Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
superhighway98.com

What does this even mean?

The web wasn't "supposed to" be anything. Though I'm not sure what magic search engine OP actually has in mind and how it's supposed to work.

Besides, one of the modern mysteries is that we're in the age of instant information yet you'll notice how many people will write up an entire comment online or bicker IRL instead of doing a cursory search. I don't think it's the internet creating human stupidity / laziness. Unfortunately we had that long before, and search engines simply try to show the best results with minimal context.

Also, I think discussion around tech would be much improved if we tried to come up with a better idea whenever we go through the trouble of complaining about something. Anyone can enumerate why things are suboptimal, and usually when you try to come up with alternatives, you find out it's just trade-offs with no ideal solution.

Trying to pitch an alternative solution (like how a search engine should work) helps drill down into real conversational bedrock that's much more interesting.

But Google's propensity to reward sites/pages that are popular or new rather than those which are actually more accurate/better in terms of quality is definitely an issue.

Google, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook all prioritize freshness. Instead of being exposed to things outside our comfort zones, we take solace protected inside filter bubbles.

Instead of the best answer, what usually floats to the top is the most repeated, the most seod, the newest, the most politically correct.

Google's results are considerably worse than they were and part of that is google trying too hard to think what we want instead of guiding us to ask better questions.