[HN Gopher] I've never seen a post that better summarized what h...
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       I've never seen a post that better summarized what happened to
       Google
        
       Author : dmart
       Score  : 21 points
       Date   : 2022-05-23 21:04 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | james-redwood wrote:
       | This is scarily accurate, and partly why I've switched to Kagi
       | (www.kagi.com) for what Google used to be. While they will
       | introduce their paid service soon, I believe it would be worth
       | every penny.
        
         | richardsocher wrote:
         | How is it better than you.com? We plan to stay free. (founder
         | of you.com here)
        
       | cranky908canuck wrote:
       | FWIW, I just ran that query, and got what looked like materially
       | better results.
       | 
       | That being said, I've seen the same sort of useless results
       | elsewhere (so maybe someone saw this particular case and
       | intervened). I have been told that part of the SEO industry works
       | like "take this sample post and rephrase it with the following
       | keywords and product links". So you get the same warmed-over
       | results on the topic, and it's hard to find the posts that drill
       | deeper.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | cranky908canuck wrote:
       | Similar to this but not (maybe) as nefarious is the links to what
       | looks like the result of the <solemn-and-important-font>Quarterly
       | Conversation with Your Manager to Set Goals and
       | Milestones</solemn-and-important-font>. The outcome of the
       | QCYMSGM is "Goal: understand $(technology); Milestone: write a
       | blog post about it". So you get a lot of half-baked "Intro to
       | OAuth2" links that don't really help that much.
        
       | solarmist wrote:
       | It's not a summary of what happened to google (as far as I can
       | tell), but an example of what it's become.
       | 
       | I want to know what happened. What were the individual things
       | that made sense in isolation, but added up to this steaming turd.
        
         | AnimalMuppet wrote:
         | "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
         | measure" (Goodhart's Law).
         | 
         | Google measures how "good" pages are for a given search query.
         | (It doesn't matter how.) Those who own the pages want those
         | pages listed as high as possible, so the measure of how good
         | _their_ page is becomes a target (for them, not for Google).
         | That 's enough to make Goodhart's Law apply to Google rankings.
        
         | simonswords82 wrote:
         | Too much focus on ad revenue to drive revenue growth to the
         | detriment of the user search experience is my guess
        
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       (page generated 2022-05-23 23:02 UTC)