Why blame the algorithms rather than the spammers who reverse engineer them to get their affiliate link littered ai generated "reviews" to the top of the search results.

In the arms race between Google and spammers, honest websites sometimes get caught in the crossfire. For some reason lately lots of people want to blame google for this and not the spammers.

Why must I'd be necessarily either/or, black/white, Google/Spammer?

Why couldn't it be that reasonably both sides are to blame. Google enables the commodification of search results. Yes they claim that they want to show the best result. But best for whom? I don't believe that Google is a neutral party as they earn more if they promote sites that lead to additional advertising clicks. How should users know that there are often better results on pages 3 or 4 and below.

And than there are the ones trying to make a living with minimal effort. No need to create great content. Good enough is sufficient. As long as the content is optimized and the page receives relevant traffic from search the revenue via affiliate links is secured.

In this arm's race the other sites loose. They are the collateral between two fighting parties in this arms race. And also people loose. Loose great content and the diversity of the net.

Thankfully Google operates in a free market where it is possible to compete by building a better search algorithm.

I don't buy into the position that all this great content and diversity of content is lost because of Googles algorithm. It isn't as discoverable as the mainstream content that Google search returns but that's no different than being in a world where Google didn't exist. Except for perhaps in such a world people would have different content discovery habits.

Complaining that Google doesn't surface your preferred set of "great content" is like complaining that prime time cable TV only shows lame sitcom reruns. It's true, but it doesn't prevent you from buying HBO, or Prime Video.

The difference is, that a lot more people know Prime Video, Netflix and the like. Most people, when asked, might be able to say that Microsoft also has a search engine. But for a majority of people Google (or Facebook) is the internet. To the these different kinds of search engines as well as different kinds of content are a unknown unknown.

They can't look for what they don't even know exists.

I know how to surface these sites and enjoy them. But I probably belong to a tiny minority of users within the internet regarding this knowledge.

I know that basically always there have been the types of people who were better equipped for knowledge discovery. And also that knowledge was not free. To learn was time consuming and expensive. And only in recent decades this has changed.

Still the tools as well as the fact of additional stuff outside one's current knowledge needs imho to be distributed more broadly.

> Thankfully Google operates in a free market where it is possible to compete by building a better search algorithm.

That is a sentiment I don't share. With market shares > 90 percent and reighn of Android the network effects are very strong in my opinion. Making it at least a few orders of magnitude more difficult than when Google entered the game. So while it might be possible, it is economically probably not a great bet to make.

Google make a large chunk of their money from ads. If you create some SaaS where users can automate their site's SEO by using GPT or whatever, and it is reasonably priced, you could end up competing with Google Ads. Google want to prevent that.

I can't see any other reason for spam clone farms to outrank the sites they clone except either more incompetence then I'd ascribe to Google, or because the spam farm is full to the gunwhales with ads which earn money for Google.