Comment by beefield | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beefield | Hacker News Reader

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> Why do you assume malicious intent?

Not GP, but to me, admittably a complete non-expert on search, there are so many low-hanging fruits if search result quality was anywhere on Google's radar that it is really difficult not to assume malicious intent.

Some examples:

- why pinterest is flooding the image results with absolute nonesense? How difficult it would be to derank a single domain that manages to screw google's algorithm totally?

- why there is no option for me to blacklist domains from the search result? Are there really some challenges that can't be practically solved in a couple of minutes of thinking?

- Does google seriously claim they can't differentiate between stackoverflow and the content copying rip-off SEO spam sites?

> why there is no option for me to blacklist domains from the search result?

You might already be aware of this, but you can use uBlock Origin to filter google search results.

Click on the extension --> Settings --> My Filters. Paste in the bottom

    google.*##.g:has(a[href*="pinterest.com"])

Every time I get mislead on clicking onto an AI aggregator site, my filter list grows...

The issues you pointed out might be due to a company policy of not manually manipulating search results and leaving it all to the algorithm. It can be argued that this leads them to improve their algorithm, although at this point I don't think any algorithm other than a good and big LLM/classifier-transformer can solve the ranking problem, and that is probably not economical or something. But OTOH they manually ban domains they deem to be not conformant to the views of the Party. (not CCP, 1984)

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