PageRank worked when there was very little tangible value besides vanity in being number one for a particular search term, and when there was little competition between sites. Once SEO became a key strategy to growing a business PageRank had to shift from finding the most relevant results to removing the things that were pretending to be relevant results. That challenge is much harder.
I contend that practically every update to Google Search over the past 15 years has been to try to defeat SEO spam. There doesn't appear to be anything else. And, unfortunately for all of us, it's a battle Google are not winning.
Even worse, they are completely disincentivised to do anything about it, since presently the ads occupy most or all of the real estate most users see anyway. Buying ads to show up in that section so you aren't drowned out by spam is exactly what benefits GOOG's shareholders. And I say this as a GOOG shareholder, lol.
I've come to believe that the organic results are a niche product that Google could eliminate tomorrow and most consumers wouldn't really realize anything had changed. They'll go to the first result 99% of the time, and 99% of the time that's an ad.
They got a lot of bad sites, but they got rid of a lot of good ones too.
Now google is the modern yellow pages imho. It's more shallow than ever, but it's okay for many, and they can shake down legit sites for adwords to show up.
Totally agree with the main article, sadly however it's like what, 90% of people never go past the first page? And many still assume the top ads are vetted results that are better than all the rest.
Looking forward to leaving google as the yellow pages and encouraging more niche search engines, web rings, and similar.
Perhaps it might be accurate to say that as email has declined in popularity, “spam” has simply moved to the Web.
Perhaps what's missing here is a garbage collection algorithm. Whatever they are using as 'roots' is not working, and they can no longer infer trust by association. They need to curate and review sites. Or maybe they already do, but the humans' focus is directed by heuristics and those heuristics have been gamed.
Does anyone know if Google still has a functioning QA department? Perhaps this is the same disease we see everywhere of developers thinking they understand testing when really we know just enough to be dangerous.