It’s much simpler than that. Google is an ad company, not a search company. SEO spam gives them ad clicks just the same as quality content, if not more so. As long as they don’t became bad enough that everybody switches to the competition, they simply don’t have to care.
Comment on Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Here’s my theory… Google wants to artificially fuck up it’s search functionality. It wants to offer good performance for a fee. And it’s going to be doing that by giving it’s own AI the correct filters while at the same time tripping every other AI capable of searching the net such that the other AI results become garbage and only the Google one works correctly. Anyway that’s my conspiracy theory, fuck Google with a bunch of sharp forks.
skarlow181@lemmy.world 5 months ago
HessiaNerd@lemmy.world 5 months ago
SEO spam gives them ad clicks
It does? I thought the point of SEO was to show up in search results without having to pay for keyword placement.
skarlow181@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It’s not about the ads on Google.com, but the ads on the SEO sites themselves, those are also served by Google. If Google search would give you good clean non-commercial sites without ads, they would lose money.
MaggiWuerze@feddit.de 5 months ago
Exactly. Google has an incentive to send you to the most ad infested seo garbage, that just barely answers your search.
Chadus_Maximus@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Or they just cannot complete with literal millions of people dedicated to optimize their webpages for discovery using Google.
Mkengine@feddit.de 5 months ago
If other services like kagi can offer better results they should be able as well, right?
ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
I think it’s simply a question of what are Google’s interests. Users doesn’t pay anything to Google for the service, so that’s not where Google’s interests are. Advertisers pay Google, so that’s where Google’s interests are. Google has no interests to make the search better for users, they want to make it better for advertisers.
maness300@lemmy.world 5 months ago
They still need to make the system appealing to users.
FoxBJK@midwest.social 5 months ago
And AI is just making it worse. Entire websites of SEO-optimized content can be generated in seconds now. No one will be able to keep up with all that!