Maybe you're correct. I've heard that explanation before but it just seems too incredible that they'd undermine their monopolistic global billion dollar business for a measly share of the revenue of geeks4geeks.
I don't think it's an intentional decision anyone has taken, or that they intentionally made the search engine the way it works now, but more of a "there's nothing wrong here from out perspective, so what's there to fix?" kind of thing.
Google is a self playing piano with clueless leadership. There is probably no plan involved.
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.
the way you phrase it there makes it sounds miniscule, but you scale that up to the size of the SEOified internet and the numbers are surely into the billions
I was thinking the same. Taking in consideration the vast amount of such SEO farms, there's surely a lot of ad money to be spend/earned if you prioritize the "right" sites.
Re:The Fall of Stack Overflow
by marcosdumay on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @11:47AM
(#36864093)
Last time I saw, Google gets much more revenue from ads on search than from the entire 3rd party ecosystem.
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.