https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/
Google thought it had a business model that incentivized them to stay good. The opportunity to sell results didn't go away and eventually they took it.
Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?
31–40 of 40 posts
Re: Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?
#32But SEO will enshittify anything new that replaces it. Sure, Google has done some damage to search, but search quality is bad because of SEO poisoning the well. All we can hope for is old school Google for a the first few years.
Re: Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?
#33You mean, like https://www.kagi.com ? A search engine you pay for. Every link is there to serve _you_. There are not ads.
I haven't tried Kagi yet but I'm curious how does Kagi combat SEO spammers?
Go try it. You get 100 free searches per month, or something like that.
I'm a happy customer.
Re: Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?
#34SEO is something that happened to Google, any search engine will have to deal with it. What changes to the business model are you envisaging?
In terms of enshittification, a good model would be downranking by number of ads and tracking. That applies some counterpressure.
Re: Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?
#35The problem isn't Google, it's the internet. Google might be deliberately making their search results "worse" (for whatever value of "worse" you prefer), but nobody else is doing all that much better, despite the obvious motivation to do so. I'm a DuckDuckGo user, but I don't think that the results I get are particularly better than Google results. When people complain about Google, the root cause is usually that the…
> The problem isn't Google, it's the internet.
I partially agree, but Google itself has also been going downhill in my experience. For example, in recent months the topmost Google results often omit one or more of my search terms, and I have to search again with quotes to force words to be included. I understand the reasoning behind including results that omit a term, but putting those at the top is just silly. Yesterday I did a search that included "discontinued", and the top result along with most of the first page of results ignored "discontinued"[1], so the results were mostly the opposite of what I was searching for.
1: With the text below the result "Missing: discontinued | Show results with: discontinued"
Re: Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't tried Kagi yet but I'm curious how does Kagi combat SEO spammers?
Extremely well! No idea how it's doing it in the general results, but they're orders of magnitude better than Google / Bing etc. Plus you get to fine tune results yourself, ie: downrank w3schools etc so the garbage sites are less likely to appear in your results. You can even exclude them completely.
A good strategy could be to rank on the number of ads ... more ads in the page, lower the rank.
Re: Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Extremely well! No idea how it's doing it in the general results, but they're orders of magnitude better than Google / Bing etc. Plus you get to fine tune results yourself, ie: downrank w3schools etc so the garbage sites are less likely to appear in your results. You can even exclude them completely.
A good strategy could be to rank on the number of ads ... more ads in the page, lower the rank.
They sort of do that.
Next to link, you have information about how many ads were detected in the site, and sites with more ads are lower ranked. They also have an index of their own which only allows sites with few ad detections (they use number of blocked things by ublock, so it also counts tracking links etc)
Re: Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?
#38You mean, like https://www.kagi.com ? A search engine you pay for. Every link is there to serve _you_. There are not ads.
I was fine with the simple ads in the sidebar of the Google results of yore. It felt like a fair deal.
I think the problem is then you eventually get SEOification. I suppose you can just reset every now and again. Maybe like give a training program to get SEO people real jobs.
Re: Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?
#39The real prize is to deshittify the content on the web. Ignoring copyrights for a moment, it should be possible to rewrite pages in 1000s of sites down to just the information. StackOverflow could just have the Q&As, news sites could just have the news, Pinterest would just have the pictures. Remove all the signup nags and popups. With good tools, one person could probably maintain the deshittifier for a few sites, a…
ChatGPT is basically the deshittifier that rewrites thousands of sites to just the information…? And it has a much better interface than original Google. Every query starts with the equivalent of “I’m feeling lucky”, but then you can ask further questions.
Nah this tech will poison the web. People don't know what it is and take it too seriously.
Re: Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?
#40I think the question boils down on how to stop enshittification. Because if we were to recreate all the enshittified platforms, what would stop them from becoming enshittified anew? We must understand the mechanism of enshittification and fundamentally break this mechanism, making it nearly impossible for a new platform to enter the enshittification cycle again.
I think this calls for a government funded national un-enshittification Laboratory to study the social dynamics of enshittification and develop hygiene practices. Work must be done quickly before enshittification research becomes enshittified!