Comment by satellite2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by satellite2 | Hacker News Reader

Contrary to many posts here, I think that Google completely controls the quality of the results. The feeling is that quality has gone down because a lot of top ranked website are SEO ads filled websites. I think this is true and on purpose. Two years ago top results were very often Wikipedia, Stack overflow or reddit. Sending users to those websites is not profitable for Google.

I also think that's why it's very hard for competitors to compete. As soon as one is going to get credibly menacing they'll improve on the quality again to preserve their position.

I think that has happened with McDonald's for instance. A few years ago the quality was at it's lowest, the food definitely started to feel fake, air filled and not satisfying. Since the small local competition of hand crafted hamburger popped up a bit everywhere, and credible international competitors ramped up (5 guys, in n out...) they had to improve the quality. And my impression is that it's been a bit more than a year that the quality dramatically improved, and their hamburgers actually taste like food again.

I think it's simply the quality versus profits cursor and it can be adapted any time.

> And my impression is that it's been a bit more than a year that the quality dramatically improved, and their hamburgers actually taste like food again.

Huh, maybe I don't eat there enough to notice differences, but on the occasions lately that I've had a McDonald's burger, I haven't noticed the quality being anything but terrible. Not entirely unpleasant, but just not at all a high quality meal, even compared to some of the other fast food burger places.

Well it's still McDonald's we're talking about, it's still going to be 3mm thick patties and very sweet sauce. But with less soy derivatives, non caloric sweeteners and corn instead of wheat I have the impression.

I don't quite understand what you mean when you say "sending users to those websites is not profitable for google" - referring to Wikipedia, Stack, Reddit etc...

Organic search results only ever profit Google if they answer the user's question, because it makes that user more likely to use Google again and click an ad in the future. If a user searches something and the top result doesn't answer their question, then Google hasn't done it's job and the user is less likely to use Google again and therefore less likely to click an ad in the future.

Surely the most profitable option for Google is to answer people's questions quickly and easily, whether you think these questions are answered by Wikipedia instead of a business site targeted to answering that question is a different story.

I just don't understand how Google's goal of "answering people's questions" is somehow opposite to "providing quality" for users. I think for most of HN, they have a very narrow view that "quality" means antiquated wiki-type sites.

> If a user searches something and the top result doesn't answer their question, then Google hasn't done it's job and the user is less likely to use Google again and therefore less likely to click an ad in the future.

This is simply false. It would only be true if there was a better alternative to Google, which there isn’t.

Because those websites don't contain ads provided by the Google network, while Google can choose to send the user to websites that contain ads for which they are going to take a cut.

Obviously the best for Google would be to send the user to a website with the best content and that contains Google ads but that's often not both the case.

It's an optimization problem, and generally you cannot optimize for two variables, profits and user satisfaction.

Maximizing only for profits would probably lead to completely garbage results so they probably have to compromise.

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