Re:Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
by alangibson on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @10:36AM
(#29393248)
The hard part of what Google does is spam and abuse prevention. If you only indexed known-good sources I think the hard part would basically be done. Providing good search results, rich queries, sentiment analysis etc is all old hat by now.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
by jeffbee on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @10:56AM
(#29393500)
"Known-good" sources have a serious habit of getting owned by malware and replaced by organized crime schemes. Anti-abuse can't be handled by whitelists, it needs to be an online system.
Re:Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
by alangibson on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @11:50AM
(#29394169)
Garbage sources have a serious habit of getting taken over. It's not that common with quality sites, but also not impossible. A simple downvoting system would be good enough.
Re:Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
by marginalia_nu on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @02:36PM
(#29396440)
The problem is that even quality sites die. And when they do, their domain gets poached and suddenly it's not a quality site anymore. But according to the ranking algorithms it's the same site, since its quality is measured by how many links it gets.
Coopting quality sites is a bit of a cottage industry. There is also a significant amount of hacked wordpress sites. Their domain may be quite reputable, but they're unknowingly host to a ton of spam.