I hate SEO-optimized garbage as much as the next person, but I don't see how this avoids that problem other than being small enough that nobody is optimizing for your search engine.
If this was to become popular I suspect it would be overflown with SEO garbage just like Google. I guess that means we can use it while it lasts.
I'm not convinced. I'm not convinced I'll ever get big enough for that to be a problem. Even if I'm 5 times bigger than every current competitor to Google combined, I've only got few percent of the market share.
But sure, even if that would happen, I have an ace up my sleeve. An devastating and incredibly simple way of limiting spam, which is to go for the wallet and de-rank sites for having ads.
Google could and would never do that, of course, because they are selling the same ads. It would undermine their entire business model. This conflict of interest is the core of Google's search engine spam problems.
It seems that you're talking about de-ranking the fat middle of the curve which serves the banal content consumed by those in the fat middle themselves, leaving only the tail end, theoretically serving the corresponding tail end of content consumers, which might approximate the early days of the internet before the normies invaded, before the barrier to entry was lowered such that it approached zero.
Google would get sued if they did that. Google are already sued a lot for their search ranking behavior, everything they do they have to be able to defend in court.
In general, it's a lot smaller problem. With the current SEO spam, the goal is to get a visit, not necessarily actual engagement. To get something out of amazon affiliate links or similar, you actually need to convince someone to click the link and go to amazon and buy something. That's a quite different beast.
SEO only exists because search engines are user-hostile garbage.
Imagine being able to blacklist domains from your results. That would basically solve the problem, because the first time you encounter spammy garbage you'd simply nuke it forever.
You could even have pre-made open source lists. Basically ublock origin for SEO crap.
In a very real sense, it only happens because it's being allowed to happen.
> Imagine being able to blacklist domains from your results. That would basically solve the problem, because the first time you encounter spammy garbage you'd simply nuke it forever.
> but I don't see how this avoids that problem other than being small enough that nobody is optimizing for your search engine.
Google doesn't have any countermeasures against a lot of what we consider spam and generally user-hostile.
Google could at least try to detect spammy recipes by for example detecting certain keywords (likelihood of it being a recipe) and then downranking it based on length, with the idea that if we're confident it's a recipe it should be short and to the point, and anyone telling their life story on it can go to hell.
Google could detect listicles similarly.
Yes, this can all be gamed, and I will expect there to be an arms race, but it will at least raise the bar and make spam content costlier to produce and require constant maintenance as Google's algorithms get better. Yet, right now, Google isn't even trying any of this, and why would they? Spam typically has ads and/or analytics on it, both which can be Google's and thus benefit them. Why would they ever expend extra engineering effort (thus money) to ultimately earn less money if they're successful?
In addition, the ultimate counter-attack to profit-motivated spam would be to just detect & downrank what gets them paid - ads, affiliate links or analytics, as I explained in previous comments such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32434317. All of those often require things that would make them trivially detectable, whether it's ads that must be a third-party script so the ad network can detect fraud, affiliate links which ultimately must lead to a large affiliate domain such as Amazon and sometimes mandate legal disclosures that can be detected, or analytics that likewise rely on a third-party script.
Google may be a bit limited due to their monopolistic position. Many of the more devastating things they could do would probably skirt pretty close to anti-competitive behavior.
There's Bing, etc. I could see issues where Google is unfairly prioritising their own properties, but if they're merely going after user experience (including downranking ads which hurts their bottom-line), I'm not sure where the antitrust argument is?
They can always offer it as an option that the user must explicitly opt-in, that way nothing is forced onto the users (yet everyone will enable it pretty quickly if the results end up better).
Well if you have a 97%+ market share, I'd to say you're a defacto monopoly.
Might fall within refusal-to-deal (which is fairly nebulous concept), especially given they are also in the advertisement business. Anything that could be interpreted as blocking search results with competing ads to their own might come under scrutiny.
If this was to become popular I suspect it would be overflown with SEO garbage just like Google. I guess that means we can use it while it lasts.