You can't compare the good faith web from 1996, which consisted of a bunch of nerds blogging, to today's web. Everything of any importance in our society moved online, and much of it needs monetization. And since on average users won't pay a cent for anything, ads it is. We very much have a role in this outcome ourselves.
Even in a hypothetical situation where ads would no longer be the driving force of algorithms, something else will. As soon as something gets large enough, it will be gamed. If not for commercial reasons, it might be cultural/political influence.
I will end by reminding ourselves that us techies should spend some more time with ordinary folks. I agree with everybody here that Google Search has been getting worse and worse for years now, especially for our niche searches.
It's a mistake though to think that this is widely experienced as such. My mum looks up an unknown ingredient in a recipe and within a second sees a picture of it. That means it works. All kinds of personal data might be shared in the process but since you can't really see that, it didn't happen. From her point of view, Google Search works extremely well and is close to magic.
The point being, Google doesn't give a shit that you don't get the best answer for your query on JavaScript closures. Nobody searches for that, and those that do, block ads.
What makes you assume non-techies aren't feeling like the quality of results is lower? Plenty of people moving their search needs to reddit, tiktok, even pinterest seems to indicate that it _does_ affect them - they just don't articulate it as "the google algorithm yada yada"
Reddit search is garbage. What people do is they search on google “headphones_model review reddit” on Google which shows them somewhat less fake information than the SEOd blog posts that would come up.
Sure maybe it would be good if Google prioritised these results by default but that would just result in reddit becoming more manipulated since whatever the default search shows will be gamed.
If not priority, at least fix the actively-misleading results page. So many examples, choose your own adventure.
One that annoyed me today: on mobile, reddit search results will all say like "3 days ago" or "6 days ago" and then the actual link takes you to a six year old post.
Personally, whenever I want to search anything about TV shows (particularly the most recent ep), games (particularly sticky ones like rimworld or factorio), I quite literally search directly on Reddit, bc the Google results are never relevant
This says more about a shift in the way of consuming content, and the quality of the content than the search results quality/algorithm itself. People are tired of fluff and want direct quick answers; Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest, etc, all provide that.
People don't want to search for a bread recipe, click to see it and be forced to scroll through 3 folds of ads and the history of bread in eastern europe, to get to the list of ingredients.
> People are tired of fluff and want direct quick answers;
When didn't people want "direct quick answers"? Google got popular because that's what it used to give you - the answer you want used to always be the first or second...
It's such a strange phenomenon. My well-paid tech friends scoff when I say I pay $9.99 (annually, not monthly) for my little podcast app [0]. Meanwhile they have YouTube Premium. I don't get it.
See I haven't even made it there. I'm in a household that subscribes to Netflix, Prime, Disney, Spotify, and several Twitch streamers, yet I'm enough of a cheapskate that I somehow still slum it with free-tier Youtube and Castbox.
At least I throw my preferred YouTubers a few bucks a month on Patreon, but that feels different since I'm paying them more or less directly for the work they do, rather than buying myself a marginally better experience from Google.
> Even in a hypothetical situation where ads would no longer be the driving force of algorithms, something else will. As soon as something gets large enough, it will be gamed. If not for commercial reasons, it might be cultural/political influence.
While this sounds true, I think it actually needs motivation.
As far as I can tell, this type of analysis typically bases itself on only a few examples.
Even in a hypothetical situation where ads would no longer be the driving force of algorithms, something else will. As soon as something gets large enough, it will be gamed. If not for commercial reasons, it might be cultural/political influence.
I will end by reminding ourselves that us techies should spend some more time with ordinary folks. I agree with everybody here that Google Search has been getting worse and worse for years now, especially for our niche searches.
It's a mistake though to think that this is widely experienced as such. My mum looks up an unknown ingredient in a recipe and within a second sees a picture of it. That means it works. All kinds of personal data might be shared in the process but since you can't really see that, it didn't happen. From her point of view, Google Search works extremely well and is close to magic.
The point being, Google doesn't give a shit that you don't get the best answer for your query on JavaScript closures. Nobody searches for that, and those that do, block ads.