Thinking of it, it would be an interesting test to compare the ranking of two similar sites, one with google ads, another with ads from another provider. Might be good evidence for antitrust litigation. But what do you do if they just prefer sites with more ads? Because due to their market position, that benefits them, but it isn't anti-competitive against other ad-pushers.
Just managers doing what they get more money for or devs hunting promotions by increasing ad revenue by 0.01% in the short term one sting at a time.
It's really good and IMO more than worth the price.
[0] https://kagi.com
Some people argue that Google possibly can't win the fight vs spam sites, but obviously it works perfectly fine manually blacklisting them.
It takes time to build ranking.
The underlying reason is probably that the spam sites use Google Ads (revenue which is tied to 1000s of PMs and managers bonuses) and that Google as an org is deeply dysfunctional at this point.
And not in a generic “this kind of content is bad for our users” but very specifically “site x.com is bad for our users.”
> Yeah, but then they're editorializing.
> And not in a generic “this kind of content is bad for our users” but very specifically “site x.com is bad for our users.”
Except that shouldn't be a problem because I'm pretty sure Google already blacklists domains.
The business reasons why Google doesn't take steps to remove the bad content and make their product pleasant to use again is so far from my understanding it might well be aliens running the company for all I know.