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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

SEO spam, and poor quality content I would guess. Google has bolted on a ton of ML over the last ten years to fight it.

And yet most Google results that don't point at one of a handful of major sites are SEO spam :-/

The spammers won. Google gave up and settled for "we like the right kind of spam—the kind that took a little effort, and makes us money".

I did a search earlier today on Google for "north face glacier" - turns out that the company North Face has a Glacier product so as far as I can tell that's all the search results contain.

Searching for "north face glaciation" did help as the first page of search results did have one entry on the topic I was actually searching on!

Maybe they should have a "I'm not buying anything" flag!

This has been the problem with results for the past few years. E-commerce gets priority in all things and you have to wade through pages of useless links if you want actual content about what you are searching for.

Big brands have the ad budget to advertise. That drives awareness. If they have offline stores, those can be thought of as both destinations AND interactive billboards which drive further brand awareness and demand for branded searches.

Many of the top search queries are navigational searches for brands.

And so if tons of people are searching for your brand then if there is a potentially related query that contains the brand term & some other stuff then they'll likely return at least a result or two from the core brand just in case it was what you were looking for.

It's not just ML, but the people that provide the labeling for the ML.

Google pays some large number of people to do search and grade the various results they get to see if the answers are good, which then helps feed back ML.

Heck, according to this article[0], google has been paying people to evaluate their search results since 2004.

[0] https://searchengineland.com/interview-google-search-quality...

It doesn't feed back into the ML directly, according to Google. Instead they use it to evaluate changes to search algorithms. If they get an increase in thumbs up back from the Quality Raters then their changes were positive. If not, they figure out why.

The original 2012 FTC investigation of Google anti-trust activity showed how they might have abused this process. Interesting read, no matter which side you take: http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/

I feel for certain topics, especially anything to do with tutorials or coding, even Google falls foul to SEO content. Just Google ‘android custom ROM <phone model>’ for instance. There’s stock pages for all of them, identical save for the phone model, and clearly not applicable.

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