Huh, maybe I don't eat there enough to notice differences, but on the occasions lately that I've had a McDonald's burger, I haven't noticed the quality being anything but terrible. Not entirely unpleasant, but just not at all a high quality meal, even compared to some of the other fast food burger places.
Organic search results only ever profit Google if they answer the user's question, because it makes that user more likely to use Google again and click an ad in the future. If a user searches something and the top result doesn't answer their question, then Google hasn't done it's job and the user is less likely to use Google again and therefore less likely to click an ad in the future.
Surely the most profitable option for Google is to answer people's questions quickly and easily, whether you think these questions are answered by Wikipedia instead of a business site targeted to answering that question is a different story.
I just don't understand how Google's goal of "answering people's questions" is somehow opposite to "providing quality" for users. I think for most of HN, they have a very narrow view that "quality" means antiquated wiki-type sites.
This is simply false. It would only be true if there was a better alternative to Google, which there isn’t.
Obviously the best for Google would be to send the user to a website with the best content and that contains Google ads but that's often not both the case.
It's an optimization problem, and generally you cannot optimize for two variables, profits and user satisfaction.
Maximizing only for profits would probably lead to completely garbage results so they probably have to compromise.
I also think that's why it's very hard for competitors to compete. As soon as one is going to get credibly menacing they'll improve on the quality again to preserve their position.
I think that has happened with McDonald's for instance. A few years ago the quality was at it's lowest, the food definitely started to feel fake, air filled and not satisfying. Since the small local competition of hand crafted hamburger popped up a bit everywhere, and credible international competitors ramped up (5 guys, in n out...) they had to improve the quality. And my impression is that it's been a bit more than a year that the quality dramatically improved, and their hamburgers actually taste like food again.
I think it's simply the quality versus profits cursor and it can be adapted any time.