only customer.

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ssl-3 750 days ago
While it would be absurd for me to say that an advertising behemoth like Google has no influence on the decisions of users, it would also be absurd for me to say that Google is somehow empowered to force users to do...anything, at all.

Free will still exists. Nobody from Menlo Park has put a gun to anyone's head to make them use Google to search the web instead of Bing or DDG or Yandex or whatever.

> All it would have taken was some restraint: some combination of being less dominant in the market (i.e., optimizing for a 90%-market-share search engine is different vs. 60%-market-share)

So, let me get this straight: The idea is that Google Search sucks, and the suggested cause for this level of suck is that it is so popular that it causes many publishers to deliberately poison the well using Google-optimized SEO. (Or, more simply: That Google has reached critical mass, and that this is problematic for Google users.)

And, well: I don't disagree. That does appear to be the state of things.

But the apparent proposed corrective action is for it to somehow make itself less popular? By doing what, exactly? Sucking harder? Does it not already suck hard enough?

What a confounding paradox.

Wouldn't a simpler and less paradoxical plan of attack -- that anyone can accomplish completely and absolutely, starting right now -- be to just not use Google search at all for one's own dealings in life?

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