> I don't believe for a second that Google's algorithms are unable to identify and remove content marketing blogspam.

Easy for me to believe. They have to use some formula, and as soon as they change it, well, there's a massive industry dedicated to getting around it. If their algorithm is just "filter out what's useless", that's AGI.

Then what’s the point of using Google? In terms of AGI, we have that if Google where to say employ people to look at say the top million searches and heavily penalize junk they could make real headway.

Personally, I swapped to DuckDuckGo in 2019 and have been consistently happier but Bing or whatnot is probably equally valid at this point.

I've used DDG for years now. They give me the exact same results that Google does, all the time. And why wouldn't they when they're indexing the same web sites. Full-text search isn't rocket science, after all, and it's not like new websites with quality content have surfaced lately given the incentives. I don't even bother to cross-check Google's result anymore, something I occasionally used to do maybe two years ago.

That's interesting, whenever I search for anything programming related the results differ greatly and google always wins.

I actually switched to DDG cold-turkey and didn't use !g at all. Until I couldn't solve some problem and someone in my team said "it's the first result on google", I felt pretty stupid then. Since then I've given up and just automatically stick !g whenever I'm searching anything programming related.

> Full-text search isn't rocket science, after all

Full text search isn't, but ranking the results is - and more importantly there is no objectively best ranking.

Yes, and Google sucks at it.

I use DuckDuckGo by default but I probably add !g to redirect to Google 2/3 of the time. DDG seems to be a little bit worse about rewarding user-hostile SEO spam [0], but honestly the main reason is that with Google I can use [1] to block those domains. DDG is also still noticeably worse for vague or complex queries IME.

[0] When I search "postgres array_agg" on DDG - something I actually had to search for today - the Postgres documentation is the 6th hit (not even visible without scrolling down!), preceded by crap like https://archive.is/7JeSe. On Google it's the 2nd hit, also preceded by what seems like SEO spam.

[1] https://github.com/wildskyf/personal-blocklist

I sometimes find myself going to Google for some complex queries or obscure error messages as well, but I'll usually try an alternative query first.

In this case, DDG happens to have a bang shortcut for postgres which takes you directly to the search results on the PostgreSQL site if you query !postgres array_agg.

There's a surprisingly large number of these which end up making it more useful than the generic web search results page overall.

> we have that if Google where to say employ people to look at say the top million searches and heavily penalize junk

I doubt a million is going to make a dent in it. Content marketers are automatically generating this stuff, and Google has billions of users, many of which will occasionally invent a novel query.

If they curated like that, esp with employees, they'd open themselves to an infinite number of lawsuits.

The point of content marketing blogspam is to pester the reader with AdWords and the occasional affiliate link.

Old-school useful content is rarely monetized, just someone sharing their passion for something. Occasional affiliate link, with the obligatory apologetic "hey web servers cost money, so I included some affiliate links here!"

The uselessness is just a side effect of Google directing you toward paying customers.

You're thinking of Content Farms. I think the current villain is Content Marketing, which is to attract people to your website without paying for AdSense, via an inane blog post. Like the Michelin guide or Guinness book did before the internet.

The reason Google keeps those results near the top is because it drives up the cost of AdSense, since multiple competitors are fighting for the first page of organic results with those tactics, and AdSense is a way to "cut the line".

The result for users is that the first page of most result pages is littered with advertisement, either via real AdSense or with those inane marketing blog posts.

The other answers are probably the actual reason, but it's amusing to me to think that it's because giving you incorrect results drives up engagement on the search because you keep going back… it's also obviously the wedding metric to use in this case, but that has never stopped people before.

The sites are all packed with google ad spam. Why would they not promote them. Google benefits when people click fake download buttons too.

If you need to click more links to find useful content, then google probably does benefit.