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Comment by navyrain | Hacker News Reader

The adage "cock-up over consipiracy" comes to mind when reading this. What the author implies is that Google is knowingly keeping spam sites in their results so as to profit from them. Google is still the largest player in search by a good margin, so I suspect it is more the case that spammers are targeting their SEO spammy skills to Google's algorithm, and google just fails to withstand the onslaught.

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Google may be experimenting to find the right balance between spam and search quality. "Right" meaning the most profitable.

Not doing so would a breech of their fiduciary responsibility to their share holders.

Their duty to the stockholders is to do what's in the best interest of the company. It's not a breach of duty for a company to forego short-term profits if, in the management's judgement, those short-term profits can only be had by damaging the company's long-term prospects.

Google stands to make the most money in the long run by being the preferred search engine for the most people. Right now, they are. But that could change if another search engine can convince people they deliver results with less spam.

You are assuming that balancing "ad spam" with utility is something new. One only needs to consider how long Google's search results have been tailored to the local from which they originate to get a sense of how long Google may have been adjusting results.

> Google stands to make the most money in the long run by being the preferred search engine for the most people.

Not necessarily -- if other search engines drive people to pages full of Google ads, Google still get paid, right?

No, because they could experiment with other things to make profit. Playing with spam is playing with fire. Beyond foreseeable profitability, which is what most shareholders are interested in, this would damage their reputation and their business in the long run.

> I suspect it is more the case that spammers are targeting their SEO spammy skills to Google's algorithm, and google just fails to withstand the onslaught.

Is it true that google has more spam than other search engines?

That is a very good question. Are there any hard numbers to back this up?

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